TechCrunch
ShopPad Raises $500K To Instantly Turn Online Shops Into iPad-Friendly Websites
ShopPad, an e-commerce platform that turns retailers’ desktop websites into tablet-optimized experiences, is today announcing $500,000 in seed funding for its software-as-a-service technology now used by over 10,000 online merchants. Angels in the round include Mashery co-founder and CEO of MyBlogLog, Lookery and Lumatic, Scott Rafer, plus Arik Keller (Director of Product at PayPal), Peter Horan (President of Answers.com), Allen Morgan (previously GP at Mayfield Fund, and Fab.com board member), Walt Doyle (previously GM PayPal Media), and others.
The company was founded around a year ago by Aaron Wadler, a longtime product guy and founder and CEO of Viddyou, acquired by Motionbox in 2009. Wadler says he got excited about the iPad’s potential to change computing a couple of years ago, around the same time he became an online shopper. He started imagining how those two passions would soon intersect, but despite rapid iPad adoption and tablet market share growth, he discovered that online retailers were lagging behind these major consumer trends.
“Big retailers weren’t doing anything exciting [on iPad],” he says. “A lot of them had broken sites, and it really seemed like a mess. It got me thinking – if the really big guys can’t get this figured out, it’s going to be a huge problem for everyone else down.”
To help him build what’s now ShopPad, Wadler brought in co-founder and “Chief Creative Officer” Ryan O’Donnell, previously founder of VinoTrac. O’Donnell’s background involves an understanding of conversion rates from a UI/UX perspective – a necessary skill set for creating a better tablet shopping experience.
With ShopPad, the initial idea was to target the lower to middle online retail market with a solution sold through the Shopify and Magento app marketplaces. Retailers simply install the plugin to begin immediately serving the tablet-optimized website.
“They don’t need to know any programming. They don’t need to enter in any code. It’s all a WYSIWYG interface,” explains Wadler. “We go in through the store’s API and we mirror and sync to our servers their categories, product and store information.” ShopPad then puts a line of JavaScript on the retailer’s website to detect and redirect tablet traffic to its servers instead.
In addition to changing the interface itself, ShopPads also handles under-the-hood things like automatically creating and serving retina product images, connection adaptation, offline abilities, dealing with orientation changes, and more.
If retailers want to change the default settings, they can choose to adjust the branding, add their logo, or bring in other content pages with things like store hours or return policies, for example. These various options are available in the company’s paid plans, starting a $6 per month. A $19 per month plan also offers priority customer service and support for retailers’ own domains.
Once live, consumers visiting the tablet websites can browse through inventory and add things to their cart using the ShopPad interface, but the final step – checkout – is yet to be tablet-optimized. Wadler says, however, that they’re working with Shopify on this, and are excited to get into this area in the future.
Now a team of four, the San Francisco Bay Area startup is working to bring its technology to smartphones and even in-store, allowing retailers with limited room or sales staff to offer tablet kiosks where customers can view additional inventory online, or just browse the website for themselves. ShopPad is also beginning to move up market, and has started working with a few undisclosed, but bigger name, retailers.
Interested retailers can learn more here on ShopPad’s website.
Twitter Continues To Beef Up Its Social TV Efforts With Trendrr Acquisition
Twitter has acquired Trendrr, a company that tracks social media engagement around TV content, as announced in a Trendrr blog post and confirmed in a tweet by Twitter.
Trendrr says it’s “excited to be joining Twitter’s world class team, enabling us to realize bigger opportunities that drive better experiences for users, media and marketers – across Twitter and around the globe.” The company also says it will continue to honor its existing contracts but will not be signing new ones.
Earlier this year Twitter announced that it was acquiring social TV company Bluefin Labs.
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Fuse Streamlines Your Social Networking Into One Mobile App
Fuse, a new mobile application that aggregates your social networking activity into one “fused” feed which you can then interact with, search, reply to and more, recently got an overhaul making it a more solid, stabler product – and one that’s now ready for the forthcoming iOS 7 operating system thanks to an upgraded look-and-feel.
The concept behind the app is simple: it brings all your social networks together under one unified interface. Currently, Fuse combines your accounts from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn, with plans to offer support for Pinterest, Google+, Foursquare and other networks in the future.
Like most social apps, Fuse presents your updates in a stream-like format, allowing you to like/favorite, share, re-tweet/re-post, reply, and more. Plus, it lets you write posts and then share to all your networks at once – the way Ping.fm once did back in the earlier Web 2.0 days. You can also create and save searches which find your keywords and search terms across all your networks.
There are other apps which let you combine your social accounts - Divvy, for instance, focuses on photos, and newly launched Socialblend looks promising as well. However, other would-be competitors have since abandoned this space, including Tweekdeck, which earlier this year pulled its Facebook integration and mobile apps, while Streamified more recently announced they’ll be joining Airbnb and shutting down.
Fuse, hopes to stick around a little longer by having a business model in place from day one, it seems. Twitter and Facebook support are offered for free in the app, but Instagram and LinkedIn are 99 cents via in-app purchase. Presumably, as other services are added, they too would be paid upgrades.
Fuse’s co-founder Kyle Matthews is best known as the co-founder of ModMy LLC – the company behind ModMyi.com, the largest iPhone customization community on the web, with some 850,000 members and 1 million daily pageviews. He explains that the new app was built out of a personal need. Managing your social presence is taking more and more time, says Matthews, as an increasing number of apps vie for your attention. ”I got tired every morning of opening four different apps to check my social presences. Our tagline is ‘You’re one social person. Get one social app,’” he says.
Matthews teamed up with co-founder Ryan Negri, CEO of e-commerce site Negri Electronics, to create Laicos, the mobile development studio behind Fuse. The two have extensive experience in the mobile space – Negri with the wireless industry and bootstrapping companies, and Matthews with app building, consulting, and more, including ModMy’s other expansions to medical apps via ModMedical, and auto customizations with Brooks Motorsport, among other things.
The Fuse app quietly launched late June, and received the overhaul just a week ag. Fuse is fully self-funded and live here in the iTunes App Store.
trueAnthem Raises $2.6M To Help Publishers And Brands Track Viral Content
trueAnthem, a company that allows publishers to track the impact of their content on social media, has raised $2.6 million from CrunchFund, Core Ventures Group, and undisclosed angel investors.
(Both CrunchFund and TechCrunch were co-founded by Michael Arrington.)
trueAnthem was actually started back in 2008, but CEO Chris Hart said that it focused on music content before pivoting a year-and-a-half ago to look at the social influence of a broad range of content. The idea might sound kind of generic, but Hart said trueAnthem goes further than just counting the number of times an article gets tweeted or shared.
“As a writer, when you publish a story and you’re interested to know about the social impact, you’re probably looking at the number of times those shares have happened,” Hart said. “We believe social infleuence is more important.”
After all, one reader who tweets your article might have only 100 followers, while another might have 10,000. In addition, that initial tweet might lead to subsequent tweets that drive still more tweets (and more traffic). To examine all of that, trueAnthem says it offers “100% tracking of your social sharing footprint.”
This is useful for news publishers like Yahoo and Fox Sports, who can see what content is actually resonating on social media and adjust their editorial strategies accordingly. Hart noted that online “earned media” (content that a company didn’t have to pay for) is becoming increasingly important to brands, as well.
Hart said this approach means trueAnthem doesn’t have any direct competitors, though aspects of what it does could be compared to social-sharing tools like AddThis and social influence companies like Klout.
Oh, and the company is also sharing some indicators that there’s really something to this technology: It says it received a patent this year on tracking social influence and a Gold Award from the Advertising Research Foundation.
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