Media : Innovation + Job News

Two years after selling to the Dachis Group, Gunter Pfau has reacquired Stuzo, the company he founded in 2005 as a Temple senior. Considered one of Facebook's first Preferred Marketing Developers, Stuzo is countering industry trends: While competitors have been acquired by Google, Adobe, Salesforce and Oracle, Stuzo is going independent.
 
Located in Chinatown, the company creates specialized customer engagement solutions and has worked for a slew of corporate brands, including Proctor and Gamble, Coca-Cola, DreamWorks, Intel and Samsung. They have 40 employees (split between Philadelphia and a European office) and plan to hire for positions in customer engagement, accounting, creativity and product delivery.
 
Pfau says he was one of Facebook’s earliest adopters. Shortly after the social network launched in 2007, Stuzo pivoted from servicing student-to-student textbook sales to brand engagement strategy. 

"With the transformation and democratization of social technologies, you have companies and brands engaged in two way conversations," says Pfau. "If my trusted friends on Facebook tell me how well Swiffer picks up dog hairs off hardwood floors, it's much more impactful."

To date, the company has built over 600 custom social media campaigns that integrate social platforms including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. For example, Stuzo doubled the votes cast in the People's Choice Awards (PCA) with an API (Application Programming Interface, software that shares information with multiple websites or applications) that republished the voting activity of PCA's Facebook page to Twitter.

Shortly after iPad was released, Stuzo began focusing their energies on cross-platform mobile solutions, increasing their revenue by 70 percent in 2012. According to a 2012 report by Strategy Analytics, Machine to Machine (M2M) products--where activity is shared across consumer devices without human input -- will increase by over a third this year. Pfau believes that Stuzo's cross platform communications, enabled by APIs, is positioned to meet the demands of the M2M world.

"Mobile is now the key screen that we need to optimize for from a user experience perspective," he says. "Our core technology platform is built to be flexible so that we can integrate new [social] platforms and consumer [devices] with ease. 
 
Source: Gunter Pfau, Stuzo
Writer: Dana Henry

WordPress launched in 1998, creating a world in which even your grandma’s cookie business could maintain a web presence. On February 21, Apprenaissance -- mobile app creators located in Old City -- relaunched as Artisan. Their flagship product is Artisan Optimize, an app builder at the forefront of a WordPress-style revolution in the mobile sphere. 
 
"In the '90s, everyone had to have a website, but they weren't exactly sure why," says Bob Moul, CEO of Artisan. "To some extent we’re seeing that on apps. People are starting to go to the next level and say, 'Hey, this is actually a really cool way I can engage my customers in ways that I couldn’t do with a website.'"
 
Accessibility, however, is still an issue for app writers. Once an app goes to App Store, Apple controls it. A simple change in wording, color or image goes through the builder's IT department, and is then resubmitted to Apple. At least a week goes by before Apple releases the update. The process can often take a month or longer.
 
Artisan Optimize shifts the power dynamic with Mobile Experience Management, a platform that enables point-click style revisions for mobile apps. Artisan’s patent-pending technology allows their cloud to update Apple's system, creating an uninterrupted pathway from app author to the App Store.
 
By eliminating the need for code, Artisan allows non-developers to make changes. A marketing department using Artisan can also observe resulting traffic -- down to the specific actions of individual users -- with Optimize’s Experimental Analytics.
 
The relaunch closed its seed round of fundraising with $3 million from First Mark Capital and angel investors. They are hiring developer, sales and technical writing postions.

Moul said Artisan expected their product to be a hit with mid-level retail corporations but was surprised to find that conglomerates the size of Disney (which owns 600 mobile apps) are expressing interest. Artisan is demonstrating the new product this week at Etail West 2013, a national e-retailers trade show in Palm Springs, California.

Source: Bob Moul, Artisan
Writer: Dana Henry

Here's a 21st century riddle: Why, in an age of endless instant media, are coffee shop corkboards and telephone poles still cluttered with printed flyers?

According to HootBoard founder Satyajeet Shahade, the answer is our ever-shrinking attention spans. Everyday, a torrent of Twitter headlines, Pinterest pictures and Facebook updates stand between timely messages and their target audience. HootBoard, which operates out of the University City Science Center’s Quorum, pushes messages to the front of the line with a virtual "flyer" combining social media channels and design elements. The company completed Novotorium’s business launch program and will release the beta version of its product this week.

Back in 2011, Shahade was working on Raspee, a platform for scholarly work. In a broad attempt to reach students and professors, he spent hundreds of dollars and endless hours covering local campuses with pieces of paper. "It was painful," says Shahade. "And worst part was that we didn’t even know if anyone was looking at these flyers."

The flyer needed a 21st century makeover. HootBoard takes advantage of recent advancements in front end web design technology to integrate multiple channels -- including videos, music, maps and meetup invites -- into a fully customizable posting. HootBoard also provides private bulletin boards for communities that share a physical address, school or workplace.  

"Everyone has a need to announce or promote something," says Shahade.

Source: Satyajeet Shahade, HootBoard
Writer: Dana Henry

Curalate launched its groundbreaking visual analytics platform in 2011 and began accruing an impressive client base, including The Gap, Michael Kors, Campbell's and Saks Fifth Avenue. Now the University City-based company has broadened its focus to include customer engagement strategy.
 
The investment community has gotten behind the decision. Curalate’s seed round funders—New Enterprise Associates, MentorTech Ventures and First Round Capital—have reinvested $3 million in their Series A. The company has grown from four to 14 employees in the past year and now seeks web developers.
 
Visual analytics, the foundation of Curalate’s subscription plan, enables large companies to track images on platforms like Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr. "Increasingly, consumers are talking about brands using pictures instead of words," explains founder and CEO Apu Gupta. "We make it possible for brands to understand who’s talking about them, what they’re talking about and what’s important to customers."
 
Graphics, more than text, reveal specifics about consumer preferences. Someone might "like" The Gap on Facebook, but posting a blue sweater explains why. With visual information, businesses can better determine what to include on their homepage, email blasts and billboards, as well as which products to use for social media promotions.
 
"In a social context, [brands] have never known, specifically, which products were driving their engagement," says Gupta. "What brands can do with that is pretty powerful."
 
In September 2012, Curalate launched their "dashboard," allowing clients to manage customer social engagement on visual platforms and administer promotional campaigns. They’ve partnered with several established public relations agencies and helped The Gap effectively promote across nine countries.
 
Source: Apu Gupta, Curalate
Writer: Dana Henry

 Parker Whitney and Jake O’Brien--who cofounded Flyclops with Dave Martorana--started developing Domino ! as a two week side project, but it rapidly grew into a fulltime gig. The game launched in May 2012 in a highly competitive market and grew its user-base by 500 percent between June and December. The Indy Hall-based company is hiring an Android developer. 

According to O’Brien, the vast majority of mobile games fail, and many are built around complex, character-driven narratives that have a limited market. Classic games, on the other hand, are often overlooked. Whitney and O’Brien were working on an imaginative game when Whitney discovered one of his favorite childhood pastimes was missing from the app store.

"It was like a giant hole," says O’Brien. "The more we started working on [Domino!] the more we were sold on the idea of it."

The success of Domino! is partially due to timing. As devices spread to new demographics and geographies, the mobile market increasingly includes people who grew up with a game board instead of a PlayStation. Domino! is downloaded throughout the United States, Latin America, the Middle East and Europe. Whitney, who handles customer service, says he’s continually impressed by the enthusiasm. One customer routinely plays with her husband while he’s stationed in the Middle East. In the Midwest, a family of eight gathers in the living room after Sunday dinners to play on their devices. A devotee named "Coach" sends Flyclops bi-weekly emails.

With 97,000 users playing Domino! every day, Flyclops can return to action-based game development. Additionally, they plan to create new variants for Domino! and build a stronger market in Latin American countries. 

Source: Parker Whitney and Jake O'Brien, Flyclops 
Writer: Dana Henry

Think about your favorite bar or coffee shop. Sure, you enjoy the grub, the décor, even the snarky comments from the hipster behind the counter, but none of this would impress without decent music.

Sevenpop—an Israeli startup with U.S. headquarters in Center City—mines our timeless urge for good tunes, integrating mobile requests into a business' preexisting music player. According to cofounder John Vairo, when patrons influence the sound system, they’re more likely to stay—and spend—giving the business a competitive edge.

Recently, the company closed its first round of financing with a $400,000 investment from JanVest. They’re currently releasing the United States version of Sevenpop across the country.

Cofounders Nuke Goldstein and Eyal Bernstein created the product at a bar in Tel Aviv that later became their alpha test site. When the team asked for a computer to run the system, the bar explained their only apparatus was the music player. "We concluded [Sevenpop] should focus on the music and the product was shaped," says Vairo.

The resulting “Social Jukebox” provides a lean solution for three popular multimedia systems. (The company says they will adapt their software for other systems.) They've landed in bars, cafes and DJ booths, and expect to add grocery chains, gyms and sports arenas to their client base. The company sells added social features, but Vairo says the best way to approach a market segment of this size is to keep the basic software free. “Once [the client] is up and running, the system is theirs for as long as they want it," he says.

Source: John Vairo, Sevenpop
Writer: Dana Henry

Mobile technology presents a marketing conundrum: Personal devices gather valuable specifics about the viewer, including location and activity, but render web advertisements distorted and invasive. Malvern-based TapCLIQ is changing all that.

After 14 years directing software development and strategic partnership at SAP AG,  founder and CEO Chirantan Bhatt created a "customer engagement platform" that responds to user-generated feedback in real time. The company recently graduated from Project Liberty Digital Incubator and is hiring data scientists, software engineers, and marketing and sales directors.

Bhatt says he’s always the first to try a new gadget, but finds "an abundance of annoying and unrelated advertisement constantly appearing on mobile applications." When his four-year-old daughter came to him with a file downloading over the game app she was playing Bhatt realized the problem was urgent. 

"Advertising completely interrupts the user," says Bhatt. "[Mobile devices] can’t have ads like a web page."

According to a 2012 study by Azullo, 80 percent of smartphone users have already forgotten all the mobile ads they’ve seen in the past 6 months. Yet internationally, spending on mobile advertisement is predicted to reach $28 billion by 2016 (based on reports from International Data Corp.).

Big ad companies—including Google, Real Media 24/7 and Flurry—are still stuck on display ads, explains Bhatt. TapCLIQ, conversely, doesn't asks users to leave their app and offers related purchases and commenting options for their current activity. Now in private beta, the company has created 1 million interactions with over 20,000 mobile users.

"We have an intense focus on user experience," says Bhatt. "That means better ads, coming at the right time, with more relevance to the customer."

Source: Chirantan Bhatt, TapCLIQ
Writer: Dana Henry

In the age of Wiki-pages, Kickstarter and crowd-funded banking, something as routine as dinner can be crowdsourced. At least that’s what the cofounders of Zokos—Christopher Kieran, Bradley Baer, Andrew Hapke and Roger Vandervort—are betting on. Their site helps hosts plan and fund dinner parties by engaging guests in their extended social networks. The team recently moved their headquarters from New York City to Benjamin’s Desk in Center City, Philadelphia, and plans to hire web-developers (particularly Ruby developers) early next year.

Unlike potluck invitations, which are well served by Facebook or Evite, Zokos assumes some people enjoy planning events while others wouldn’t mind contributing a little money in order to partake. The cofounders were pursuing master’s degrees at Yale when they met at the popular Veggie Dinner Club and discovered the appeal of peer-networked meals.

“I was able to have an unbelievable dinner with 10 to 20 interesting people,” explains Baer. “Often these dinners would turn into longer events where I'd make several new friends and connections.”

The Zokos dining community is modeled on the vibrant social exchanges available on a university campus. In addition to the funding feature, Zokos allows hosts to reach out to friends-of-friends, collaborate on the menu with their guests, and join a larger network of foodies and event enthusiasts. Interest groups and book clubs use the platform to plan dinners and fundraising occations. So far, over 4,000 parties have been successfully created, and roughly five percent of guests return to the site as hosts. The company also launched Zokits, a source for complete event planning roadmaps developed by industry experts. As more and more twenty-and-thirty-somethings stray from traditional family life, Zokos could be the antidote to eating alone.

“While good food, saving time and saving money is important, it's all about finding anything that brings people together,” says Baer.

Source: Brad Baer, Zokos
Writer: Dana Henry

Last year Eyal (Al) Azoulay, co-founder and CEO of Rumble and self-proclaimed news junky, bought his first tablet. He expected to view his favorite titles on the go, but there was not a single app for his choices. He was not alone in his disappointment—according to a study by Kontera, mobile accounts for 27 percent of all content consumed on the web (up 430 percent from last year) and news outlets, particularly traditional print media, continue losing readership as they struggle to adapt.
 
Rumble, based in Philadelphia and Tel-Aviv, and accelerated at the Project Liberty Digital Incubator at the Inquirer/Daily News offices, is a catchall content distribution system for mobile devices poised to conquer this digital divide. They’ve secured $1 million in investments and are hiring rapidly: Seven positions are currently open in sales and marketing.
 
Over the past five years, the print to web shift has resulted in billions of lost revenue for the newspaper industry. Mobile content represents an entirely different set of complex technologies and user interaction issues, and can be overwhelming to newspaper managers who are down to 70 percent of their heyday budget and workforce. "[Newspaper managers] honestly don’t even have the time to think about a strategy across mobile, let alone execute one," says Azoulay.
 
The problem is even more severe for mega publishers such as Conde Nast, Gannett, Lee, Knight Rider and Mcklechy—often each title will create individual apps. "As a mega publisher, your network of titles is completely fragmented," says Azoule. "Rumble offers the mega publisher one platform to unify all titles over all mobile devices and leverages the entire network as one."
 
Newspapers, Azoulay points out, are experts in content creation, not software. With the fourth version of the iPad rolling out after just two years, it’s hard to justify the major upfront investment required for the print-mobile switch. Rumble offers a backend system that publishes across all mobile devices and hosts a complete set of content-related features, including mobile-specific layout, performance tracking, revenue modeling and social media tools. After newspapers, Azoulay and his cofounders—Itai Cohen and Uyen Tieu, who’s served in executive sales and marketing positions for Microsoft and Viacom—expect to add trade publications and television news clients with similar needs.
 
There are over 1,600 newspapers and 2,000 university publications. Currently, news media gains only $1 from mobile platforms for every $9 they’ve lost, but Azoulay believes that’s all about to change. Mobile usage reveals not just consumers’ demographics and preferences, but where they are and what they’re doing. Of the $30 billion dollars spent annually on advertising, seventy percent come from local ads and no one is more capable of capitalizing on that revenue than newspapers.
 
"If you couple that with the highly sophisticated targeting available through mobile, you get one of the best combinations you can leverage," he says. "There’s no question that we will learn how to monetize on mobile devices very well."

Source: Eyal Azoulay, Rumble
Writer: Dana Henry

ElectNext has grown membership by 1,000 percent for four straight months. Having partnered with 40 media sites and secured more than $750,000 in investments, the civic-engagement startup is moving fast to keep up with upcoming federal elections and their own ambitions. They are hiring data scientists and engineers.
 
According to Dave Zega, National Director and CMO of ElectNext, political campaigns operate like a corporate marketing agenda: They purchase personal information, available via internet, and deliver highly tailored messages to individual voters. So how do you know who you’re really voting for? ElectNext turns the tables by collecting data on the politicians from multiple sources, including interest group ratings, campaign finance records, and politicians’ websites, to reveal candidates’ true stance on various issues. Members sign in, answer a series of issue-related questions, and receive their best voting ‘match.’
 
“What do we know about our politicians?” Zega asks. “Most of us can’t even name them and that is a huge data divide. That is why we are building the big dataset on your politicians and putting it together with a recommendation engine, so that anyone, anywhere can use our data and technology to engage on their most important political issues, every day.”
 
As elections approach, voters seek the company’s partner news sites, which include national and local outlets, driving traffic to ElectNext. Upon discovering their match, new members can publicize their results on social media platforms, sparking political conversations and civic activity while creating more potential members.
 
Collectively, the answers members provide illustrate the policy positions of the voting public. ElectNext generates profit by leasing access to this aggregated data to broadcast media, search engines, and educational nonprofits, without revealing anyone’s personal information.
 
So far, the “big dataset” accounts for federal elections, but ElectNext expects to build state and local elections into their platform in 2013.
 
“Some of our most important issues happen on a daily basis in our communities,” Zega says. “Think community centers and public parks, property taxes and the neighborhood school. So that is where we most want to help you engage.”
 
Co-founder Keya Dannenbaum, worked on several campaigns before entering Wharton’s demanding MBA program and losing all civic awareness—it’s difficult to balance political research with real life. ElectNext aims to better connect estranged voters with authentic politics. They’re continued success could help make super-packs and fact-checking frenzies a thing of the past.  

Source: Dave Zega, ElectNext
Writer: Dana Henry