TechCrunch
LinkedIn Raises Its Game In Infographics And Analytics With New SlideShare Upgrade
Infographics are one of the most-maligned, yet most popular, ways that people share data with others, and today LinkedIn is releasing two infographics-related updates that it hopes will help it become a stronger player in that arena. The company is adding two new features to SlideShare, the content sharing platform it bought in May 2012 for $119 million: a new infographics player, and an upgrade for its paid, SlideShare PRO product so that those who post infographics and other presentations can see how well they do.
Together, the two new moves today are more signs of how LinkedIn continues to roll out products that will help it both expand its profile beyond being a place where people go to look for jobs and people to hire, and also to get more visitors spending more time on its platform — essential both for its advertising business and to generate more premium income from paid services.
LinkedIn is still, it seems, stopping short of offering tools to give users the ability to actually create infographics and other presentations themselves — this is an area being explored by startups like Visual.ly in infographics specifically. I’d pay attention to see whether LinkedIn makes further moves in this direction, too.
The infographics player, writes product manager Arpit Dhariwal, will mean that when infographics now get uploaded to SlideShare as PDFs, they will be automatically detected as such and also tagged and included in SlideShare’s infographics directory.
Meanwhile, the premium analytics features will mean that those who upload infographics and other content will get more meaningful data about how it gets used.
Trends are now shown by country and by those who refer an infographic (a referrer). That includes the ability now to weed out traffic from bots to concentrate only on actual humans viewing your data.
Those posting presentations can look at usage data for specific slides now as well. LinkedIn says that users will also be able to see data within 24 hours of publishing — presumably that wait time was significantly longer in the past.
The company also notes that this data can now be presented in graphical formats. That’s right: infographics about your infographics.
Whether you are in the camp that dislikes infographics or thinks they’re a great way of digesting information in our overloaded-data world, the undisputed fact is that these are on the rise. LinkedIn says that in 2012, 43% of B2B marketers (one of its target audiences) used infographics in their work, up from 28% in 2011. It claims (citing data from Payscale, in an infographic of course) that the most effective of them can reach up to 15 million people.
BarEye App Lets You Buy And Send Drinks From Your Phone
BarEye, a social nightlife app that helps you purchase drinks at partner bars, is expanding after its pilot in Tallahassee to five major U.S. cities: New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Atlanta and Austin.
Co-founder Andrew Bennett says the app has several angel investors backing the project, but declined to disclose how much he has raised. The app has seen over 10,000 downloads and sold over 6,000 drinks since it first launched last fall. BarEye is used in 17 bars in Tallahassee and largely focused on the college scene. But now, Bennett and co-founder NFL player Jonathan Vilma want to reach out to a larger market.
After downloading the BarEye app, you can buy drinks for friends through Facebook or to anyone checked in to a BarEye bar. You can also buy yourself a drink to avoid opening a tab or waiting for service. Just select the bar and drink, pay with credit card and redeem with the bartender. Drinks range from $0.99 to $8.99 depending on the bar. Of course, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a $0.99 drink once the app moves to New York or LA, but a Deals page lists discounts and specials throughout the week. Bars can also broadcast deals to BarEye users within a certain area or demographic, to try and drive business on slower days.
BarEye is also a way for people to send drinks and interact from far away. After you buy a drink, you can include a message to say congratulations, happy birthday, etc. or to start a conversation. The app is meant to make ordering and sending drinks simple and accessible to today’s bar patrons, who are all equipped with smartphones.
“Like any bar-owner, I’m a little skeptical because I’m used to the traditional way of generating revenue by bringing patrons in,” Vilma tells me. “[But] I took a look at my demographic and people coming into my bar and said, ‘You know, I think it makes total sense because I’m looking at the younger generation, the 21-25 year olds, they come in and all they do is play on their smartphones.’”
Bar-hopping college students are built around an existing community, so its easy to see how an app like BarEye might spread in Tallahassee. But moving into cities, Bennett and Vilma face the challenge of widespread adoption from both bars and customers. Bennett says since bars using BarEye paid $200 for the service, he is confident he can sign on a large amount of bars for free through franchisees, each of which will manage about 100 bars in a given location. He tells me using franchisees will also negate the need to scale sales and marketing teams.
“Relative to the market, less than one percent of bars have anything like this, so it’s wide open. So it’s really about finding a way to scale, and we really think that the franchise model is the way it can be done,” Bennett says.
There are several other apps trying to do the same thing, but all are still limited to one specific market. Both Gratafy and BuzzMe take the concept of BarEye one step further by allowing users to order appetizers and menu items for friends, as well as drinks. This is a useful complement or alternative to have, and it’s another source of revenue for bars and restaurants. According to its website, Gratafy has also built up a user base of 67 different restaurants in the Seattle area. But Gratafy has yet to expand past Washington, and BuzzMe is only available in Tampa Bay, Florida. Another unique feature from BarEye is a users leader board, which won several college students iPad minis for buying the most drinks using the app.
The BarEye team is working on a similar app for night clubs. If BarEye can achieve quick adoption in large cities, it will have a significant edge on any up-and-coming competition. But if you’re like me or Liz Lemon, you might just wait it out for an app that provides some mozzarella sticks to go with your drink.
The iOS and Android apps can be downloaded here and here.
BillGuard Launches iPhone App To Help Credit Card Users Catch And Dispute “Grey Charges”
Two years ago, BillGuard launched to help consumers identify fraudulent charges on their credit cards. Now it’s hoping to save them money with the launch of a new iPhone app determined to identify and dispute so-called “grey charges” — that is, charges that they might have agreed to but forgot about.
When it comes to grey charges, think free trials that result in subscription charges, for instance. Or your grandmother’s AOL dialup subscription. Those charges are incredibly common, and usually are easy to resolve.
The problem is that most customers don’t pay enough attention to their credit card accounts to know that they’re there or dispute them. According to a study conducted using BillGuard data, there are approximately 233 million grey charges posted to U.S. credit cards every year, resulting in about $14.3 billion lost by consumers annually.
The BillGuard iPhone app seeks to make identifying those charges easier, by highlighting new questionable charges users might get. While the BillGuard web product was designed mainly as a set-it-and-forget-it type of application, the iPhone app hopes to keep users engaged with Push notifications, letting them know of questionable charges as they pop up.
When they go into the transaction screen, users can verify charges that they’re aware of by swiping right on those charges. For those they’re not sure of, they can choose to get help with a transaction by swiping left. Doing so brings up a screen to help users identify a certain charge or vendor, dispute it, or save for later. Using that information, the app’s smart inbox learns only to highlight new charges from questionable vendors.
When disputing a charge, users don’t need to know much about the company that it came from. BillGuard has a vast database of vendors, and can send an email to the origin of most disputes directly. This saves the consumer time, and it saves the vendor money by having them deal with consumers directly, rather than dealing with the customer’s bank.
Not only does the app help consumers save money individually, but it also helps BillGuard crowdsource data to identify vendors or charges that might be seen regularly by other users of its products. The company has a large amount of crowdsourced data both from its users and from banks it works with to help their users resolve disputes. According to co-founder and CEO Yaron Samid, it has scanned nearly a billion transactions between the two.
The app is free to download and allows users to add up two credit cards for free. If they want to add more, the app has a one-time charge to manage up to ten cards for just $9.99.
BillGuard was a finalist at TechCrunch Disrupt a few years ago, and since has raised $13 million in funding from investors that include Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund, Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Bessemer Venture Partners, IA Ventures, Saul Klein, and Joe Lonsdale.
Check out this video of how the app works:
Lomography's Kickstarter-Backed Petzval DSLR Lens Is A Portrait Hero
Some companies have taken to using Kickstarter as almost a default step in their product pipeline, and New York’s Lomography is one of them. The photography focused company has successfully Kickstarted its film scanner for iPhone, and now it’s looking to fund a throwback portrait lens for DSLRs based on the historic “Petzval” 19th century design.
The Petzval lens was the most popular choice for photos in the 19th century, and produces a unique bokeh (background blur) effect with a very narrow depth of field. They’re pretty recognizable once you see some samples taken with them, and the effect is very impressive when paired with the sensors and imaging capabilities of modern DSLRs.
Lomography’s version would retain the signature visual style but also offer up mounts for Canon EF- and Nikon F-compatible cameras, along with a very bring f/2.2 maximum aperture, which beats the classic Petzval’s by at least a full stop. It also has terrific color saturation and high contrast, according to Lomography, and is very sharp in the in-focus area. Vignetting is also intentionally quite noticeable with the Petzval, for an art-house effect.
The Petzval is unique in its design in terms of being intentionally made to capture a super narrow depth-of-field, which is a key ingredient for portrait photos that really pop. And as an awesome bonus just from an aesthetic standpoint, the new Lomography Petzval will be crafted from brass, just like the original.
Lomography has been making lenses and throwback lo-fi cameras for over a decade now, and the Petzval is ambitious but definitely within their scope. The campaign is seeking $100,000, and has over half of that pledged already. Pre-order backer levels start at $300, though few are left at that price, and there are backer levels at $350, $400 and up after that.
The trend of companies like Lomography that are established using Kickstarter as a way to poll interest for potential products, while also creating a pre-order channel and defraying some of the risk of building something new is great for consumers, since it pairs trusted brands with an innovation platform. Kickstarter gets a lot of flack for projects that don’t deliver as promised, but it could end up being much more successful on this scale, with medium-sized companies looking for wider audiences, than as a money vacuum for early adopters who are loose with their wallets.
Japanese Cloud-Based Accounting Software Startup Freee Raises $2.7M In Series A Funding From DCM And Infinity Capital Partners
Japanese startup freee, which provides online accounting software for small businesses, announced that it has raised $2.7 million in Series A funding from DCM and Infinity Capital Partners. Founded by Daisuke Sasaki, who previously led Google’s small- to medium-sized business marketing in the Asia-Pacific region, freee targets Japanese SMBs that don’t want to purchase expensive packaged software. freee will use its new funding to accelerate product development.
Before his five-year stint at Google, Sasaki served in marketing and financial positions at several startups. During that time, he became frustrated by the outdated bookkeeping methods still used by many SMBs in Japan.
“You want to be able to type in data one time and then reuse it, but first people would make invoices, then they would print those out and then a bookkeeper would type in the data again. That’s stupid,” Sasaki tells me. “I saw that inefficiency and I thought, okay, this will change. But after working at Google for five years, I didn’t see any change. So I saw there was an opportunity to make Japanese businesses more efficient.”
freee automates bookkeeping by syncing with bank and credit card accounts and categorizing transactions through text analysis. Japanese businesses can even use freee to create financial statements for tax filing.
Sasaki says there are six million SMBs in Japan and less than 1% penetration for cloud-based accounting software, giving freee a sizable growth opportunity. Since freee launched in March, 6,500 Japanese SMBs have signed up for the software’s free trial.
The startup will use its Series A funding to accelerate freee’s product development by increasing credit card and bank coverage, integrating the software with point-of-sale systems for cash transactions and adding collaboration features so employees within a company can use freee to file expense reports and manage payrolls.
Sasaki says his team will also continue to refine freee’s user interface. “Most B2B software doesn’t pay much attention to user experience, but SMBs are more like consumers. They don’t have the time, so we want to make the product really friendly for those businesses.”
Warby-As-A-Service? Backed By Reddit, Posterous Founders, Eponym Helps Brands Build And Distribute Their Own Eyewear
Over the last few years, a new wave of startups has emerged to tackle a range of inefficient, ignored or offline segments within the massive world of fashion and retail. The maturation of the Web and digital commerce has allowed these startups to not only target specific niche groups of consumers and build communities and intimate relationships around these verticals, but to bypass brick-and-mortar gatekeepers and connect with customers directly through digital storefronts.
This landscape has produced a number of high-profile companies, from Bonobos, Modcloth, Nasty Gal and Fab to Everlane, BeachMint, Indochino and Zulily. Warby Parker, in particular, has created some waves in this space by offering an affordable alternative to pricey designer eyewear and building a strong, fashion-conscious brand around it. At the time Warby was founded, less than one percent of eyewear was sold online, which allowed it to take on the bigs (like Luxottica) by moving eyewear sales online — and wooing hipsters.
While Warby Parker and other online retailers have looked to stand out by staying laser-focused on their own brand, Eponym is a testament to the fact that it still pays to think broad in online retail. And, while the prevailing notion in this space is that you have to be loud and hustle like mad to build a strong, incredibly meaningful brand just to stand out from the noise — and, in turn, that the more you focus, the more meaningful that relationship will be.
What’s cool about Eponym is that it’s been happily flying under the radar for the last three years and is eschewing the laser-focused, single brand approach to succeeding in the eyewear market by creating a (B2B2C) services business. This is especially refreshing at a time when the excitement over the “consumerization” of everything (and consumer-facing business models) seems to have reached a fever pitch.
Unlike Warby Parker, for one, eponym is building a business around serving other brands, helping them build, launch and distribute their own designer eyewear lines. While eyewear behemoth Luxottica only owns and caters to big brands, eponym is going after the middle-tier. Not quite the mom-and-pops, but not quite as corporate as Oakley.
What’s more, while Warby has to mix it up to keep hipsters flocking and experiment with its sales channels, taking its online brand into offline retail and create pop up shops and so on, eponym is going straight after the platform model. Eponym Founder Andrew Lipovsky instead wants to create a software platform (as-a-service) around handling everything a brand needs to launch their own sexy, wooden-framed RayBan line.
The startup works with brands during every step of the production process, beginning by partnering with the brand’s design team to help whip up the plans and, once those are set, the team then creates a custom-designed website for the brand, which is powered by its own backend infrastructure. The platform offers in-store sales units for the brand’s retail stores, which support customer ordering by giving them their own iPads, which are distributed to all their retail outlets and are automatically connected to the startup’s eCommerce platform.
Brands are finicky and can just opt to do it themselves at any time, so to provide those extra incentives, the company handles all product trial and full-order fulfillment, customer service, CRM along with co-marketing for each brand. Those partnering with Eponym are also encouraged to stay involved during the key stages, though Lipovsky says that the goal is to build a solution that’s as “turnkey” as possible.
But wait, if these brands aren’t just tiny mom-and-pop shops, why do they need eponym’s service, you ask? In fact, few actually can because it requires partners and familiarity with a range of specialized distribution channels. The other key differentiator is that, traditionally, if a customer comes into your store to buy some top-shelf eyewear, then the salespeople will have to take down your information, ask for your prescription, call your doctor to verify the prescription, send it to a lab to get the lenses made and then fitted, package and then ship.
There are a lot of touch-points and that’s not even the thornier use case, like home-try-ons, where consumers can order up to six pairs and try them on for free. Instead, eponym allows brands to actually deliver the end-product to their customers, selling them a pair of sunglasses and allowing them to buy the frame in the store and walk out the exit.
Simply put, this isn’t in the wheelhouse of most brands. So, if part of that process is outside the company’s core competency, they can fork that responsibility over to Eponym, letting them take take care of building a great product experience around those initial designs.
As eponym is technically an umbrella company, it has spent the last three years building relationships and shoring up distribution channels and so on. It has two brands to date: a house brand (which they’ve developed themselves) called Classic Specs, which sells eyewear directly to consumers for $89, as well as well-known designer Steven Alan.
In concert with Allan, eponym will launch the guy’s eyewear line (called Steven Alan Optical), which has “been very successful thus far,” Lipovsky says.
As to the business potential? The founder says that revenues are now growing 50 percent month-over-month and that it has plans to launch “some exciting new things in the very near future.”
With its end-to-end eyewear services platform beginning to generate real revenue and attract some well-known brands, the startup was able to lock down $1 million in seed financing from a flock of angel investors, including Loopt co-founder Sam Altman, former engineering lead at Palantir, Posterous co-founder and Y Combinator partner, Garry Tan, Alexis Ohanian and Stuart Litkin — to name a few.
For the immediate future, the founder says, eponym will be focused on helping new customer Steve Allen build out a new line of handsome and comely spectacles. Each time the startup onboards a brand it has a better understanding of their needs, the data and the whole funnel itself. It also continues to add to its software platform, extending it to take as much of the manual, human-powered steps out of the process.
From what we gather, eponym’s own Classicspecs brand has been able to generate a couple hundred thousand in revenue over a fairly short period of time. Once it is able to reproduce the original product/model quickly and officially and hits a groove in so doing, there’s no reason not to be optimistic about the eponym model’s chances.
When asked about his reason for investing, Reddit co-founder, (Hipmunk launcher) and angel investor Alexis Ohanian said that he was also impressed by the startup’s ability to bootstrap to healthy numbers, thanks to classicspecs, before signing its first actual brand partner. The fact that this brand partner was Steven Alan was a bonus. Once they proved the platform model, Ohanian says, “the expansion path became pretty clear.”
Startups, take note: It turns out there are other ways to build a company, including through a “platform” model and a “services” business, and, sure, it might be a risky bet this early in the game, but one might even venture that this approach will one day eclipse Warby.
Yandex Posts Q2 2013 Sales Of $281M, Ad Revenue Up 35%, Profit Up 48%
On a day marked by some tragedy, the Russian search giant Yandex posted Q2 earnings today of $281 million (9.2 billion Russian roubles), up 35% on a year ago and just beating analyst estimates 9.1 billion roubles. Adjusted net income, meanwhile, was up 48% to $92 million. On the strength of its current business, the company also said it was raising its full-year guidance to revenue growth of between 34% and 38% for 2013.
Like Google, Yandex makes the lion’s share of its revenues from advertising around its search products. Like overall sales, this grew 35% to $274 million. Yandex says that text-based advertising revenues accounted for 88% of its overall revenues in the quarter, with 73% of that on its own sites and the rest through its ad network.
Yandex’s position in search is still Russia’s largest — 61.7%, as reported by Yandex today, a slight increase on last quarter — but it is always facing competition from the likes of Google, which is partly growing on the strength of its Android smartphone and tablet OS and the subsequent drive of more users to its browser and search engine.
It is for reasons like this that Yandex is getting more enterprising about how it extends its own search business, and moves into other products like mobile, mapping and cloud services.
Today, the company quietly noted that it is now powering paid search services for Mail.ru — which looks like it is the unnamed company powering Mail.ru’s decision to drop Google for its own solution back in July. This makes Mail.ru one of the bigger partners in Yandex’s ad network. It will be worth watching to see how much that will impact sales in that category going forward. As it is, text-based advertising revenues from Yandex’s ad network were $42 million — growing 25% over last year and contributing 15% of total revenues during Q2 2013. “Revenues from Yandex websites grew faster than those from our ad network as we implemented changes to our advertising technologies on our owned and operated sites,” the company says.
As for other products, the company this month completed the merger of Yandex.Money, its internet payment system (think PayPal or other digital wallets), with Sberbank, which now owns 75% of that operation. This wasn’t actually a very big business for the company — even if it is one of the bigger payment providers in the country. Yandex today noted that online payment commissions accounted for only 2% of revenues during Q2 2013, although that grew 57% compared with Q2 2012.
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