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- Real-Time Research: iOS Dominates Over Android When It Comes To Usage, Says Chitika
- Ticl Her Fancy With Romantic Gift Service Ticlr
- Voldemort’s Got Nothing On Jeff Bezos
- Why Search? Let LaunchGram Bring New Product Info To You
- From Russia With Money: How KupiVIP Is Riding The Middle Class Wave In Europe’s Most Connected Market
- Facebook Shareholders: What Do You Do After You Make a Zillion Dollars
- If Financing is Marriage, is M&A Death?
- The Power Of AngelList Revealed In Its New Look: 978 Deals, 48 Acquisitions
- Flush With Funding, Video Chat Service Tango Has Social Network Ambitions
- A Mid-Career Switch: From Massachusetts State Trooper to iOS Developer-To-The-Rescue
- Got Pot? Leafly Can Help
- PicPlz Founder Dalton Caldwell: All This Gossip About The Instagram Sale Is ‘A Waste Of Time’
- Facebook Updates Android App: 1.9 Adds Photos, Message Sharing From Home Screen
- Live From The First Ever MamaBear Family Conference
- What Would You Do For A TCTV Interview? Digital Ocean Employee Does 100 Pushups [TCTV]
- Tiggzi’s Drag-And-Drop Mobile App Builder Goes Beyond Templates
- Khan Academy Partners Up With 23andMe To Make Learning About Genetics Fun
- Facebook’s $1 Billion Instagram Deal Didn’t Affect Path’s Valuation In Recent Raise
- Equally Creepy And Creative, Cheek’d Is Online Dating In Reverse
- Event Marketing: The Key To F-Commerce?
| Real-Time Research: iOS Dominates Over Android When It Comes To Usage, Says Chitika Posted: 21 Apr 2012 08:48 AM PDT  Android, by most accounts, is proving to be the most popular smartphone platform when it comes to devices getting sold today — partly due to the sheer variety of devices and price points that are out there. But a new research tool that tracks usage in real-time shows that when it comes to usage, consumers, in the U.S. at least, are far more active on Apple’s devices than on any other. The numbers come from the ad network Chitika, which notes that in the last 24 hours, iOS devices, covering the iPhone, iPad and iPod models, accounted for just under 68 percent of all usage on its network. Android, meanwhile, accounted for just under 28 percent. Other platforms (Windows Phone, BlackBerry, etc.) were less than five percent of all activity. But there have been periods in the last few days when Android accounted for as little as 19 percent of traffic (on April 19, as it happens). You can watch the new tool in action right here. Chitika also breaks out what kind of iOS traffic we are talking about, and it looks like iPad tablet users are sending more traffic to its network — and browsing web sites and apps where Chitika’s ads appear — than iPhone users, with iPod traffic being the smallest of all. If you look at the graphic on the site itself, you can run the cursor over the line chart to get specific percentages. The stickiness of iOS and the iPad are also borne out by a separate piece of research from Chitika, which found that users of iPad tablets had the highest click-through rates. Looking at “hundreds of millions” of mobile ad impressions on its network, covering April 9-15, Chitika found iOS devices had a 0.72 percent CTR, and Android had a 0.60 percent CTR. Within iOS, iPad users had the highest CTRs at 0.80 percent, compared to 0.67 percent for iPhone and iPod had 0.62 percent. For the real-time research, Chitika explains that the numbers come from monitoring unique impressions on mobile devices covered by the Chitika Ad Network. It says it works in a six-hour delay into the numbers for “maximum continuity of data.” Does this sound like mobile stat watching gone too far? For the majority it may well be — but this is actually a pretty interesting bit of data for the world of mobile advertising and mobile content in general. It potentially gives ad networks, and advertisers, a lot more insight into planning campaigns on platform versus another and one device compared to another. Publishers can use this kind of data to help decide how it channels resources for serving content to different apps and platforms and devices as well. I think that we are bound to see some kind of response from the Google camp on these usage numbers, which do not put Android into the best light. It will also be worth watching to see if other ad networks follow suit and offer similarly granular insight into daily/hourly usage.
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| Ticl Her Fancy With Romantic Gift Service Ticlr Posted: 21 Apr 2012 08:00 AM PDT  When you ask someone on a date, maybe you are a gentleman that likes to offer some flowers to make it official. This is where Ticlr, a startup showcased at DEMO Spring 2012, comes into play. You can send a date idea for a nice dinner at a French restaurant with yes/no answer options. If the recipient agrees, some flowers will be sent to his or her home. This is called “tickling” and can be used in many different scenarios. Ticlr is creating another way to send gifts that claims to be easier, less stressful and more creative. Gifts can be both personal gestures (I’ll cook a nice romantic dinner) and paid gifts such as gift cards, a donation to a charity or an object from one of its partners. It fosters spontaneous gift-giving because of the inexpensive personal gesture option — a new take on gift coupons — and the motivational aspect of conditional gifts. “I began thinking about this idea a little over a year ago when I bumped into a friend I hadn’t seen in quite some time,” founder and CEO Chuck Digate says. “We caught up and chatted about a mutual friend neither of us had seen recently either. It occurred to me that there really hasn’t been a social relationship platform for expressing gratitude or acknowledging relationships,” he continues. On the website, you can find a public gift locker where users save their gift ideas. Other users can browse the locker to find a good gift idea. Ticlr also publishes gifts in the locker, and of course some of them are the products sold through their partners. Ticlr plans to have different streams of revenue: they will mainly monetize the service by taking a small margin on every product sold through Ticlr and commissions on donations to a charity. Down the road, they want to leverage their platform to allow brands to launch new products. When I asked who Ticlr’s ecommerce partners were, the answer seems to indicate that the company is still actively building its partner list. “Our initial set in a few weeks will include FTD, Hammacher Schlemmer, Gold Medal Wine Club, Zinio, DiscountMags, Golfsmith, zChocolat, Hulu Plus and a few others,” Chuck Digate says. Ticlr isn’t the only one working on improving the gift-giving process. Evidence of this lies in the competitors that already exist: GiftWoo creates gift suggestions, and Karma and Wrapp are mobile apps that make gift-giving social and a pleasant experience. The startup, which is based in Boston, Massachusetts, has received an undisclosed amount of angel investment and is looking to raise additional funds. If you want to tickle someone today, you can sign up on Ticlr’s website right now.
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| Voldemort’s Got Nothing On Jeff Bezos Posted: 21 Apr 2012 07:00 AM PDT  E-books. Again. Amazon and the DOJ vs. Apple and “The Big Six.” The future of reading. A breathtakingly stupid David Carr piece in the New York Times, which thankfully someone else took down paragraph-by-paragraph, so I don’t have to. Elsewhere, an awesome quote which I want to cheer with the force of a million choirs of angels:
Yes, it’s time to trot out that obligatory William Gibson quote again:
There’s certainly more than enough evil to go around here: Evil But Smart, represented by Amazon and its oppressive Kindle monoculture, vs. Evil And Flailingly Inept, aka Publishing’s Big Six, whose “pig-headed insistence on DRM on ebooks is handing Amazon a stick with which to beat them harder,” to quote Charles Stross. (If you question their evilness, bear in mind: “Five of the six major publishers of trade books either refuse to make new e-books available to libraries or have pulled back significantly over the last year on how easily or how often those books can be circulated.” Having attacked public libraries, publishers presumably will next go after motherhood and apple pie…) Their battle may sell popcorn but is really neither interesting nor relevant. Remember that Gibson quote: Mere evil is insufficient for middleman success. You need to be necessary. That’s a lot harder. Let’s go back to the basics. (Context: I’ve had four novels published by major publishers, one by a small press, and a graphic novel published by DC/Vertigo.) This, to oversimplify, was the publishing pipeline for most of the last several centuries: author ⇒ editor ⇒ copyeditor -⇒ designer ⇒ typesetter ⇒ printer ⇒ distributor ⇒ wholesaler ⇒ bookstore/library ⇒ reader Note how many of those stages are susceptible to digital disruption. Copyediting and typesetting are increasingly algorithmic and automatable, as is design, if you’re willing to limit yourself to a few templates and find your own cover image. Distribution and wholesaling were erased by the Internet. On the other hand, you still have to get an e-book to a reader’s device, and someone still has to take their money. That’s where Amazon comes in. This is their system, if you self-publish: author ⇒ Amazon ⇒ (optional) DRM ⇒ device ⇒ reader Today, the absence of copyediting, design, typesetting, and above all, editing, means that will be one seriously amateur-hour book … but the first three are increasingly algorithmically replaceable. Clearly Smart & Evil has the long-term advantage – – but wait! As the tedious ebook battle of evil vs. evil continues, a shining new force has arisen, a champion of liberty, justice, and common freaking sense! Ladies and gentlemen, I give you none other than Harry Potter. No. Seriously. This DOJ thing is actually completely irrelevant, but Pottermore, now that’s interesting. You see, here’s the Pottermore model: DRM-free, directly downloadable to your Kindle, from a non-Amazon source: author ⇒ Pottermore ⇒ device ⇒ reader Obviously, JK Rowling can and does pay for the best copyediting, design, and typesetting in the world, and her books have already been edited by capable Big Six editors; but the important thing that Pottermore highlights is that neither Amazon nor publishers are a necessary evil. True, publishers also provide marketing (although precious little, for most books) and the imprimatur of quality (you’ve read some bad published books, but you have no idea how much better they were than most of what festers on publishers’ slush piles.) But is there any reason other than history and momentum that editing, copyediting, design, typesetting, marketing, and quality assurance live under one corporate roof? Small presses already do an excellent job of all of these things, frequently by outsourcing them. So what’s so necessary about the Big Six, in an era of shrinking advances, when their biggest names can and will pull a Pottermore and start to sell books themselves? Very little indeed. However. Amazon is equally unnecessary. And if Stephen King or Tom Clancy or someone of that bestselling ilk goes to Amazon and demands the same treatment as Rowling, Amazon can no longer say “we don’t do that” or “that would be far too technically difficult.” They do do that. They already implemented it. And now that they’ve set this precedent, it’s only a matter of time before Capitalized Names everywhere start demanding that Amazon extends that most-favored-literary-nation status to them, too. The Big Six may be doomed, but now that Amazon has broken the seal on external sites selling DRM-free Kindle e-books, that DRM-laden monoculture will go down with them. Meaning that finally, after years of thrashing, readers will finally get what they have wanted all along: DRM-free e-books sold by Amazon and anyone else who wants to sell them. Three cheers for Harry Potter, and a billion points to Gryffindor.
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| Why Search? Let LaunchGram Bring New Product Info To You Posted: 21 Apr 2012 06:50 AM PDT  Last week at the 10x Xelerator, Andy Sparks impelled LaunchGram.com into motion and lazy people all over the world rejoiced (or they will…eventually). This new service, in the words of Sparks, “aggregates pre-release demand signals for products coming soon.” The way it works is that consumers can create an account at LaunchGram’s website and subscribe to news about imminently launching products of interest (the iPhone 5 for example). Once users subscribe, they can receive “LaunchGrams” via email with curated updates about product release date, pre-order availability, photos and video. (LaunchGram does the dirty work here by scouring the web for the most up to date information about listed products). The same information that shows up in emails can also be viewed on product-specific pages at the main website. What kind of products? Right now, the team is focusing on video games, movies, While these news alerts are being issued by email today, SMS alerts are coming soon. Additionally mobile web and app versions of the service are on their way too. Strategically, Andy indicated that their goal is not to replace news sources, but rather to accentuate them as filters for smart search. Heck, we should use this here at TechCrunch!
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| Posted: 21 Apr 2012 05:20 AM PDT  From a slow start in the aftermath of the Soviet Union, Russia is now Europe's biggest internet market with 53 million users (compared to number-two Germany at 51 million), and figures from GP Bullhound and comScore indicate that it is also growing the fastest, at 14 percent (other European countries are at less than six percent it says). On top of that, a growing base of middle class consumers — 15 million today, expected to double to 30 million in the next five years in an e-commerce market that is projected to be worth $40 billion — has translated into a veritable boom in the rise of tech companies. But not all of that growth means big money just yet. KupiVIP, the Russian flash-sales site, is on track to make $200 million in net sales this year, on revenues of $300 million. Oskar Hartmann (pictured), KupiVIP’s young and bullish CEO and co-founder, who I met while on a tour of Moscow’s tech scene this week (another story on that here), believes the company will be making $1 billion in sales annually within the next five years — pretty modest by the standards of Amazon, a company to which KupiVIP is compared, which had revenues of over $48 billion in 2011, but still making KupiVIP one to watch. A story that Hartmann tells gives an insight into some of the trials and tribulations of building a startup in a country like Russia: "It was January 21, 2009, and we were just about to get a new financing round. At the time we had negative 200 million euros in the bank," recalls Hartmann. He explains that while VCs in Europe consider a deal done when the term sheet is delivered, and in the U.S. when the shareholder agreement is finalized. But in Russia it's when the money gets wired to a bank account, with the paperwork being effectively meaningless without it. "Then we suddenly got a call from the main investor, who said they'd changed their mind. It was game over for us." So they got to thinking fast. "We called our retail partners, and asked if they would be willing to give us six months of credit. We worked out a revenue sharing deal with our biggest retailer. And then our existing VC, Mangrove, gave us a bridge loan. Then our company grew by 40 times in the next eight months." He said the VC that dropped out at the last minute later approached them to invest again — possibly in the $55 million round the company secured in April 2011 from Balderton, Bessemer, Accel, Mangrove and others. "And they did." Since then, KupiVIP ('kupi' means buy in Russian) has been becoming an ever more ubiquitous presence in the market on a business that still counts flash sales as its biggest pillar, but now also includes white-label e commerce sites and a full-priced e-commerce site of its own called ShopTime — all distributed on a logistics network created and owned by KupiVIP that includes warehouses, a fleet of delivery trucks and even delivery men who will bring a product and wait at the door until you try the item on and decide whether you want to keep it, and then pay they guy, in cash, if you do. Most recently, the white-label service, which KupiVIP started building two years ago, has now begun to grow in earnest: it now has nine big brands signed on (Adidas being one of the most recent, going live just this week), with plans to have 23 by the end of this year, launching two new sites every month. White-label is already providing 25 percent of the company's revenues but they expect that to account for half by 2013. Hartmann's big idea for KupiVIP is to sell name-brand fashion at deep discounts (as with other consumer goods like electronics and food, name brand clothes from regular stores can be ridiculously expensive) with the aim of building a solution covering middle class women — and men — in "every region, every city." It definitely fills a hole — nothing like this existed before, and Russian women love to shop and are huge impulse buyers. Two of KupiVIP's biggest assets are more behind the scenes: The first has been in the creation of that logistics infrastructure. It includes a battery of attractive in-house call center girls (I think some of them may double as models for the site, and one of their incentives was for good performance to get rewarded with photo shoots for the company calendar); plus distribution centers, trucks and a fleet of customer-friendly delivery people who double as sales assistants to work with customers at the point of delivery. Hartmann says that it had to build this from scratch because existing delivery services were just not up to the task involved: not just sending goods to so many extensive parts of Russia but then being on hand to collect money or the goods if they're not up to scratch. (Ozon, a competitor to KupiVIP, says that 80 percent of its sales are in cash, too.) You can imagine that if another international e-commerce company like Amazon or eBay decide to really make a play for Russia, this is the kind of infrastructure that they would need to either build as well, or buy. The other is in the area of data collection: the company is picking up an enormous amount of information about what people like to buy and when. This is an area where KupiVIP is already making acquisitions to improve its position, specifically looking for companies that are "supportive of data intelligence, consumer mining and individualization in shopping.” That information is already helping them shape the product experience for individual shoppers, Hartmann says. There are some areas that are no-go for KupiVIP. For one, Hartmann says that the company will not touch electronics and books, which are already being served well by Ozon and others, because he believes startups first and foremost need to "solve problems that are unsolved." Plus he thinks that even for a company like Ozon these product categories do not make much money. He argues that this was the motivation behind Ozon's purchase of Sapato, Russia's Zappos, in February 2012: to be able to distribute more profitable products over Ozon's own logistics infrastructure. "Books/electronics will always lose money. They want to overlay their delivery engine with profitable products, antiques, fashion and shoes, so it make a lot of sense for Ozon to buy Sapato." International expansion is another. "We have no interest in extending outside of Russia and the CIS," he says. "There are already huge e-commerce companies in Europe. We would have to build up from zero. We need to look at markets where we can add value in the CIS before looking where we can grow internationally." PriceWaterhouse estimates that the whole of the e-commerce market (including content like games, lottery tickets and money transfer) was worth $9 billion in Russia in 2010 and that this will double by next year. Hartmann also notes that the kinds of market gaps that exist in Russia are in other parts of the world, too — for example Saudi Arabia and India. How do the financials look today? "We are as profitable as we want to be," Hartmann answers. There is also talk of an IPO in the next two years. The biggest cost, he says, is customer acquisition and delivery, the area that KupiVIP has built out from scratch. (Delivery can cost 20 euros per sale but the company delivers free.) Those margins improve the more the logistics network is used, which is why we will probably continue to see KupiVIP launch ever more services in the future.
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| Facebook Shareholders: What Do You Do After You Make a Zillion Dollars Posted: 21 Apr 2012 05:00 AM PDT  In the dot-com boom I lost $15 million cash. Yes, I am an idiot. You know what happens when you lose that kind of cash? When you go to zero? You lose your libido. You don’t want to have sex ever again. And even Viagra won’t help. I lost my house. I lost my family. I lost all my fake friends. I was sick all the time. When I passed people on the street who were laughing I was definitely sure they were laughing at me. $15 million cash. One million a week in the summer of 2000. I could’ve saved lives with that money.Instead every night I would lie on the floor and try to mentally force my body to die. [See, "What It Feels Like to Be Rich"] So now I will save some lives. You Facebook shareholders are about to make a lot of money. One friend of mine made one of the most common features on Facebook we use every day. He’s going to make $15 million. So my message is to him but the rest of you can listen in on the conversation. 1.) The One-Year Rule. Don't change your lifestyle at all for at least one year. No new house or apartment. Don't buy a fancy car. Don't buy expensive artwork. Don’t take on a mistress. This is not to say these things are bad. It's just that you need to let the new wealth marinate your soul a little bit. Get comfortable with it before you try on new clothes that might not fit yet. Once you buy some massively expensive toys or homes, it changes your whole perspective and might make you much more foolish than you were when you were first climbing the ladder of success. Remember: One year. 2.) The No-Friends Rule. Don't lend money to old friends. Don't be so quick to make new friends. Once you make money, everyone will approach you about new investments you can make. Or people will want to borrow money from you. Don't do either. It's very hard, of course, to deny a friend who says, "listen, I just need to borrow $100,000 for 90 days." Or "I have a great new start-up that looks like Twitter but better. I'm just raising $500,000 and I left $300,000 for you to come into the round." I probably lost a few hundred thousand in loans that were going to be repaid the next day. Here's what you can say, "I'd love to do it. It sounds great. Right now everything is tied up with my financial adviser and you can talk to him. I have to go by what he says because of all the legal stuff I don't understand." And you aren’t lying. Make your wife or husband or mother or whoever your financial adviser and tell them to say no to everything. But it's necessary if you want to keep your friends. Particularly in Year One (see previous rule). 3.) Don't Invest. What's the rush? You just made your money. Put it in a savings account for one year at least. Or under your mattress. No stocks. No paintings. No private investments. Try not to start a business again so quickly. A friend of mine recently won $3 million in a poker tournament after being broke for many years (all his life). Right away he wanted to buy a hotel. Don't do it. This was right before the entire housing crisis and recession that followed. Thank God he took my advice. If you feel absolutely compelled to do some investing then follow the next rule. 4.) The 2% Rule. If you really feel that Google is going to $5,000 per share and you have to buy some stock at $500, don't put more than 2% of your money into it. Then, if it all goes to hell, you've only lost 2% of your money (or more likely, 1%, since Google will probably never go down more than 50%). This is hard for entrepreneurs who come into sudden wealth because they are used to making their money by having most of their net worth tied up in one investment (their business). But this is probably the most important rule on the list. After the other six rules of course. 5.) The Good Health Rule. Believe it or not, your health is now at serious risk if you just came into sudden wealth. More risk than ever before. A friend of mine had a very stressful business in the online gambling space. He was worried the Feds were going to outlaw him and arrest him. He was broke and the business was always in a state of running out of money. High, high, stress. I thought he was going to have a stroke or a heart attack but he always stayed in great health. Then he sold his business and made about $50 million. Three months later he was on a ski slope in Aspen, enjoying the fruits of his labor, when he suddenly had a major heart attack and only survived because of immediate medical care. He was essentially dead for five minutes on the operating table. Your body, in a high adrenalin situation, will postpone punishing you until the situation is over. But don't think when the stress is over that your body will forget. It doesn't. You must focus on health after achieving sudden wealth. Here is the key thing to remember. When you are mugged, your body goes into a fight or flight mode. Adrenaline shoots up. The same thing happens when you start a business. Only difference is: you are mugged every day and you sit immobile at your computer. So once that adrenaline calms down your body is going to do some very weird things. Unless you keep in good health. 6.) Try Not To Burn Out. You worked hard to get here. You worked 120 hours a week. You gave up watching “Mad Men”. Your girlfriend cheated on you. Your missed your parents 50th anniversary. I get it. Congratulations. But don't burn out just yet. You need to be responsible and show the people around you that they all made the right decision in trusting you, hiring you, paying you, inspiring you, feeding you. You have few chances in life to demonstrate that you're made of the right stuff and this is one of them. And what to do if you lose it all? Don't worry. Do the next item: 7) The Daily Practice Should you happen to implode and lose everything, here is the technique I used to get off the floor and get motivated again and start new businesses and go from failure to success (and I had to repeat that a few times). Basically, I view the body as four bodies interconnected: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. They are all connected. It’s like if one path to your heart is blocked then blood and oxygen won’t flow through your body properly and you will get sick. It’s the same here, if everything isn’t flowing properly then you’ll get sick, lose all your money, and die. But if you check the boxes on what I call The Daily Practice, your life will be completely different in six months, no matter how badly you fell apart before. Trust me, my life still changes completely ever six months. Note: There's no such thing as luck. In the chess-playing world there's a saying: "Only the good players are lucky." That applies to business as well. People can say you were lucky. But the truth is you'll be able to do it again and again, no matter how deeply you fall. Trust in this and follow these rules and sudden wealth will become permanent wealth.
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| If Financing is Marriage, is M&A Death? Posted: 21 Apr 2012 01:00 AM PDT  Editor's note: Contributor Ashkan Karbasfrooshan is the founder and CEO of WatchMojo, he hosts a show on business and has published books on success (he was also, from 2000-05 one of the most popular relationship columnists, under a pen name, for a well-known lifestyle mag). Follow him @ashkan. Not a week goes by where I don't get an email that goes like this: "I wanted to reconnect, as I’ve recently left [the company that bought my startup]. Long story, but suffice it to say their executives and I did not share the same vision for the future." Let's face it, although there have been some smashing successes, more often than not, Mergers & Acquisitions fail. If you didn't know any better, you'd think that selling your company amounted to a kiss of death, when it ought to be closer to a rebirth and the start of something… better. Indeed, while raising money from investors feels like marriage, M&A sure feels like death. How so? Let's count the ways. Why Bringing on Investors is Like Marriage The financing process – prospecting, discussing, negotiating, and closing – is awfully akin to marriage. Like any relationship that "culminates" with a wedding, the real, hard work starts once the honeymoon is over, and the partying that comes with celebrating the closing of a financing round is eerily similar to a honeymoon. In fact, when you go from being your own boss in a bootstrapped company to having a fiduciary duty to investors, the honeymoon is over pretty quick: you can't act selfish and do what feels right; you have to take into consideration how your words and actions will affect your significant other. Sure, it might get a bit dysfunctional if you have more than one investor, but we'll that for a separate article. Why Entrepreneurs Fail At "Marriage" (Financing) We've all seen the stats: half of marriages end in divorce and 99% of VC-backed startups fail, with VCs earning a measly 1% per annum. Why the poor record? It's perfectly fine to celebrate your financing – something that takes a lot of time and energy to do. But if you treat that as the end result or the outcome that matters, then you're bound to fail. In fact, it says a lot about an entrepreneur when all he brags about is how much money he's raised. After all, some would argue that if you've been divorced three times, you've actually failed six times, because you've connected with the wrong partner thrice and called it quits three more times. Why Stop There with the Analogy? Products Are Like Children The similarities don't end there. Regardless of one's thoughts on how much a man and woman each contribute to pregnancy and child-rearing, the bottom line is you need both to have children in the first place. Similarly, to some extent, an investor and entrepreneur will come together and create products, but despite their best intentions, it's impossible to envision how their offspring will grow and develop. It Takes a Community To Raise a Child In business, unlike in unique scenarios, the entrepreneur is usually acting like a single-parent, relying on his employees, advisors, users and clients to ensure the well-being and development of his "child", but the best investors have operational and/or strategic experience and will help you shape your product. Fred Wilson rolls up his sleeves and gets his hands dirty with a product or service before, during and after he backs it; I recall him talking about Twitter before investing, for example. It's all about Compromise and the Greater Good Ultimately, though, for an investment to be successful and prosper, the entrepreneur and investor have to compromise and sacrifice for the greater good – and that means setting aside one's short-term self-interests for the children to go on to greater heights. To be perfectly fair, selling one's company to a larger entity, or merging your business with another ought to be like a marriage, too, but for various reasons, it seldom is. More often than not, it's actually destructive. Why is that? Liquidity: My Water Broke! Well, for one, an investment is usually a means to an end. Like a marriage, it is (or was, at least traditionally) a step towards starting a family. An investment's objective is to take an idea from concept to reality. Only when it grows and successfully exits – thereby providing liquidity to all shareholders – does the marriage seem like a true success. In other words, if you get married for the status, your marriage will likely fail. The same applies to fundraising. Why Entrepreneurs Fail At M&A Ironically, M&A is usually seen like a cause of celebration (birth, or marriage) because it provides with some form of instant gratification but it rarely is one with hindsight. There's a reason why we have a cliché that says: "the grass is greener on the other side". In fact, it's one of the common mistakes entrepreneurs make when they sell their companies. If you want a good overview of why so many M&A deals fail, take a look at this article. Ultimately, like a failed marriage, it boils down to the two parties not coming together to make it work. But does that mean M&A is equal to death? That sounds harsh. But it's usually true because the seller tends to either lose motivation or overpromise the potential of the combined entity. Alternatively, the buyer is usually going to fail to do a better job of running the acquired entity than the team that ran it as a scrappy startup. Do You Want the Crown or the Cash? However, because you have exited and experienced financial success, you may not care. Your passion morphs into frustration and disillusionment; with your bank account full, no amount of money can bring back the thrill of sitting on the throne. In that context, the entrepreneur is just as guilty as the buyer for killing his "baby". Mind, Body and Soul How M&A differs from death, ironically, is that while we're taught to believe that upon death the mind and body perish but the soul goes on, in M&A, the opposite happens. A product, unit, or company can continue in form and fashion, but the soul is usually the first thing that is stripped, because of a lack of vision or effort, or an excess of greed, fear and hubris. But mainly, entrepreneurs want their cake and eat it, too. Once you accept an offer, you have to realize that it's no longer your business and if you can't see the forest through the trees then you are bound to fail. If you can't let go and become part of the new solution, you will be just as responsible in the death of your company. Financing, like M&A, requires a collaboration to succeed. Failure in either, like a child, is a product of two parties. With a better perspective, hopefully buyers and sellers can make M&A turn out to be more birth, than death.
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| The Power Of AngelList Revealed In Its New Look: 978 Deals, 48 Acquisitions Posted: 20 Apr 2012 11:29 PM PDT  Although its value may not have been apparent to all at the outset, AngelList has proven to be a remarkably effective way for investors to connect with entrepreneurs. The hybrid social network, communication and crowdsourcing platform offers a greater degree of visibility to startups that might not have access to investors, and, on the flip side, has become an important resource for investors looking to boost dealflow and connect with other investors. AngelList is looking to level the playing field, and harness the power of the crowdsourcing models to connect great ideas to the capital that can get them off the ground. But some have worried that the crowdsourcing model will encourage the herd mentality, and, with scale, potentially end up with an unfavorable ratio of noise to signal. Having found traction (in 2011, 500 startups and 2,500 investors joined the community, with a total of 12,500 introductions resulting), AngelList is now on a mission to capitalize on its position and become a more advanced resource for early-stage companies. (See its experimentation with a new pitch deck format.) AngelList facilitates a growing number of investor-founder introductions, but it’s always in need of better ways for all parties to dive down and see what’s happening at various stages of the funding process, both to help inform decisions down the road and get a better sense of the landscape in the present. Today, AngelList added some cool new features to its homepage (sign out if you’re logged in), which offers the startup a more effective way to show off what it’s been able to accomplish and gives all visitors a better way to break down the information they want to see. It’s also released funding statistics on its startup flock with a new landing page called “Done Deals.” Currently, the new page is showing that 978 startups have found some form of investment since 2010, along with offering investors and startups the ability to sort through these deals by type, by the year they closed, the amount, and even search for participating investors. It’s a great use for the unique data the platform has collected over the past two years, and provides some much-needed context. The stats show that nearly 40 startups on AngelList have been acquired since 2010, two have raised series C rounds, 18 series B, 109 series A, and 868 have now raised seed capital.
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| Flush With Funding, Video Chat Service Tango Has Social Network Ambitions Posted: 20 Apr 2012 10:00 PM PDT  Video chat service Tango is moving in a new direction, and this week the company closed a round of $40 million in Series C funding which will take it there, it hopes. Many think of Tango’s service as an up-and-coming Skype competitor, as it, too, is about real-time communication, specifically video calling, between users. But the comparison to Skype may no longer be apt. Tango is working towards becoming a more social service – something more akin to the micro social network Path, in fact. On the roadmap are several new social features, some of which make sense for a phone replacement utility (like text messaging), others which seem more like a shift to a social network (like exchanging photos). Tango’s co-founder Eric Setton describes his vision for Tango’s future not as a video chat service, or even a communications service, but as “a service that keeps you closer to those you care about.” Getting there has been all about taking baby steps, Setton explains. “We’re very cautious in everything we introduce,” he says. “We first want to check with the market that everything we’re thinking isn’t just our imagination,” he says. Features don’t roll out fully baked, but are introduced, tweaked, and then expanded upon. Case in point: the slow way that Tango has rolled out video messaging. This newer feature, which allows users to leave video messages for others, was originally introduced in December as a kind of “video voicemail” option. In January, responding to user feedback, Tango allowed users to send these messages without having to first dial the recipient’s phone. This week, the company rolled out support for one-to-many video messaging, perfect for sharing things like baby’s first steps with the entire family. Soon, Tango will add video message replies, too. If the latter additions make you think that Tango is beginning to feel a little bit more like a social network than a utility, you would be right. Setton says the company has been asking itself, “what do we want to be when we grow up?” “We’ve clarified that a lot over the last six months,” he says, “and here’s what we see it as: because of the nature of video calls, which is so much more personal and intimate, we’re addressing a small audience around you – your spouse, your kids, your parents, your really close friends – what Path calls the ‘intimate social network’….we, by default, play within that circle.” And in this more intimate network – the ones you’ve deemed “favorites” within Tango’s app, for example – it’s about sharing, not just phoning. “When you think about these people [in your personal network], what do you do with them? These are the people that you call with your normal phone, these are the people that you text, these are the people that you exchange pictures or videos with, these are the people that you actually want to celebrate occasions with, etc…so rather than thinking about us as a phone replacement, it’s really about bringing all these interactions to the service,” says Setton. Tango is now working on the video messaging component, and the infrastructure needed to store your saved video messages in the cloud so your messages are still available as you move from phone to phone. It also recently introduced animations (Tango Surprises), which you can add to messages to give them a little flair. Although Tango is free, it’s starting to monetize through in-app purchases for things like more storage space for messages or different animations. As for the future, text messaging and photo-sharing are on the way. What about status updates and checkins, we asked? “We can’t share the whole roadmap,” Setton hedged. But in terms of what social features he didn’t think would be a good fit going forward, he only said that public sharing wasn’t something under consideration. “Tango is not really about blasting,” Setton explains, referring to networks like Socialcam which are meant for sharing video to a larger audience on social networks. “The ‘following’ model – that’s not really us,” he says. The obvious comparison, then, if Tango is going the social networking route, is with Path, also deemed an intimate network of your closest friends and family. But while Tango is clearly moving into Path territory, it’s doing it its own way. “We come from the communication angle – that’s been a very strong driver for growth – we don’t really approach it from the same angle…real-time communications will always be an integral part of the things that we do,” says Setton. ”Also,” he adds with a grin, “I don’t see you stopping using the phone anytime soon.” The real-time communications angle has, indeed, proven to be successful so far for Tango’s growth. The number of daily calls has doubled in the past four months, and the number of daily registrations have doubled since July. There are now over 45 million people on Tango, 10% of whom use it daily, and 44% of which are active users. The service’s $40 million C round, announced earlier this week, brings in new investors Qualcomm Incorporated, acting though its venture arm, Qualcomm Ventures, and Access Industries, Inc., the industrial holding company founded by Len Blavatnik. It also sees additional investment from members of Eric Setton's family, who have been early supporters. Other investors include Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Michael Birch, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Bill Hambrecht. Tango now has $87 million in total funding to execute its vision. Tango is available on Android, iOS, Windows Phone, and Windows desktop and is working to bring a native iPad app out in the near future. Setton wouldn’t comment on the company’s Mac plans, however, but hopefully it, too, will arrive soon.
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| A Mid-Career Switch: From Massachusetts State Trooper to iOS Developer-To-The-Rescue Posted: 20 Apr 2012 05:29 PM PDT  After writing about Lovestagram, the app that Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger’s girlfriend made for him as a Valentine’s Day present, we didn’t think we could find a cuter story. But we totally did. Smoopa, a mobile commerce app I wrote about yesterday, is also the by-product of a little love story. Derek Langton, who served as a Massachusetts state trooper for 18 years, picked up programming over the last year and a half to change his career and prove his ex-Googler husband and the company’s co-founder Mendel Chuang wrong. “When you have an economy like the one we have now and when you’re trying to change career paths, it’s not easy,” Langton said. “But it comes down to motivation. It’s like losing weight. People try and fail. But when you see that it’s a lifestyle change and you make it part of who you are, you can be successful.” Langton’s story is pretty interesting considering the way the local Silicon Valley economy seems to have divorced itself from the brutal employment market facing the rest of the country. In enclaves like Silicon Valley, it feels like the shortage of skilled workers is so intense that no number of H-1B visas could possibly fill it. And yet, in the rest of the country, there is an 8.2 percent unemployment rate. That’s nearly double the 4 to 5 percent range that the country hovered in before the 2008 financial crisis. If the U.S. is going to fix its structural unemployment problems, it’s going to take mid-career people who are motivated enough to pick up technical skills and resources like Codecademy that will make it easier for them to do so. So how and why did Langton do it? After almost two decades of serving in the Massachusetts state police force, Langton felt like he wasn’t completely in love with police work anymore. He also saw how hard it was going to be for Chuang to do a startup from Boston, instead of Silicon Valley. Chuang was looking to co-found a mobile commerce company another MIT alum Charlie Sharp. The company is backed by SimplyHired’s co-founder and former chief technology officer Peter Weck, the original Google doodler Dennis Hwang and Nate Johnson, who leads consumer product marketing at LinkedIn. But when Chuang, who used to work on AdSense while at Google, found himself short of developers, Langton stepped up. He’s been doing 80-hour weeks to pick up Cocoa and Objective C, his husband says. "He's been mad-driven," Chuang said of 42-year-old Langton. "The more I told him that iOS development was hard, the more he wanted to prove me wrong." Langton built the iOS version of Smoopa, a price check app that launched yesterday. It rewards shoppers when they share prices back from real-world stores. When they open the app, they can scan a barcode in the store. The app will pull up matching products from a database of 20 million items. The user picks one, and then they also find the store they’re in from a list of nearby places. If they share prices from the store, there’s a random chance they’ll get a reward of 50 cents or so that could go toward a gift card, rebate check or donation. The company earns affiliate revenue whenever a consumer makes a purchase through the app. “Sometimes [Chuang] admits it’s even a little better than the Android version,” Langton joked. Getting Langton’s skills up to snuff was a long process. He originally started out with watching computer science course videos from MIT and Stanford, but then he switched to watching YouTube tutorials from teenagers, like this one about how to use the camera integration in the iPhone. “These kids are coding like mad scientists,” he said. “I found their videos to be some of the most user-friendly ones.” He added, “I eat, drink and sleep iOS development. This is the kind of thing where either go or you don’t. You don’t go halfway.” Here are the places he used most intensely during his year-long odyssey:
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| Posted: 20 Apr 2012 04:20 PM PDT  During my daily combing of tech news feeds/breaks to learn more about the wide world of drugs, I stumbled upon this interesting little service called Leafly. Essentially, you hop on over to Leafly.com to do one of two things: find local dispensaries or explore various strains of the Mary Jane. But the set-up is quite nice, and with Marijuana legalization becoming a matter of when and not if, it could become a pretty huge part of the medicinal marijuana industry. The industry rivaled that of Viagra revenue in 2011 at around $1.7 billion, and is expected to reach $8.9 billion in 2016, according to a March 2011 See Change Strategy Report. So, what could essentially become the Yelp of gooey greenery is exciting to come across. The strain explorer lets you choose between various medical uses (think depression, insomnia, lack of appetite, and PMS), as well as options for desired effects (such as aroused, hungry, sleepy, tingly, and uplifted). Strains are then neatly displayed like tiles on the Periodic Table, color-coded to identify Indica, Sativa, or a hybrid. Once you choose a strain, you can view reviews, check out the details on that strain, view images, and check locations near you where you may procure your desired strain of pot. The dispensary locator is equally straight-forward. You enter your zip, or city and state, and the site generates a map with little tags for different locations. If you click through, you’ll be taken to a page about that specific dispensary, which includes a menu, reviews, and photos. Leafly has apps on the App Store and in Google Play, and there’s even an iOS app meant for dispensary use that displays up-to-date data on your club’s menu, ratings, reviews and pricing info.
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| PicPlz Founder Dalton Caldwell: All This Gossip About The Instagram Sale Is ‘A Waste Of Time’ Posted: 20 Apr 2012 04:15 PM PDT  Apparently lots of people are still talking about Instagram’s sale to Facebook (last week seems like ages ago to those of us in the attention-deficit-disordered world of blogging, but I guess a $1 billion pricetag will tend to keep tongues wagging for a while.) The latest Instagram/Facebook detail the chattering classes are seizing on? Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz’s position in the deal. Basically, Andreessen Horowitz pitched seed funding into Instagram in its earliest days but ultimately opted to place more of its money and support behind PicPlz, a competing mobile photo sharing app. Today the New York Times published an article about the situation — the not-so-delicately titled “How Andreessen Horowitz Bunted on an Instagram Investment” — that tells the story in all its schadenfreude-inducing glory. Well at least one person has had enough of the snark: PicPlz co-founder Dalton Caldwell. In a comment today on the Hacker News thread about the aforementioned New York Times piece, he defended PicPlz (which was eventually pivoted into being a part of into Mixed Media Labs, a broader smartphone app development company that has since spawned mobile platform App.net) and encouraged other entrepreneurs to ignore the score-keeping perpetuated by the media and tech industry gossip. His whole comment is kind of awesome, so we’re reposting it in its entirety here:
Marc Andreessen also weighed in on the thread, writing:
In all it serves as an important reminder that for all the fun that we have buzzing about the tech industry on blogs and Twitter, the people who are hard at work building things are the real reason we’re all here in the space at all. It’s always going to be easier to pick things apart than to put them together — but in the end, those who stay focused on being productive and positive usually wind up better off than the others, in one way or another.
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| Facebook Updates Android App: 1.9 Adds Photos, Message Sharing From Home Screen Posted: 20 Apr 2012 04:13 PM PDT  Facebook has released an update to its Android app today that should give users of the social network on Android devices a more integrated and instant experience — and takes Facebook another step closer to making its mobile app experience more like the one people have when using the social network on the web. Specifically, the new version lets users share photos and messages direct from the home screen of their devices, and it includes several features that had been in the standalone Messenger app. Facebook for Android 1.9, according to a blog post from Facebook software engineer Frank Qixing Du, also integrates several features that had been in Facebook’s separate Messenger app. These include the ability to see when your friends are online or on their mobile devices; the ability to add people to a group conversation; and a more intelligent contact list, sorting it by the people you interact with most. After updating the app, camera shortcuts and messaging shortcuts will also appear in your Android app tray, as shortcuts separate from the Facebook app itself: As before, you will also be able to upload photos, track what your friends are uploading and writing, and look up the phone numbers of your contacts. So far, the reviews in the Google Play app store have been mixed. On the minus side, several are pointing out that there is now some confusion between Facebook’s Camera and Messenger apps, and those that users would have already had — the native Android apps. Also these new additions take up extra space for now. On the plus side, there’s strong praise for the new design and better Messenger integration. Check out the reviews and the app itself in Google Play.
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| Live From The First Ever MamaBear Family Conference Posted: 20 Apr 2012 03:53 PM PDT  Because I’m so clearly ready to settle down and have a family, I am at the first ever 500Startups MamaBear Family conference in Mountain View today, watching a group of talks from family-oriented startups and people who have experience with family-oriented startups — like Wittlebee‘s Sean Percival and mama-entrepreneur Randi Zuckerberg. Yesterday I was totally ready to remove my uterus, but today my biological clock is all “Ring the alarm!” now that I know that the mom space = major moola (that sounds really gross actually, sorry). If you too are itching to go beyond the social photo sharing black hole and build something useful for families and chillens, watch the Livestream above for tips and tricks. Full schedule here (the livestream will revert to the full conference once today’s talks are over).
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| What Would You Do For A TCTV Interview? Digital Ocean Employee Does 100 Pushups [TCTV] Posted: 20 Apr 2012 03:28 PM PDT Yesterday at New York Tech Day we met with quite a few great companies including Digital Ocean. These guys are pretty established in the cloud space. They offer OS agnostic cloud servers and are giving away some service space for free to NYTD participants and their minimum package is $5 a month. Pretty basic stuff. But what they wouldn’t do for a TC mention! One of their employees, Mitch, explained that he was the in-office push-up master so we asked him to do 100 push-ups while we interviewed someone else from the team. Two minutes later and Mitch was done, the pitch was complete, and we all realized that we should all be doing pushups instead of startups if we want to look as beefy as Mitch. Thanks, incidentally, Mitch, for being such a good sport.
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| Tiggzi’s Drag-And-Drop Mobile App Builder Goes Beyond Templates Posted: 20 Apr 2012 03:10 PM PDT  There are plenty of services out there that will let you build simple mobile apps without the need to know how to program. The problem with most of these is that you quickly reach their limits once you want to build more complex apps. Tiggzi, a new cloud-based service by software engineering company Exadel, wants to provide a bridge between the world of drag-and-drop app builders and more complex tools. With Tiggzi, you could build a basic app without any programming knowledge, but the service is really meant for more advanced users who can use it to design complex apps that can hook into virtually any REST API on the net. Tiggzi lets you build apps for the mobile web, as well as native iOS and Android apps. The company plans to launch support for native Windows Phone and Blackberry apps soon. For a fee, Tiggzi will also submit your apps to the major app stores for you and host your web apps. The first thing you will notice once you start using Tiggzi is that it offers some support for novice users, but that the team really built the service for a more professional audience. Tiggzi, for the most part, only offers blank templates (beside one template specifically designed for musicians). As it gives you a lot of freedom, it also allows you to make mistakes. In return, though, you get a far more powerful tool and the ability to combine the user interface editor with REST APIs. The company is mostly aiming this service at professional developers and IT departments. For beginners, though, Tiggzi also offers a number of step-by-step tutorials as well. The “secret sauce” here, Tiggzi told us earlier this week, is that users can save these API connections as plugins and re-use them and share them with the service’s user community. Tiggzi also plans to roll out a library of pre-packaged API plugins soon. The company also hopes that third-party services will create plugins for the service as well. This combination of an app builder with support for third-party resources, the company hopes, will allow it to stand out from its competition. The service comes in a free version, which is limited to one project with up to three screens. The paid versions start at $15/month, which lets you work on three projects with 10 screens simultaneously and which also includes support for multi-user collaboration. The service’s high-end plan, at $50/month has no limitations and includes unlimited web app hosting (that’s a $10/month extra with the other plans).
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| Khan Academy Partners Up With 23andMe To Make Learning About Genetics Fun Posted: 20 Apr 2012 02:38 PM PDT  It’s 4/20, and you know exactly what that means: It’s National DNA Day! (What, were you expecting something else?) Yep — this is the official day to commemorate the 1953 publishing of the first scientific paper on the double-helix structure of DNA, which was famously co-authored by James Watson and Francis Crick (with the sometimes overlooked contributions of others.) Anyway, to celebrate, educational non-profit powerhouse Khan Academy has announced a partnership with personal genetics testing company 23andMe to “promote the importance of genetics education.” Specifically, this means that Khan Academy’s website now has educational videos produced by 23AndMe on topics such as Genetics 101. It seems like a match made in heaven of sorts, since both Khan Academy and 23andMe are services that have become favorites in similar kinds of geek circles in recent years. I’m personally a big fan of both — Khan Academy videos have helped me brush up on algebra and calculus, and I’ve basically bought 23andMe kits for my whole family (and have been known to gush about the service to anyone who will listen.) Now when people ask me what’s so cool about genetic testing, I can send them a link to a Khan Academy video! Nice. For your viewing pleasure, embedded below is the first of Khan Academy and 23andMe’s four-part video series on Genetics 101. It starts out with the revelation that your body is made up of 50 trillion cells — a far out fact that will be sure to fascinate all the DNA Day revelers out there.
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| Facebook’s $1 Billion Instagram Deal Didn’t Affect Path’s Valuation In Recent Raise Posted: 20 Apr 2012 02:36 PM PDT  Why? Because the term sheets were signed weeks ago. The deal was only announced this week. (Yes, sorry, there isn’t a more interesting reason.) However, Scott Raney, a partner at Redpoint Ventures, the firm that led the deal, suspects the valuation would have almost certainly gone up in this TCTV interview. (He didn’t comment on the previously reported $250 million valuation number.) To be fair, I’ve heard arguments both ways. One the one hand, the $1 billion price that Facebook paid for Instagram might set a benchmark price for other mobile social networking apps. It might compel a competing consumer Internet company (ideally with more than $1 billion at its disposal) to go in with a splashy mobile acquisition too. On the other hand, Facebook’s deal may take it out of the market as a prospective buyer, leaving fewer players to bid up the prices on remaining properties. This is all totally ungrounded speculation though. We’ll see what happens when or if Path ever comes back to the funding table again! Raney also talks a little bit about how the firm managed to get into the deal. A longstanding relationship with Path chief executive Dave Morin really helped, especially after Morin saw how the firm handled the sale of SimpleGeo, a location services company that was acquired by Urban Airship. Unfortunately, he doesn’t dive into the nitty-gritty details of how the deal went down, except to say that it was very competitive. While Raney doesn’t confirm or share the valuation, he doesn’t feel that Path is too richly valued. Just to compare (even though I know that valuing companies on a per-user basis is extremely flawed, especially in a high-growth space), Instagram had a little over 30 million users at the time of its sale. The $1 billion price tag suggests that Facebook paid approximately $33 per user. Path, in contrast, has about 3 million users. If the reported (though not confirmed) $250 million post-money valuation is true, that puts Path at a very rich $80 per user. Also keep in mind that both companies are essentially pre-revenue, although Path sells some filters. Raney says Path has a very strong team and that Morin is clearly in it for the long haul.
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| Equally Creepy And Creative, Cheek’d Is Online Dating In Reverse Posted: 20 Apr 2012 02:11 PM PDT  I’ve covered a few online dating services in my day, but this one has got to be the most creative. It’s called Cheek’d, and I’d categorize it as a place where business cards meets picking up prospective boyfriends/girlfriends/one-night stands. Here’s how it works: you go over to the Cheek’d website, at which point you take a couple minutes to fill out a profile. The fields of personal representation are actually a bit more novel than most dating sites, asking things like where you’re most likely to be found, the most played song on your iPod, and your favorite board game. Upload a pic, and the fun really begins. You then must order a deck of cards, which say things like “act natural, we can get awkward later”, “don’t overthink this”, and “emotionally available.” There are literally hundreds of different sayings, and there’s even a Wall Street deck with lines like “add me to your portfolio” and “all my bank accounts are Swiss.” The cards also have a short ID code on them, with a URL for the Cheek’d website. When a suitor receives the card, the idea is that they’re so filled with curiosity that they enter the code on Cheek’d and are taken to your profile page. Cheek’d calls it online dating in reverse. See, Cheek’d wants to take out the online part of online dating. It forces real-life interaction, even if that interaction seems a bit awkward to me. You get the first month free, and can also get a free deck of five cards (shipping and handling not included.) Past that, you pay $9.95 for a monthly subscription (which basically means you pay $10/month to keep your profile live). Cards you still have to pay for, and decks come in various sizes with corresponding pricing. I grilled the founders yesterday at the NY Tech Day because, upon first impression, this sounds like one of the creepiest things ever. Why would I hand someone a card that says “hi,” (yes there are cards that simply say “hi”) instead of just saying hi myself? You know, with my voice? But they threw out some instances where I could possibly, maybe, potentially see the idea materialize into something helpful. For example, let’s say you’re out at a crowded bar, and a girl who seems relatively attractive catches your eye. But there’s one problem: she’s surrounded by five of her closest girlfriends, and no man (or woman) has come anywhere close to scoring with any of them all evening. It’s girls’ night. But you, being the clever, “Cheeky” man (or woman) that you are, decide to send over a drink to the hottie along with one of your Cheek’d cards. Maybe the one that says, “I couldn’t find a napkin.” By the time she gets the card and the waiter tries to point you out to her, you’re walking out the door, all mysterious-like. I’m not saying it will work, but I won’t say with certainty that it won’t work either. (Note: Cheek’d is offering our readers a 50 percent discount on cards if they use the promo code “TECH”.) Click to view slideshow.
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| Event Marketing: The Key To F-Commerce? Posted: 20 Apr 2012 01:15 PM PDT  Editor’s note: Patricia Nakache is a General Partner at Trinity Ventures where she invests in early stage social commerce and entertainment companies. Trinity Ventures is an investor in the following companies mentioned in this article: BeachMint, Gigi Hill, Kixeye, Primalistas, Ruby Ribbon, ShopIgniter, and Zulily. You can read more about Patricia at the Trinity Ventures website or follow her on Twitter @pnakache. Speak to people who think Facebook will be a screaming buy at its likely IPO valuation of $100b+ and they will say with confidence, “Facebook is just getting started.” What they mean is that Facebook is just starting to find ways to monetize its 845 million users; the social network started with the lowest hanging fruit, which was advertising, then moved on to taking a cut of in-app virtual goods purchases, and now presumably has a long laundry list of other ways to enmesh its users and grow its top line. High on that list is a controversial proposition: commerce on Facebook, otherwise known as F-commerce. Though an initial rush of branded retailers set up storefronts on Facebook pages, several of them, including GameStop, JC Penney, Nordstrom, and The Gap, decided in February to shut them down. It turns out that simply replicating a web storefront on Facebook isn’t compelling for consumers, particularly when the brand’s fully-functioning and pretty convenient web site is only one click away. Moreover, brands were leery of driving commerce traffic to Facebook rather than to their own sites where they could better control the experience and manage consumers through a purchase conversion funnel. So what kind of shopping experience works on Facebook? The answer, in a nutshell: event marketing. In the offline world, events have long been an effective marketing tactic for generating excitement among customers, driving foot traffic into stores, and selling product. Of course, the most common events in retailing are sales events, some of which have become so widely recognized that they are brands in their own right. Think Nordstrom's Half Yearly Sales. Other flavors of events in bricks and mortar commerce include celebrity events, such as author speaker series at bookstores, or trunk shows in department stores to preview the latest offerings from high-end designers. These different types of events all accomplish the same goal: get people in the store and get them excited to buy stuff. One sector that has fully tapped into the power of event marketing is the party selling industry. Companies like Pampered Chef, Stella & Dot, Gigi Hill or Ruby Ribbon understand the irresistible draw of a party event thrown by a friend paired with an opportunity to buy great product. The direct sales industry is sizeable, with $30b in sales in the US driven by 15 million sales people, and is attracting an increasing amount of venture investment as party sales become recognized as "social selling" that can be turbocharged with technology. Over the last few years, event marketing has also transformed ecommerce. Private sales sites such as Zulily and "daily deal" sites such as Groupon create excitement around daily sales events with limited inventory and for limited time periods. Moda Operandi and Primalistas are bringing trunk shows online with pre-order "events" for high-end fashion. Given the proven effectiveness of event marketing, it stands to reason that events could provide the linchpin for commerce on Facebook. A healthy percentage of the social network's 845 million users are milling around on the site at any given time browsing for interesting content or entertainment. What better venue to organize an event? Social commerce leader BeachMint pioneered event marketing on Facebook with its live 2011 CyberMonday sales event. Hosted by 2 bloggers, the 90 minute video event featured pre-taped footage of BeachMint's celebrity influencers, live call-ins from those celebrities, and lots of great deals on limited quantities of products from across BeachMint's 4 brands, JewelMint, StyleMint, BeautyMint, and ShoeMint. The results of the event were compelling with over 50,000 visits and all items promoted selling out. BeachMint is now planning a series of live events on Facebook, including one today with StyleMint. Social gaming companies are also savvy to the power of event marketing on Facebook. Kixeye, which develops strategy games on Facebook, periodically hosts tournaments and other special events across its three titles, Backyard Monsters, Battle Pirates, and War Commanders. Battle Pirates, for example, has featured a series of "Base Invader" events that rally players to work together to defeat The Draconians, an evil nemesis. During these events, Kixeye sees its visitor and revenue metrics spike as players flock to the event. A few established retailers are getting into the act with innovative event-based campaigns of their own. Home Depot has used a tactic called "like-gating" to create a game-like atmosphere and generate excitement around sales events. For their Spring Black Friday sale last year, Home Depot posted on Facebook that if the post received 250 'Likes', the retailer would unveil the next item in its sale. Within 8 minutes, the post had over 1000 'Likes' and, within 2 minutes of the sale item being unveiled and made available for purchase, it was sold out. The results of the 3-hour event: Home Depot added 61,000 fans (a 28 percent increase) and sold out of all four sale items. Instead of creating its own sales events, Target capitalizes on the meaningful events in its customers' lives to drive commerce. The retailer launched a "Give With Friends" app on Facebook powered by social commerce platform provider ShopIgniter that facilitates gift-giving for events such as birthdays and anniversaries Friends, colleagues and family, in other words the people in your Facebook social graph, can chip in together on a gift card and personalize the card and message to the occasion. The recipients can redeem the gift cards online or in store through their mobile phones. In the bricks and mortar world, retailers have long understood that different venues call for different retail formats – think of the differences between a flagship Starbucks in a downtown location relative to a Starbucks tucked inside a Safeway supermarket. The same principle holds true in ecommerce. Retailers will succeed in driving ecommerce on Facebook but they will need to adapt their approach to the venue. My bet is their formula for success will involve event marketing.
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