20 of Ogilvy’s finest digital thinkers headed to General Assembly yesterday to talk to 5 companies - Piictu, Rent the Runway, Movable Ink, 140 Proof, and Contently. It was the beginning of what we hope to be a long relationship w/ GA and the companies call it their headquarters.
20th January 2012
Notes: 6
The following list is from Betabeat - a solid online publication that provides the best coverage of the NYC tech scene. Click here to read this article in full. I’m only re-posting the startup overviews.
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Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator is a seed stage incubator based in New York City that just accepted its 2nd class of startups. Here is the complete list of startups:
Appy Couple:
Appy Couple lets you quickly, easily, and affordably create a gorgeous mobile app to share all the excitement of your wedding with invited guests. The Appy platform populates a mobile app in real time, and includes features like picture uploads, virtual champagne, countdown, and geolocation.www.appycouple.com
Cinchifieds:
Cinchifieds is the world’s simplest marketplace. Users catalog what they’re interested in buying or selling, and Cinchifieds does all the work, delivering matches directly to you. Cinchifieds makes buying and selling a cinch.www.cinchifieds.com
Dibsie:
Dibsie makes it easy to find, organize and discover products online by integrating social networking with powerful search capability. Dibsie streamlines the process for discovering and sharing products by allowing users to search thousands of retailers and brands, then bookmark favorites for sharing through a mutually-curated catalog.www.dibsie.com
LocalBonus:
LocalBonus allows consumers to use their existing credit and debit cards as their loyalty card at local merchants and gives merchants an easy way to deploy a rewards program to build customer loyalty.www.localbonus.com
Pictorious:
Pictorious is a photo-sharing game that creates a fun way to explore the world, meet new people and earn awesome rewards and prizes. Pictorious also helps brands and merchants engage with and attract customers.www.pictorious.com
ShareRebate:
ShareRebate is a referral tool that helps mobile app developers get more downloads. The referral tool seamlessly integrates into any mobile app and starts to offer users of the app rewards for recommending the app to friends and family.www.sharerebate.com
Stray Boots:
Stray Boots turns the walking tour on its head through its cell phone-guided, interactive urban games in cities throughout the U.S. Stray Boots curates the games and delivers them to customers’ phones via its proprietary software, taking urban explorers on an adventure that’s more fun, engaging and flexible than other ways to explore the city.www.strayboots.com
STYLYT:
Stylyt is redefining the way fashion brands acquire loyal fans. Partnering with contemporary and boutique brands, Stylyt launches collaborative fashion design campaigns that allow any user to customize an item in a collection, vote on user entries and even choose the winning design entry to be manufactured and sold.www.stylyt.com
Wizpert:
Wizpert is a real-time platform that instantly matches people who need advice with experts who are qualified to provide it on a wide range of topics from parenting to relationships and nutrition. Wizpert offers immediate access to a simple, helpful form of human communication. Talking. www.wizpert.com
WowWombat:
WowWombat is an event sponsorship marketplace that provides an easy way for businesses to find and interact with their target audience. A business selects events to sponsor based on the demographics they want to reach and scale they can afford—while event organizers post event details to receive sponsorship.www.wowwombat.com
Everyone’s familiar with email, the cost-effective channel that brands are shifting more and more budget to each year. While it isn’t the sexiest weapon in the marketing arsenal, there’s a few new players in the space looking to spice things up a bit - Sailthru and Movable Ink.
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Movable Ink’s app allow users to stream live content into their emails. Every time someone opened opens an email, their technology serves live content based on the time, recipient’s locations, social context, and your business rules - increasing the emails relevance and context for every user.
The dynamic content can include:
- Live tweets
- Web crops
- Countdown timers
- Local Maps
And can be optimized in real-time for:
- Creative
- Different devices
Such functionality has a wide variety of use cases. In particular, its great for flash deals site, retailers w/ multiple locations, and event marketing. For sample executions and inspiration, you can check out their case study and demo page.
The company was founded in October 2010, and is based at General Assembly in NYC. Their client list includes: StarStreet, Daily Candy, Redeemio, GroupMe, and many more.
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Founded in June 2008, Sailthru is an API based Email service provider focused on improving email open and click-through rates through behavioral tracking.
It does this by tracking what products and content each subscriber is browsing and purchasing on the publisher’s website, mobile app, and in emails, and then dynamically generating email content based on the collected data.
So for a retailer, if a subscriber is only clicking on and purchasing shoes, Sailthru will tailor the email to only include content about shoes. While for a publisher, if I subscriber is only reading content about startups, then it will only deliver them emails with content about startups. It tailors emails in this way for every subscriber within one template, eliminating the hassle of segmentation for the advertiser.
Sailthru technology can be plugged into any content management system with any data in as little as a day, and will optimize itself in real-time as user’s interact. It is most effective for marketers with large existing data sets, and its value increases over time.
Clients have seen open rates increase by 15%, while decreasing their email build times by 90%. The data can also help drive incremental advertising revenue as targeting email display ads can be served at a premium. Sailthru’s current client roster includes HuffPo, Business Insider, Fab.com, flavorpill, Thrillist, and more.
Sailthru is based in NYC and has received over $9 million in funding by big-name investors.
Just off the phone with my new friend Charlie Maddock, Director of Biz Dev for Shapeways, and I am a huge fan of what they’re doing.
Overview
Shapeways is the world’s first 3D printing community that allows users to upload designs of just about anything and bring them to life - including cuff links, home decor, iPad cases, board games, jewelry, and much more. If you can design it, they can make it real.
For those who aren’t designers, they have a easy-to-use customization portal on their website that lets people customize things like sake sets in minutes. Check it out here. Or you can browse and buy the creations of others.
How does it work?
In their words: “We define 3D printing as any additive manufacturing process whereby one machine turns a digital file into a finished physical object by building up that object layer by layer. If you were to be more precise the technology would be called rapid manufacturing and 3D printing would just be one of the manufacturing processes used to create objects in this way.”
Still don’t get it? Watch the video below.
How Can Brands/Advertisers/Creatives Use It?
- Shapeways 3D Design Classes: They’re already hosting classes on Skillshare, but for agencies and other creative companies, it would be great to have Shapeways come in and do a class for your employees. It would add another weapon to your design arsenal for both clients and internal creative executions.
- Design Contests: Have a brand start a design contest for Shapeways community to participate in. Kool-Aid could incentivize people to create cool Kool-aid Man products, IKEA could have people create home decor, and the list could go on and on.
- Branded Store: Creative shops could/should open up branded stores within Shapeways to showcase and even sell designs from their creatives. It’s innovative, forward-thinking, and a great portfolio piece to showcase to clients.
- Just make/buy cool stuff: Strategic initiatives aside, use Shapeways to make cool stuff for the office, home, of as gifts. Their products are one-of-a-kind, sure to impress others, and give a wow factor to those uninitiated to the brand. For ideas, check out their gift guide that’s organized by personality type.
Things to Note
- Shapeways is opening a factory in New York in 2012, which will improve logistics as well as establish a physical presence for people to tour and get to know the technology. New York, being the design hub that it is, will undoubtedly show its support upon opening.
- Printing materials include stainless steel, silver, sandstone, ceramics, and much more. Full list here.
- If you can’t attend a Shapeways class, no worries. They have a robust repository of tutorials and downloadable models.
In short, I highly recommend getting to know Shapeways. Whether for a brand or yourself, it’s products are undeniably cool, custom, and innovative.
Really digging what 140 Proof is doing. Below is a general overview, details and ideas to come soon.
Overview
140 Proof is the first social stream advertising platform, reaching 175 million users on Twitter by parsing the public social stream of data providers like Twitter, Foursquare, and Blippy. 140 Proof’s API provides the main revenue streams for social stream applications and websites like UberTwitter, Echofon, HootSuite, and Plixi.
The company was founded in 2009 by Jon Elvekrog and John Manoogian III, formerly of LinkExchange and Organic, respectively. 140 Proof grew out of the social currency app Plus One as a way to target positive sentiment in the social stream.
140 Proof Advertisers can promote a short, contextual message with a links that appears above the social stream of users fitting a specific demographic “persona”. The ads are full social objects, meaning they can be replied to and retweeted, multiplying the reach of the ad and lowering the advertiser’s effective cost, since impressions from retweets are not charged for.
Anyone with a Twitter account can launch a 140 Proof ad campaign network and start targeting an audience by defining keywords, locations, and influence criteria on Twitter.
140 Proof self-serve campaigns are sold on both a CPM and CPC basis, and advertisers with high-volume needs can upgrade to full-serve campaigns where creative, targeting, and optimization are handled by 140 Proof’s services group.
Current customers include brands like Microsoft, Infiniti, General Motors, Levi’s, AT&T, and Victoria’s Secret.
