Mobile Archives - Page 4 of 5

Des Moines Startup: Freebee Cards About To Launch, Making Customer Loyalty And Engagement Fun

A new Des Moines based startup called FreebeeCards is preparing for launch. They are launching May 15th in Des Moines and they are currently signing up merchants and users, for what promises to be a fun and exciting new way to build customer loyalty and engagement.

Freebee Cards was founded by CEO Ken Lazzaro who is a consultant in the reward/loyalty card and credit card processing space so he has experience with this kind of thing. How did he come up with Freebee Cards? Their marketing guy Todd Razor told us in an interview:

“Ken’s consulting company, which educates and helps business owners implement gift card, loyalty and credit card processing programs, was working with the owner of a women’s clothing boutique in Austin, Texas. Ken had just sold the business owner a point-of-sale system, and she was also very interested in increasing customer loyalty. Ken’s company approached her about offering preloaded gift cards with varying values of $5, $10, $25 and $50 to customers in her area.

She loved the idea of consumers having to visit her store to find out the value of the cards. Yet a concern over not being able to measure the customer acquisition cost stopped her short of running that program.

Ken soon realized that developing an electronic version of this gift card marketing concept would allow merchants to track customer shopping habits, as well as open a direct line of communication to make special offers, reward customer loyalty and collect candid feedback outside of the public’s view.

It snowballed into an idea for a website and FreebeeCards was born.”

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Victoria Police Endorsing Australian Startup MyBikeRego To Help Reunite Bikes And Owners

Police in Victoria are endorsing a new QR based technology designed by an Australian startup called MyBikeRego.

The concept is rather simple. MyBikeRego gives users of their service, three very hard to remove QR code stickers to affix to their bicycles. For $30 per year the owners information is stored in the cloud. The bicycle owners name, phone number, address and even other important information like blood type and next of kin can be stored in the cloud.

Now, when someone finds a bike and has a QR code reader on their smartphone they can easily locate the bicycles owner. Also police departments can do the same thing. With the information like the blood type and next of kin, should a bike rider ever get in an accident emergency personnel can easily contact the riders next of kin.

Craig McDonald, a leading senior constable and crime prevention officer in the northwest region of Victoria met with MyBikeRego in 2011 and instantly started recommending the product:

“As Police if we find a bike they all look the same to us,” he says, which makes it hard to help those whose bikes have been stolen. Bicycles’ inherent portability doesn’t help matters, as many end up in areas distant from their owners where it is even harder for Police to return a bike.

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Las Vegas Startup: Ticketometer Looking To Disrupt The Ticket Space With Creativity

How creative can the ticket space be? It’s a pretty straight forward business right? Have an event, you need to have a ticket. Nowadays that can be a hard paper ticket, a printed ticket at home or a virtual ticket housed on your smartphone. So is their room for creativity?

Well brothers Ardon and Jaron Lukasiewicz of Las Vegas think there is. In fact creativity is what is driving their startup Ticketometer from being different than all those other event ticketing sites. 24 year old Ardon tells Las Vegas’ Channel 8 news that they have a company of 5 already and their hoping to turn a profit in their first year with their ticketing business.

Ticketometer hopes to attract venues to using their service by being creative. That can mean making a wild and popping event web page or incentivizing ticket sales with new promotions and concepts. Ticketometer also provides back end details on ticket sales to venues, statistics that some other ticketing sites are quick to give up. But that’s not all to their openness. Ticketometer provides information to those buying tickets like how close an event is to actually selling out. Sure we all know what it’s like to miss a ticket sale and find our favorite show is sold out, but when a ticket is available is the show really popular? Are you one of 100 people going to see your favorite local band or one of 5,000. These things make a difference to both the event go-er and the venue.

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Former Vermont Secretary Of Agriculture Co-Founds Rural Location Based Mobile Startup ViewBoost

In January 2012 it was announced that former Vermont Secretary of Agriculture, Food and Markets Roger Allbee would be joining Vermont Technical College as Senior Scholar In Residence. It didn’t take too long for Allbee to go all in and help co-found a startup.

The startup called ViewBoost is a location based startup that is designed to enhance rural travel and beyond. ViewBoost is fine tuned to rural areas where similar mobile apps are designed for major metropolitan areas. The team behind ViewBoost looks at the app as a digital concierge connecting people to people, places, events and businesses. It also enables travelers to see their route, destination and recommend points of interest along the way.

The Vieweboost application integrates with Facebook to pull feedback and comments about places that users find along the way.

“Vermont has so much to offer, and is the perfect laboratory for the development of this rural tourism application. So many businesses and jobs depend on tourism that an application of this type is badly needed,” says Roger Allbee, a co-founder and former Secretary of Agriculture, Food and Markets in Vermont. “We are known for our landscape, agriculture, and food systems, and the state has been named as one of the key destinations in the world, so why should we not be at the forefront in developing this application that can better define what we are and who we are as a state and tourist destination?”

Viewboost is still in their infant stages. They are using Vermont as the test market and plan on targeting other similar sized areas as they build out. They are hoping to have the product on the market by spring of 2013.

source: BurlingtonFreePress

Denver Startup: Closely Gives Small Businesses A Competitive Edge With Perch Dashboard

As a small business owner how do you keep track of what your closest competitors are doing? Do you wear blinders and pretend they aren’t there? Do you shop at competitor locations to see what they’re doing? Do you plant spies? Do you set up Google alerts?

While some of these things (except wearing blinders), may seem effective, they all involve time and most small business owners don’t have that. Luckily there is a Denver based startup called Closely that is looking to simplify the monitoring of your competitors in one easy to use dashboard they’re calling Perch.

Perch is currently in a closed beta. The founders at Closely are hoping that Perch will give local merchants a snapshot of competitors marketing activities and help merchants build ideas of how to respond.

“We found that the majority of businesses don’t quite yet understand the level of activity surrounding them,” Closely CEO Perry Evans told Street Fight in an email. “As the application that they learn to rely on for daily tracking and watching, we’re in a front row position for helping them participate.”

Evans, started his career in technology as head of the Mapquest publisher group so he’s very familiar with the benefits of LBS, group deals and the other technologies that are preying and benefiting local merchants.

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Leesburg VA Based Startup: Time Razor Promises You’ll Never Miss Out

Time Razor, a Leesburg VA based startup just recently took their project out of stealth mode. The company is venture backed and puts a new spin on events, and time management. TimeRazor was founded by Barry White (no relation to the R&B singer), who has a mixed background mostly in real estate development. However in the hustle bustle world of the DC suburbs we’re sure a developer knows a thing or two about time management.

What TimeRazor ultimately does is cut out the noise from other similar event recommendation apps. Through their proprietary software and algorithms TimeRazor combs through over 300,000 events a day and serves up suggestions and updates for events that the user would actually like to attend. They call this technology the “distillery”.

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AOL Shoots Up 35% After $1 Billion Dollar Patent Announcement

AOL has inked an amazing deal with rival Microsoft to sell 800 of their patents to the Redmond based computer giant. The deal is said to be worth $1 billion dollars and includes licensing back to AOL.

AOL stock closed at $18.42 on Friday and skyrocketed to $25.16 on the news of the patent sale. While Tim Armstrong is taking much of the credit for the patent sale it was actually sparked by activist shareholder Starboard Value LP who had said earlier on that, if structured properly, AOL could stand to earn $1 billion dollars or more off it’s treasure trove of patents.

Obviously it was structured properly.

AOL is holding onto 300 of their patents which revolve around some of their current core business’ like maps, and search.

“This is a valuable portfolio that we have been following for years and analyzing in detail for several months,” Microsoft’s General Counsel Brad Smith said in a statement.

The patent transaction is expected to close by the end of 2012 and has a sweetheart breakup clause as well. Should the sale not go through, Microsoft will be on the line to AOL for $211.2 million dollars.

Analysts are hopeful that this influx of cash from the sale of it’s patents will help AOL continue to rebuild it’s core business units.

source: Reuters

Print Your Instagram Pics To Posters, Stickers And More With Prinstagr.am

Social Print Studio, a San Francisco based company, that specializes in making apps that print photos from social networking sites like Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter to stickers, posters and other printables. They’ve just announced their most recent endeavor surrounded by the phenomenon we all know as Instagr.am.

Now your favorite Instagram photos with their glorious filters can be captured in real life non virtual goodness. Sometimes the memories you’ve created need to be shared outside of the online world and that’s where Prinstagr.am fits in.

For $25 you can have between 50-400 of your favorite Instagram pics made into a 40 inch poster with all the photos laid out on a grid. That cute picture of your kid that got 400 likes on Instagram can now be made into 48 miniprints and shared with your entire neighborhood for just $12.

In all seriousness though with more and more people using photo apps and camera phones, and of course digital cameras less and less pictures are printed out. Taking your USB stick to Walmart or Target for that special photo novelty is time consuming and cumbersome and sometimes doesn’t even turn out right. With Prinstagr.am you’re not going to have that problem.

Check it out for yourself right here.

Source: Gizmodo

Australian Startup Announces The “Playa”iPhone Case The Ultimate Hook Up Companion

Australian based startup Annex products launched in 2011 with a product designed by mates Rob Ward and Chris Peters. Their first product, the Opena case, is an iPhone case with a bottle opener built into it very similar to beaheadcase.com’s cases for opening beer bottles. They launched the Opena case on Kickstarter the popular crowd-funding site for new products.

The new case called the “Playa” provides protection,not only for your beloved iPhone but from STD’s, and unwanted pregnancies as well. How does it do this? It’s the first case designed to hold your phone and a condom.

The condom is secured in a sliding compartment that is flush with the case and no one can tell what’s in there. It holds two condoms easily. As the company says “no condoms falling on the red carpet for the playa case owner”.

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Siri Gets Sued Again

Siri has been in the news it seems like everyday since she was released on the iPhone 4S. Not only has she been in the news she has been featured in regular sitcom tv as well. Earlier this year Big Bang Theory featured Siri in an episode where Raj falls in love with her. Raj has an ailment that doesn’t allow him to talk to human women without consuming alcohol. With Siri, he didn’t need to consume alcohol. The joke is driven home when Raj tracks down the Siri command center and tries, to talk to the real life Siri and just stumbles in disappointment.

The way Apple showed off Siri’s abilities have driven two different men to file suit against Apple. The latest plaintiff is David Jones. He filed his lawsuit on Tuesday in a Los Angeles district court. The suit was filed because of “false and deceptive representations” of Siri’s skill set, according to the Los Angeles Times.

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Flud The “Instagram For News” Raising $8 Million Dollars Heads To Android

San Diego based startup Flud, a social news reader app for iPhone is does a great job of differentiating itself from other news readers like Taptu and Pulse.

They do this by allowing users to create profiles join the platform and share their news with others in their network. The UI is very polished and some in tech circles are calling Flud, the Instagram for news.

Sure everyone has access to the same internet and the same news stories but the way people curate the news is what makes some blogs and most news aggregates so popular.

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Millennial Media Stock Opens With A Bang

Millennial Media, the largest independent mobile ad platform in the world, went public this morning on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker symbol MM. Millennial had said earlier on that they expected shares to go for between $9 and $11 at their IPO. Yesterday that number was revised to $11 to $13 per share. What happened today was nothing short of amazing.

The opening trade this morning on Millennial stock was $25 it was hovering around $26 per share around 10am eastern time this morning. It was at $25.16 at noon.

CNBC’s Jim Cramer has been talking up the mobile phone space saying that it’s the way of the future. That could be what’s driving the stock for the Baltimore based ad network.

They also have a financially sound business. Millennial did over $104 million in ad placements last year and have been on a steady trajectory of growth since being founded in 2006 by former Verizon VCast honcho Paul Palmeri.

Millennial Media’s stock story this morning has been raising some eyebrows. Yahoo advertising executive, Michael Katz, tweeted this morning:

Millennial Media’s marketcap is almost bigger than the actual Mobile Ad Maket [sic]. Tell me how this makes sense.

The Motley Fool this morning called Millennial Media “The mobile advertising play you’ve been waiting for”. Fool writer Rick Aristotle Munariz speculates that Millennial’s position as the second largest mobile ad player overall, and ahead of Apple’s mobile ad unit, may be driving the success of their IPO.

source: SAI

Seattle Based Urban Spoon Sees Big Growth In Reservations

While OpenTable is still by far the giant in the world of table reservation apps, Seattle based Urban Spoon is making great strides in a territory that once exclusively belonged to OpenTable.

UrbanSpoon has been known since it’s inception for it’s slot machine style interface for serving up great restaurant suggestions. When you open up the Urban Spoon app on your Android or iPhone you shake it and the three bars rotate like a slot machine. They eventually land on a restaurant recommendation.

UrbanSpoon reported to Geekwire that last month they sat one million people using their reservation system. That’s not a lot considering San Francisco based OpenTable claims they’ve sat over 280 million people since coming online in 1999. Opentable also claims to have 25,000 restaurants in their system.

Urban Spoon on the other hand says they have restaurants in the thousands, the San Francisco Chronicle says that Urban Spoon has 4,000 restaurants in it’s network.

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North Carolina Startup, Evatran, Attracting Funds By Finding Ways To Cut The Cord For Electric Cars

Outside of Detroit, North Carolina is a mecca for innovation in the automobile sector. North Carolina also has a thriving tech community in the research triangle area which encompasses Raliegh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Cary and surrounding areas. One of those companies is Evatran.

Evatran is a spinoff of a company called MTC transformers, which is an electronics manufacturer based in Whytheville Virginia. Evatran moved to Morrisville NC to be closer to the global technology hub that exists there.

So what is this start up doing that is Evatran doing that is so phenomenal that Google, Hertz Rent A Car, Duke Energy and Clemson University have come to the plate with funding for them? They are looking to cut the cord to recharge electric cars. Evatran is working on a plugless recharging station for electric cars.

“Fundamentally, what we’re selling here is convenience,” said Evatran co-founder Rebecca Hough told the Winston Salem Journal. “The cord gets really dirty. People run over the cord.”

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