Tuesday, December 04, 2012

JustBecause Is One Hot App This Holiday Season

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http://www.justbecauseapp.com/

If you’re an entrepreneur, when launching a startup, one of the early challenges involved are getting the word out about your product or service, letting your target consumer know of the benefits that come with it and getting people to try it out – all in the name of converting them into lifetime customers.

On the other hand, if you’re somebody thinking of sending a gift to someone special, one hurdle you need to clear is figuring out what this trendy friend of yours would be thrilled to receive. And this means ensuring the gift isn’t something he/she already received from someone else, which, needless to say, can sometimes be a tough one to pull off.

JustBecause, a newly launched iPhone app, bridges the gap between the two. With JustBecause, users can now offer their friends gifts from startups worth $10 to $100 for just $1. Yes, you read right – for just $1!

Why? Well, startups are more than glad to dole out freebies here and there (in the hopes of turning a first-time user into a permanent consumer, what else?), and simply charge the expense against their customer acquisition funds. And because the gifts are from startups, as a consumer, you can rest assured that these products or services are stuff most people haven’t tried yet.

According to Matt Hartman, co-founder of JustBecause, the app was spun from his first startup, ReferBoost, an apartment referral social lead generator. To encourage apartment residents to write reviews and post about the buildings they lived on, they gave out gift cards, usually from Starbucks.

Meanwhile, Uber, one of the startups currently in JustBecause’s lineup, was trying to acquire customers in Chicago. This, then, prompted Hartman to talk to Uber. Uber thought the idea was interesting and provided him with some cards. The limiting factor though was the number of buildings Hartman had on his system. This, in turn, led to the idea that is now JustBecause.

JustBecause requires a Facebook login. Gift codes provided only work for first-time users, and for the gifts to be shared, the sender posts to a friend’s wall. SMS sharing is something that might come into play in the future.

Based in Chicago, JustBecause is, at the moment, working hard to expand its current startup roster. To download the app, visit their website at www.justbecauseapp.com.

[Via - Uncommon Business Ideas]

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Sunday, July 01, 2012

Cool Startups - Geologi.com

BizHacks - How To Use Bitrix24.Com As A Free CRM, Intranet And Task Manager.



https://geoloqi.com/

During her keynote speech at the 2012 South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, Texas, Geoloqi CEO Amber Case proclaimed that the next generation of location-based apps and analytics would transform the mobile phone into a "remote control for reality," with people as the metaphorical buttons. The problem with the current state of things, she lamented, is that you "miss a lot of life looking at the screen all the time."

With Geoloqi, you can make apps to fix that--apps that work in the background, alerting you only if something needs to be done. The Portland, Ore.-based company provides a turnkey platform that makes it easy to add next-generation geolocation functionality to apps and mobile devices. The company demonstrates its capabilities to potential clients and partners with its own app, which has features like "Don't Eat There" (it pings you if you're near a restaurant that has gotten too many bad reviews). Case and co-founder Aaron Parecki programmed a set of location-based features that automatically turn lights on or off when they enter or leave their houses.

Ambient-location technology, as Case describes geolocation, "has incredible implications for the end-user." Other developers, she hopes, will take the technology and run with it, since her main focus is on big organizations. Already, Geoloqi has partnerships with app-development platforms like Appcelerator and a project with personnel recovery firm TATE to help track the global staffs of clients such as the Peace Corps, pushing emergency alerts upon entry to dangerous areas.

Case and Parecki started Geoloqi in 2010; they launched the product this past February, offering a software development kit that addresses pain points that have plagued the geolocation market from the beginning, such as accuracy, battery drain, carrier dependence and privacy.

In fact, Geoloqi has been six years in the making; development began two years ago when Case and Parecki still had day jobs and bootstrapped the business with winnings from weekend hackathons. "I've seen a lot of geocompanies die, so we were waiting until the exact right moment," she says--referring to when investors started calling. The company closed on $350,000 in funding in July 2011.

That cash is proof of what Victor Hwang, managing director of Silicon Valley's T2 Venture Capital and author of The Rainforest: The Secret to Building the Next Silicon Valley, says is the "significant" amount of interest, money and activity still flowing into apps. "It's true that geolocation has been going on for a while, but we're still waiting for a big ‘super-app' company that answers how to really make revenue off that," he says.

Things are promising for Geoloqi. "This is the future of apps," Case says. The numbers back that up: Pyramid Research puts the global location-based services market at $10 billion by 2015; ABI Research estimates location analytics will be a $9 billion market by 2016; and Ericsson anticipates upward of 50 billion connected devices on the market by 2020.

[Via - Entrepreneur.Com]

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