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Wednesday, February 5, 2014
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Easy Social Shop

Easy Social Shop, which lets online sellers integrate existing shops with their Facebook pages, announced today that it has raised $1.1 million from lool Ventures. This brings the Tel Aviv-based startup’s total funding so far to about $2 million. Easy Social Shop will use the capital to build new products and increase customer adoption.


The social commerce platform is geared toward small-to-medium businesses and supports many leading e-commerce platforms, including Etsy, Amazon, and eBay. Instead of having to relist all their items on Facebook, vendors can integrate their stores with Easy Social Shop and then update listings and complete transactions through their original e-commerce platform. Easy Social Shop’s dashboard also lets vendors coordinate marketing efforts on social media like Pinterest, Twitter, or Instagram, access analytics, and translate their listings into seven languages.


Founded in 2011, Easy Social Shop’s clients have opened over 80,000 Facebook stores, with over 8 million items hosted so far. The company says it drives an average of 10% to 18% sales growth across its user base and will add more marketing and monetization tools in the near future.

Easy Social Shop sample store

The startup’s competitors include businesses like Ecwid and Gigya, which also help e-commerce vendors integrate with Facebook and other social networks.


Founder and CEO Nissim Lehyani says that Easy Social Shop wants to differentiate by dramatically simplifying social media marketing for its users.


“In just three clicks, we automatically take a merchant’s store from eBay, Amazon, Etsy, Shopify, Magento, Wix, and others, and provide a Facebook store optimized for easy engagement, improved sales, and organic sharing,” he tells me.


The platform’s analytics show merchants which social media platforms drive the most traffic to their stores, what items get the most views, and how many purchases visitors from different networks actually make.


“In short, we provide answers to the questions: Who is your audience? Who are the key influencers? What products do they love? As a next step, we give you actionable insights showing you how to channel this information into more sales and more targeted marketing,” says CTO Ofir Tahor.


Easy Social Shop monetizes with a freemium model that allows vendors to open a store for free and then add advanced features with a premium subscription. It also has revenue-sharing agreements with top marketplaces.


In a statement, Avichay Nissenbaum, general partner at lool Ventures, said “We were impressed by the accelerated customer adoption of the company, and the focused data driven execution demonstrated by the team, especially when combined with a robust technological foundation, high ease of use and adoption and the scale of the platform.”





6:08 AM

Easy Social Shop , which lets online sellers integrate existing shops with their Facebook pages, announced today that it has raised $1.1 mil...

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When Citelighter first emerged in the fall of 2011, the education startup was on an ambitious mission to help students take the pain out of online research. With the enormous amount of content on the Web, students struggle to keep track of and manage bibliographical data and relevant links that are so critical to completing research papers and homework assignments.


Building out a giant learning database and browser extension, Citelighter worked to create an academic research platform that would make it easy for students to manage resources, cite online and offline content and quickly create an accurate bibliography. By searching its database of knowledge cards, students could use Citelighter to quickly find relevant materials, while teachers could encourage their classes to use its bibliography tools to prevent against plagiarism.


Today, however, with $1.5 million from a laundry list of venture firms and angel investors, Cightlighter is fueling up for a change course — a move which will take down a road that has potentially even more interesting (and ambitious) implications. Having gathered a sizable and unique data set on the habits, preferences and behaviors of students as they navigate the academic research and writing process, Cightlighter is looking to leverage this information (and build on it) with the goal of giving teachers greater insight into the work habits and cognitive footprints of their students.


While that may sound a little opaque or dubious, simply put, Citelighter wants to tackle the problem of writing proficiency in the U.S. educational system and, by giving teachers tools to help them better understand how students write, help improve writing proficiency across the board. The size and extent of the problem, say co-founders Saad Alam and Lee Joki, can be found in the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress’ survey of writing skills.


The study found that only 24 percent of high schools seniors in the U.S. can write at a proficient level and only 3 percent at an advanced level. This means that 73 percent of graduating seniors across the U.S. educational system enter the work force without the requisite skills or the ability to write proficiently.


To address this problem, Citelighter is attempting to map out the exact steps that each individual student takes throughout the writing process, using its platform to capture and visualize that data in an effort to help teachers and students learn more efficiently. The co-founders say that, while they were originally focused on a simple Web highlighting tool, after a year of watching teachers use their platform in the classroom for everything from poetry and advanced research to ESL education, they noticed a pattern.


Screen Shot 2014-02-05 at 5.50.01 AMThat is, students who used a “scaffolded” approach to writing in combination with Citelighter’s tools were found more likely to develop a deeper understanding of the concepts they learned, and were able to more effectively communicate those concepts. So, over the last year, the startup quietly began building a broader tool to accommodate its most prevalent (and interesting) use case.


While the startup is keeping a lid on the full feature list and what the platform will ultimately look like, the founders did tell us that the goal is to turn Citelighter into an “all-purpose writing platform.” The new Citelighter, which will inevitably see the startup re-brand and totally re-focus around this new platform (and direction), aims to provide an organizational framework through which teachers can help improve their students’ critical thinking abilities and writing proficiency. Furthermore, according to the founders, multiple “PhDs in writing and education technology” as well as advocacy organizations like the National Writing Project, have begun to pilot the new platform.


Furthermore, the new platform will continue developing the idea which led to its “Cognitive Prints” — a data visualization platform and tools it initially announced in September. Broadly, the platform starts with a basic workflow and collaboration layer, which allows students to automatically cite content found online and collaborate with one another as they complete research and writing assignments.


Using a framework that is integrated with both Google Docs and Microsoft Word, Citelighter tracks each student’s behavior, capturing key information on the student’s approach to writing and their process — in other words, how they work, how long it takes them to complete assignments and how they approach citations, bibliographies and incorporate source material. Teachers can then use the platform’s tools, like its visual log of events, to get deeper visibility into students’ research, organization and writing.


Referred to as “Cognitive Prints,” these tools give each student a personalized fingerprint, which the founders want to stand as a visual representation of their “cognitive processes.” These Prints allow teachers to view a realtime, color-coded map of the student’s work habits, with sequential task analysis that takes them back through each step the student went through to complete the assignment.


Screen Shot 2014-02-05 at 5.51.25 AMCitelighter then gives teachers access to a view of their entire classroom’s “Cognitive Prints” set, enabling them to see how each of their students are performing or getting on at any particular time. In addition, teachers can view each student’s individual projects, like what content they’re using, and how they think about and organize that content, for example. in a dashboard to see how all students are performing at any one time. Finally, educators can then share assignments, tips, worksheets and the like via Citelighter’s Google Docs integration.


While the description may not set your heart a-thumpin’, the deeper and more robust the data becomes that goes into Cognitive Prints, and the more interactive and three-dimensional the visualizations become, the more interesting the implications become. The co-founders tell us, for example, that the ultimate goal for these visualization tools (and the platform itself) is to give students the ability to not only better understand and dive into how they think, but potentially benchmark their own work habits or “Cognitive Prints” against other students.


For example, a student struggling with mastering organizational skills in their writing development could compare their “Cognitive Print” to that of the student in the class who excels at organization. They could peruse through that student’s thought process, following along step by step, sequentially, as he or she completed a research or writing assignment.


Screen Shot 2014-02-05 at 5.51.36 AMWith personalization becoming a mandate (and buzzword) within education, one could see this kind of tool going a long way towards increasing the personalized nature of writing education. Those struggling could benchmark or compare with more advanced students in the class, and more advanced students could use those from students in the next grade, or their teachers, or, should Citelighter ever reach critical mass, maybe even a professional writer.


Today, there’s a lot left to be done before the startup can realize any of these lofty goals, but considering where it started, it seems as if Citelighter is headed in a much more interesting direction, and one that could potentially have a much bigger impact.


The investors contributing to Citelighter’s latest funding round today include New York Angels, Blu Venture Investors, the EdTechFund, Baltimore Angels, as well as individual investors like NEA co-founder Frank Bonsal, Jr., Diker Management’s Ed Hajim and Camden Partners’ David Warnocke. And, as a result of the round, Alessandro Piol of Vedanta Capital and AlphaPrime Ventures and Canal Group and Blu Venture Investors’ Kevin Hollins will be joining the startup’s board of directors, with Sacha Levy of New York Angels and Stephen Dukker joining as observers.





5:53 AM

When Citelighter first emerged in the fall of 2011, the education startup was on an ambitious mission to help students take the pain out of...

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The Lumo Lift is the second product from startup Lumo BodyTech, and the second to help users with their posture. The Lumo Back was the first, and it raised around $200,000 in 40 days on Kickstarter. This time, Lumo opted to do the crowdfunding themselves, and the trajectory of the latest device has been quite different: Lumo Lift is at over $900,000 raised as of this writing, just under a month into the pre-order period.


That adds up to nearly 13,000 pre-orders, and totals about $32,000 per day raised thus far. The original Lumo Back campaign managed around $5,000 per day, or roughly one-sixth as much. Interest isn’t really waning the way it has a tendency to do with these kinds of campaigns, either – between Jan. 28 and Feb. 3, there were 3,149 pre-orders in total, which was close to on par with the very first week after a couple of weeks of slower, but still strong interest, as you can see from the chart below.


“It’s going well for a couple reasons,” explained Lumo founder and CEO Monisha Perkash in an interview. “Lumo Lift really differs from other wearable tech because it’s customizable to different fashion tastes. It’s really wearable tech that’s more than just tech: It’s fashionable tech. Also [...] it focuses on bringing out the more confident, more attractive, the healthier you and that requires both staying active as well as good posture and we’re the only solution in the market that can do both.”


Interest in the campaign has produced some interesting demographic insight, too. Lumo has found that the majority of pre-order interest is from male customers, who are responsible for just over 67 percent of all orders. The U.S. is the big market for the Lift, unsurprisingly, with 86.7 percent of all orders, while 92.5 percent of sales come from the combined English-speaking countries of the U.S., U.K., Australia and Canada. White is the most popular color choice with 54 percent of purchases, while 26 percent preferred black and silver trailed both with just 20 percent.


The difference between the initial campaign and this one is staggering – Lumo Lift will almost certainly exceed $1 million in pre-orders, likely before the week is out, which is five times what the startup accomplished on Kickstarter for the Lumo Back. I asked Perkash about how the two experiences compare.


“There are pros and cons of going in either direction [Kickstarter vs. self funding],” she explained. “What we’ve found is that because your customers interact with you on your website, you end up having a closer relationship with your customers. You can engage them more without having a third party between you, and you can also develop your own brand and messaging, [...] and make it consistent with what you want to communicate.”


Perkash says Lumo is still happy with having used Kickstarter in the beginning, since it helped them reach a wider audience with a brand that people didn’t really know to begin with. Also, she says that going alone a year and a half ago when they first started out, crowdfunding was still a relatively new concept, so there wouldn’t really be an opportunity to build a big following using your own platform vs. partnering with someone like Kickstarter.


Despite massively exceeding their initial expectations, Perkash says that she doesn’t anticipate any hiccups with initial production, since they’re confident in the manufacturing system and relationships they built with the original Lumo Back. There are only three more days left to get the Lumo Lift at its discounted price of $69 before it goes back to $99, so we’ll likely have a better idea of what kind of initial shipment volumes they’ll be facing once that price change starts to affect pre-order demand.





5:38 AM

The Lumo Lift is the second product from startup Lumo BodyTech , and the second to help users with their posture. The Lumo Back was the firs...

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Asus on Tuesday announced a new Chromebox device priced at just $179, a full $150 less than the Samsung product that's currently its principal competition. Powered by either a fourth-generation Celeron 2955U chip or an Intel Core i3, the diminutive Chrome OS device offers integrated Intel HD graphics, 2 GB or 4 GB of DDR3 memory, HDMI and DisplayPort for dual display support and up to 4K playback, and 100 GB of free Google Drive space for two years.


5:09 AM

Asus on Tuesday announced a new Chromebox device priced at just $179, a full $150 less than the Samsung product that's currently its p...

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Boxer

Email management app Boxer wants to help users tame the inboxes on their mobile phones. But since launch last summer, it has only been available on iOS. To help speed the development of its app for Android devices, Boxer has acquired the team and IP behind Android app Enhanced Email.


Like Mailbox, Boxer is designed to help users triage their email quickly, with different swiping motions that unlock the ability to archive, delete, or respond to emails later. But the app is also designed to allow users to do a lot more: they can circle in other team members, assign tasks, and add items to a to-do list, directly from their email app. The team has also worked to make the app more powerful by hooking into third-party applications like Evernote, Sanebox, Salesforce, and others.


But despite all that, it’s been slow to make its way onto Android devices, which is why it’s bringing on the two-person team from Enhanced Email. That app, while priced at $9.99, is still a pretty popular email client for the Android, with more than 300,000 downloads, according to Boxer CEO and founder Andrew Eye.


The acquisition — which Eye admits was a small one, though terms were not disclosed — provides Boxer with some Android expertise, and will double its Android development team. With that in mind, the company hopes to get its own Android app out a lot sooner, and is asking potential users to signup for early access at getboxer.com/android.


While giving Boxer a much-needed Android boost, the downside is that Enhanced Email will cease to be “actively developed as a standalone product,” Enhanced Email founder Daniel Ochoa has written in an email being sent out to users. Instead, it will offer a free version of Boxer Pro — when it comes out on Android — to all Enhanced Email users.


Boxer has raised $3 million in funding led by Sutter Hill Ventures, with managing director Sam Pullara on its board. The company now has 15 full-time employees, and is based in Austin, Texas.





4:09 AM

Email management app Boxer wants to help users tame the inboxes on their mobile phones. But since launch last summer , it has only been ava...

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Joachin Alumnia, the antitrust commissioner in the European Commission, has today finally given his final verdict on an antitrust investigation against Google, which has been going on since 2004: it has given the company the all-clear and will now move forward on implementing remedies. But no sooner did the decision get made public than Google’s competitors have weighed in with a response.


“This thing is a disgrace,” one told TechCrunch. He points out that the settlement won’t be made public before the deal is sealed. “So much for transparency.


“If Commissioner Almunia thought he got a good deal, he would get it vetted by experts and not only take Eric Schmidt’s word for it. But this deal will only be published after the deal is done. So the European Competition Commissioner should take some words of wisdom to heart that Eric Schmidt himself gave once to the world: ‘If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.’” There are some 12 companies involved in the case against Google and include large companies like Microsoft, Expedia and others.


Almunia has a different opinion. “I believe Google’s proposals are capable of addressing the concerns. so we are moving forward on commitments,” he told an audience in Brussels today.


At issue were four types of business practices that raised concerns. The first two related to specialised search services around particular verticals like travel or hotels. In essence Google was displaying its own results in a more prominent manner than competitors. The other two complaints relate to online advertising and pressures that Google may have been placing on them to use Google ads.


Almunia said that while he could have taken either the negotiation or adversarial routes, he chose the former. “The purpose of enforcement should be allowed to let consumers benefit as soon as possible,” he said, and this would not have been possible with the protracted timeframe of an adversarial approach.


The solution is based on the third proposal from Google, after the previous two were rejected for not being strong enough. “This is why the latest round of negotiations was very intense. We have focused on how other search services can compete with Google,” Almunia said today.


Almunia stressed that this is not the end of the Google story. There is first the case of implementing this decision, but then there are also now ongoing investigations into other areas. The biggest one is a look at antitrust practices around the Android operating system, which is the largest smartphone platform in the world and controlled by Google.


Included in the solutions, now, when users in Europe search for, say, a hotel in a basic Google search, there will be three services displayed as alternatives alongside Google’s own. There are also provisions for how Google will handle mobile ads: one rival link will be displayed alongside Google’s own results. “This is a significant improvement over the previous proposal where rivals were only accessible after going through another screen,” Almunia said.


Competitors are still unhappy about the solutions, however. For starters, they claim that they will still be at a disadvantage because their results will always appear on the right of Google’s and studies have always shown that people opt first for results on the left side.


There is also the issue of “pay to play.” Those who want to advertise on Google’s page should pay, but in the commitments there are two different areas. If Google is offerings its own services and needs to display competitors alongside, they will not need to pay. But in cases where Google is displaying advertising results competitors will also need to pay to appear alongside those of other results.


Pointedly, there will be no more market tests from now on as there have been in previous iterations when Google and the EC were still negotiating. “This is a bad deal for consumers and for companies,” said a competitor. “If he thought he had a good deal, he would put it to a market test. Now the only hope is that other European Commissioners, who need to approve the deal, will stop Almunia.”


More to come.

4:09 AM

Joachin Alumnia, the antitrust commissioner in the European Commission, has today finally given his final verdict on an antitrust investigat...

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Mileways, the Munich-based social app for frequent flyers, just got a little more useful. The iOS app has added integration with AirHelp, the flight compensation startup co-founded by Morten Lund, to make it easy for travellers to claim compensation should they face delay, cancelation or overbooking when flying to and from the EU.


The AirHelp partnership builds nicely on the Mileways proposition. The startup’s iOS app wants to be a one-stop-shop for flyers to help them keep track of and share flight information with their social network, and collect air miles that can be redeemed at a number of partners services, including Airbnb, Sixt, and Uber — with more partners coming soon.


Features include the ability to share travel details with friends (or switch to private mode), follow other travellers, get alerts when your flight is delayed, view weather forecasts, and find and book accommodation. In addition, there are a bunch of more generic social features, such as photo sharing and commenting on your friends’ trips.


Like the AirHelp app itself, the process of filing a compensation claim is somewhat automated. Data entry is minimal since the Mileways app already has most your flight details; you simply enter your name and booking code, and AirHelp’s “automatic flight compensation technology” kicks in.


First it will alert you when you may be entitled to compensation, and then assist you with filing the claim using its own airport, weather and airline data in order to consolidate the legal work required to make it stick. If the claim is successful, AirHelp keeps 25% of the compensation amount.


When I met Mileways co-founder Alexander Lueck at last year’s Disrupt Europe London meetup, he showed me an earlier version of the app and asked what I thought. My slight criticism was that I thought Mileways needed to provide more utility — it felt more vitamin pill, less pain killer — to incentivise users to go to the trouble of entering their travel details or syncing flight bookings. One way it’s doing that is obviously the redeemable air miles. And with today’s AirHelp integration, it’s added another reason for frequent flyers to use the app.





3:39 AM
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Mileways , the Munich-based social app for frequent flyers, just got a little more useful. The iOS app has added integration with AirHelp , ...

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