TechCrunch
Twitter Said To Be Preparing Location-Based Ads For Clicks And Bricks
Twitter is reportedly working on geolocated promoted tweets to help retailers target specifically consumers within spitting distance of their stores, according to AdAge. The location-based ads might be ready to launch as soon as later this year, the report claims, and would be the perfect means of delivery for spot deals designed to drive foot traffic to brick-and-mortar retailers and other businesses to nearby shoppers.
This is an area where Twitter lags behind Facebook in terms of giving its advertisers access to targeting tools. Facebook has been doing zip code targeting for a couple of years now, while Twitter has yet to introduce anything along those lines. Lately, the 140 character-based social network has been rolling out a lot of new ad programs, however, and geo-targeted tweets are a natural fit for Twitter, which has an incredibly strong mobile user base and which already displays trending topics based on broad geographic categories.
More companies are looking around for a why to take the rising interest in mobile devices and ecommerce to drive business back to traditional brick-and-mortar businesses. eBay just launched its own inaugural window shopping project in NYC, for instance. Location-based offers are something that a few different companies have been trying for years now, too, so it’s hardly risky territory for Twitter to enter.
Twitter doing more hyperlocal targeting has potential beyond just bringing more foot traffic to stores, however. For a company with strong mobile traction, it’s a way to make discovery even more relevant, by surfacing trending topics at the level of the neighborhood for instance. That could offer even more refinement to tailored trends, which offers different tags based on a user’s habits and general location, to surface not only relevant ad content but things like relevant events as well. Specificity can only help with recommended content when it comes to location, across all verticals.
Still, the appeal for advertisers will likely be the biggest part of the puzzle, especially as Twitter continues to grow its revenue engine. The question will be whether tweets or FB ads prove a better sales conversion tool for brands to leverage when it comes to getting people into local shops and stores.
3D Printing Arbitrage Is The New Hotness
As the 3D printing space heats up and home printers gain ground, there’s a new breed of startup that aims to grab the transactional costs associated with connecting printers and people. The first one I saw (and used), MakeXYZ.com, launched last February. Now the space is about to be inundated with competitors.
3D printers are still expensive. Like early laser printers, they are a major investment and their operation is sometimes fiddly. However, the value of a printer goes up immensely when owners are connected with people who need things printed, just as early users of Brøderbund’s Print Shop would soon become the desktop publishers of the 1990s.
My own experience in the market has been enlightening. First, I’m on the first page for “3D printing Brooklyn” in Google, making me a go-to source for one-off prints. I’ve already printed a number of eyeglass frames for an artist in Williamsburg and even spent a night printing a huge architectural model for a student who needed a quick turnaround. It hasn’t made me much money, but it was fun.
That last sentence, however, should give the folks trying to enter the 3D printer arbitrage space pause. Companies like Disrupt favorite 3dlt, Cuboyo, and a new offering from Printchomp are offering a method for customers to connect with printers. However, the potential for revenue is capped by the number of printers in the world and, what’s more, once printers and customers are connected these services soon become redundant. As much as I’ve tried, for example, to keep MakeXYZ in the transaction sometimes it has been hard. I suspect it’s the same problem that eBay had early on and solved, ultimately, by owning its own payment platform.
“Shapeways is focused on being a vertically integrated printed owning all of the process and equipment. This method is inherently flawed, because a great deal of their current capital investments is focused around machinery that will essentially be dated very quickly,” said Joseph Puopolo, founder of Printchomp. “3D printing reminds me of the early days of the PC. While some people are so focused on the hardware elements of it, it is more about the software and making that hardware accessible to people. The crucial part is the connection component to speed adoption to the mainstream.”
Can arbitrage rake in the big bucks? I’m not certain, at least not yet. Given the number of home 3D printers available – Makerbot, for example, has sold an estimated 22,000 units since its founding in 2009 – the opportunities are slim to scrape off the transactional fees associated with connecting makers to customers.
Given that companies like Tesco and Staples are also looking into 3D printing in stores, the window on capitalizing on home 3D printers could be quite small.
That’s not to say that this space isn’t important. I’ve learned lots about engineering and design in the few months I’ve been Brooklyn’s own 3D printing Gepetto and these services empower makers by creating demand for their products. Home 3D printers are far faster and far cheaper than the professional-grade machines used by services like Shapeways and they’re a great way to spur innovation in the 3D printing space by turning all of us into potential manufacturers.
Additionally, 3D printers have enabled a new type of manufacturer to thrive. For example, Square Helper is a little piece of plastic that holds Square card readers in place when they’re plugged into iPads and iPhones. The creator, Chris Milnes, has a number of machines going all day and night to print these little lumps of plastic and is making quite a bit of cash.
Hardware manufacturers needed brokers to connect them with clients. But this arbitrage breaks down when you’re not talking about 100,000 cellphones and instead are talking about a 3D printed crown for a cake shop. These connectors are important to the industry, I’m just worried about how long they can stay vital.
From The Makers Of Everyme, Origami Launches Its Private Sharing Service For Families
Origami, the new family-focused product from Y Combinator-backed mobile social network Everyme, has now arrived after nearly a year of development. A spin-off of sorts, Origami takes some of the original inspiration behind Everyme – that people are looking for new ways to share outside of larger, more open social networks like Facebook – and tweaks the formula to address the needs of parents and families, specifically.
“What we saw pretty early on was that probably 50 percent of the usage on Everyme is families,” explains Origami co-founder Vibhu Norby. “And that’s 50 percent of total Circles [Everyme's groups], but in terms of actual usage, it was almost 100 percent of people using it with their families,” he says. “We felt like we found the market, but the product itself wasn’t really intended for that.”
Sustained by its $2.15 million A round, the company has been focused on Origami, a new product build from the ground up, since August 2012. Like Everyme, Origami offers both a web and mobile platform that allows families to connect with each other in a private group, and share photos. But the service goes further, too, offering tools for sharing videos, creating albums, and adding text-based entries for posting stories, recipes, or other notes.
Launched into private beta this February, 90 percent of the families on Origami today are new parents. “They take the most photos, they share the most photos, and they have the biggest desire for privacy,” says Norby. “We really want to work with the parents’ workload – the idea that they take photos all day long, they take a lot of photos on weekends especially, and they don’t have time to share every single photo in real-time. They want to sit down when the kids are in bed, and think about sharing them then,” he says.
With the new service, parents can set up a homepage for their family, and even grab a custom domain which Origami acquires on their behalf. (e.g. “JonesFamily.com,” “JonesFamilyPics.com,” etc.) The site itself, like Everyme, is beautifully designed and simple to understand. Buttons on the right side of the homepage direct users to share a photo, video or story, and another feature called “Family Request” lets users prompt other family members to share photos, videos, or stories of their own.
Another section of the site lets users create photo albums, and allows for import from your computer as well as a number of other photo-sharing sites including Facebook, Picasa, Flickr, and SmugMug. These collections can also be shared via email, or back out to Facebook and Twitter.
At launch, Origami also has apps available for iPhone and Android, understanding that not all family members may be using the same mobile platform. Here, users can also post and view the moments and photos albums, plus receive notifications when new content has been added.
The service still has some kinks to work out – not bugs, necessarily, but places where the experience could be a little smoother. For example, if you go to upload from social services, there’s no way to retrieve the photos y0u haven’t already put into albums; it also can’t access those photos you’ve been auto-uploading from your phone to Facebook, Google or Dropbox (the latter two of which are not supported), and in some places on mobile, it’s missing multi-upload. But the product is still in development, and many of these features are still in the works. For example, the multi-upload function is just two weeks away.
Overall, the site fills a niche that many other mobile-only or mobile-first startups have ignored: that parents may want more of fully-fledged social experience, rather that just an app. Often, new parents (and especially moms) turn to standard blogging platforms these days instead of traditional “baby books” to record those early memories, but Origami offers another option for that kind of sharing with a service that falls somewhere in between a Tumblr for parents and a private social network.
Norby says the company’s vision is to re-create the experience of “home,” and that’s something which the real domain names it gives its users’ websites provides. “Facebook is not a home, let’s be honest – it feels like another person’s service,” he says. “[Origami] is private. It’s its own place somewhere on the Internet.”
Origami is not free, but its pricing, like the service itself, is simple. There’s only one tier: after a free 30-day trial, it’s $5 per month (discounted to $50 per year, if billed annually) for unlimited photos, videos, members, and the custom domain.
Really my only problem here is that I have to figure out how to import all the content I have spread out across all those other family-focused and private social services - Path, Notabli, Kidfolio, 23snaps, Tweekaboo, Hubble, Famil.io, Familiar, and others.
Being an early adopting parent can be tough.
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