Home Tags Posts tagged with "Startup"
Tag:

Startup

Tech Update

Post-Quantum: the UK startup that wants to save the world from quantum computers

by Rajdeep
written by Rajdeep

Post-Quantum (or PQ) is the British cybersecurity startup that just won’t give up on its strange, unsettling vision of the future. Techworld recently caught up with it for the second or third time since it was founded in early 2009, still toiling away making software designed to cope with a world where quantum computers have smashed today’s encryption to smithereens.

This world doesn’t yet exist but that hasn’t stopped PQ quietly building a suite of secure communications software to cope with the serious consequences for the day it does. It can sound pretty far-fetched at first. Who wants to buy software for a world that is, in all probability, at least 10 or 20 Years hence? It turns out the company’s technology has useful applications today but CEO and explainer Andersen Cheng is very upfront about his experience with wary VCs whom he admits have often glazed over when they first hear the rarefied PQ technical pitch.

[Source:- techworld]

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Internet

Startup Looks to Connect Breached Data With Those Facing Likely Fraud

by Rajdeep
written by Rajdeep

Startup Looks to Connect Breached Data With Those Facing Likely Fraud

As the continuing parade of mass data breaches increases the opportunities for miscreants to use grabbed credentials for all manner of fraud, it is also driving defenders to seek new ways to connect the dots and stop secondary crimes sooner.

Companies like Baltimore’s Terbium Labs have professionalized crawling the Dark Web, where criminals trade or sell large quantities of stolen credit card data and most other imaginable categories of personal information.

Austin-based AllClear ID, formerly known as Debix, is among the companies that go beyond credit monitoring and report additional information to consumers. One of its services looks for breached data turned over to the FBI-affiliated National Cyber-Forensics & Training Alliance, then alerts subscribers if material about them shows up.

Starting on Monday, an Austin startup will try a third way: collecting breached data directly from the companies that were hit, then allowing banks and other potential fraud magnets to see if their customers are involved and have accounts more likely to be targeted.

The idea behind what is being dubbed the Compromised Identity Exchange is to charge those most likely to be hit with follow-on fraud for access to information that reduces their risk.

Companies that have been breached will not pay anything to hand over the data that was stolen, and they can feel that they have done more than most to protect their customers or employees by heading off future fraud that might hurt them.

The service is being run by a company called XOR Data Exchange, which says it can produce useful data faster by hearing from the victims instead of trolling the Dark Web, where it may already be too late by the time it appears.

Due to heavy security on the data, XOR says, the system may also allow breached companies to share the sensitive information without changing their privacy policies or waiting for the people exposed to opt in, as they must for credit monitoring.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Gadgets News

360fly Funding Shows Broader Startup Plight, Gadget Woes

by Rajdeep
written by Rajdeep

To see how startup life has gotten harder, look no further than 360fly Inc.

The Pittsburgh-based startup, which makes an orb-shaped camera that captures 360-degree video, began hitting up venture capitalists for funding last year just as these investors were pulling back on new deals and slashing valuations of many existing ones.

Add in rising competition from a swarm of other camera makers and a stumbling publicly traded rival in GoPro Inc., and the result was a financing round with many of the hallmarks of a sector undergoing a painful adjustment.

360fly said Thursday it raised $40 million from private-equity firm Catterton Partners, Hydra Ventures, the corporate venture arm of Adidas AG, and existing investor Qualcomm Ventures. The deal valued the startup at about $105 million, the same as the last round nearly two years ago, according to VC Experts, which tracks more than 18,000 private companies and their financing.

The terms in this round stipulated that investors will be paid 1.5 times the amount they invested — before employees and other common shareholders — if the company is sold. If the value of the company in any future financing event falls below the latest value, the investors will get extra shares to ensure they lose no money, diluting earlier backers who don’t have the same provision, according to a company filing reviewed by VC Experts.

“These (terms) are harsh. Much harsher than we usually see,” said Amanda Akin, an analyst at VC Experts.

360fly disagreed with the data provided by VC Experts, but declined to provide additional details. Still, 360fly Chief Executive Officer Peter Adderton said it was challenging to raise the round.

“Were the terms the same? Of course not,” said Adderton, adding troubles at GoPro and Fitbit Inc. influenced investor perception of 360fly. “But it’s not a down round.”

Adderton’s philosophy contrasts with advice Benchmark Capital General Partner Bill Gurley and some other VC investors have been giving startups recently: Accept clear terms, even at lower valuations, to make future fundraising and acquisition offers easier.

“Taking a terms-laden deal is like starting the clock on a time bomb. Your only option is to hit the IPO window as fast as possible,” Gurley wrote in an April blog post. “Otherwise, the terms will eat you alive.”

The new money for 360fly, which brings total outside funding to $57.8 million, will be used to market its new 4K camera, available in stores like Best Buy and Target at the end May. The company also plans to invest in research and development with an emphasis on machine learning.

Spun out of Carnegie Mellon University in 1999 with the name Telemersion LLC, the startup raised venture backing and renamed itself 360fly in 2014. With a staff of 70, 360fly has deals to integrate its cameras into Giro and Bell sports helmets.

Other startups like LucidCam Inc. and Bubl Technology Inc. also make 360-degree cameras as do more established companies, including Samsung Electronics Co., LG Electronics Inc., Ricoh Co., Nokia Oyj and Nikon Corp. All those companies either have cameras out now or will in the next few months.

Startups like 360fly may have a tough time standing out in this crowded field, analysts said.

“It’s hard to build confidence in this space, and it will be even harder for startups,” said Stephanie Llamas, director of research at SuperData Research. “People have a lot more trust in companies they already know.”

 

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Blogging

You’re Blogging All Wrong, Startup CEOs

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

You're Blogging All Wrong, Startup CEOs

These days, most startup companies understand the value of content marketing for driving revenue and generating sales leads. According to the Content Marketing Institute, the tactic can result in three times as many leads compared to search advertising — and cost far less.

Content marketing is, after all, less intrusive, more educational and often more authentic than advertising or a cold hard sales pitch. No wonder it’s so effective.

But content marketing in a slightly different form — often euphemistically called “thought leadership” — can also be extremely useful for small-company executives. It can help them build their personal and company brands; connect to potential customers and partners; and promote their business interests in a subtle, backdoor way.

The problem: Most executives are going about thought leadership all wrong, if they’re doing it at all. How’s that? First, many busy startup CEOs and other top executives don’t or won’t make the time to develop thought-leadership content. They view all content as the province of their data-driven marketing department and find it difficult to see value in creating collateral that is not directly driving sales.

When they do take up a more-general content project, they use overtly promotional language and focus on their company, their product and their hot market.

This is, of course, the wrong mindset. Thought leadership is not meant to be promotional; it’s meant to spark conversations and add to an industry dialogue. Done right, this type of marketing allows you to share timely insights and anecdotes with your audience to educate them about a topic and your particular point of view.

Thought leadership can pay big dividends. These range from making you a go-to expert on a particular issue — ideally one sought after by the press and industry leaders for comment — to someone who actually influences public policy. You might be asked to speak at a major economic conference, for example, or named to lead an industry group or task force as a result of your expertise.

Your increased visibility on a certain topic could attract a new board member to your company or get you in the door of a hard-to-reach customer.

Finally, with traditional, startup PR harder and harder to get these days — owing to the rapidly declining number of reporters and the continued erosion of journalism’s business model –thought leadership has become a much more critical communications channel for small companies. It may be the only way your company ever gets its name in certain publications.

So, how do you do thought leadership right? Here are four tips:

Be timely.

One of the reasons executives often fail in thought leadership is that they’re too busy to do it at the right time. But with this type of content creation, timing is everything. If Congress, say, passes little-noticed legislation that would impact your market or business, the time to get your thoughts on the issue out there is when this is happening — usually within days. On-the-spot action will dramatically increase readership. That’s just the reality of today’s lightning-fast news cycle.

An example: Stephane Kasriel, a prolific blogger and the CEO of freelancer network UpWork, made a timely move last spring, when news of tech giant Amazon’s search for a second corporate headquarters was picking up steam in the press.

Kasriel very quickly wrote a piece, published on CNBC.com, positing that all the hubbub over “HQ2” was actually misplaced. Cities would soon realize that massive, centralized corporate campuses weren’t actually worth the money and effort, Kasriel argued. More companies would use distributed workforces and freelancers.

And this wasn’t an isolated move by the CEO: Two years ago, he fired off a post riffing on a then-just-announced policy by IBM to crack down on remote working arrangements for employees.

Be provocative.

Executives have a lot of important constituencies to think about: customers, investors, employees and business partners, to name a few. So, execs are generally quite careful about what they say publicly. They don’t want to offend anyone and adversely impact their business.

That’s why it’s so hard for many executives to stake out a contrarian and provocative point of view in a blog post. But, to do thought leadership right, they have to. No one wants to read a boring essay listing the pros and cons of a particular issue, and no real journalistic publication will run it.

Thought leaders need to feel strongly about their topic and have something interesting and different to say about it. If they don’t, it’s just not worth writing — and no one will remember it anyway.

An example: Dharmesh Thakker, a partner at my venture capital firm, is actually great at stirring the pot. Last year he wrote a blog post comparing the new, low-commitment world of enterprise IT to dating app Tinder (the post was “Swipe Right for a Cloud Instance.”) In other pieces, Thakker has pulled no punches in predicting that big, legacy tech players like IBM, Dell and H-P will suffer if they don’t latch on to new computing trends quickly enough.

Get to the point.

Despite what we all learned in high school English class about writing a strong thesis statement, many successful people still have trouble doing exactly that when they blog. Perhaps they’re afraid of saying anything too controversial; but in any case, many CEOs meander when they write, not stating their main point until the end of their piece — as if they’re afraid to even say it.

In the news business, editors have no patience for this: When I was a reporter, we talked openly about stories needing a “who cares” statement near the top of the piece. In other words, clearly articulate your point up high in your post — why a reader should care. Then, concisely expand on that point with well-organized, supporting material. And remember: Cut, cut, cut words and sentences when you edit. In writing, less is always more.

Show, don’t tell. 

In business, facts often tell the story. But in writing, stories and anecdotes almost always do a better job of getting a point across. If you read long feature stories about business issues in the Wall Street Journal, or Forbes or Fortune, you’ll notice how often those stories begin with a personal anecdote, a story that relates the point the author is trying to make.

Telling a specific story about how an executive made a tough decision, or turned a business around, is far more interesting than just reciting numbers or facts. You should do this, too, when you blog.

An example: Consider the work of serial entrepreneur Hiten Shah. Shah wrote a lengthy blog post in October 2017, explaining in great detail why he felt collaboration-software company Trello, whose technology helps teams plan and organize projects, missed the boat with its business model. (Trello was bought by Atlassian for $425 million but, Shah argued, could have been “the next $1 billion SaaS application.”)

Shah’s post was fairly wonky stuff. But he started it with a short anecdote, putting readers in a specific time and place by recalling exactly how Trello’s co-founder first introduced the product at a big tech conference back in 2011, unveiling a product that looked like a white board filled with sticky notes. Similarly, Shah wrote a separate post about growth-hacking, by leading with an anecdote about drinking mint juleps and beers at a bar called Memphis in Southern California.

Obviously no one expects you, a busy startup CEO, to write like William Faulkner. But, if you’re serious about thought leadership, you should make a commitment to doing it right — both by allocating the time and trying to punch up your posts to make them readable, interesting and timely. The rewards for you, and your company, will definitely make up for the extra effort.

[“source=entrepreneur”]

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Internet

Former Astronaut Jumps Into Australian Internet of Things Startup

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Shuttle flight STS-120, which Pam Melroy commanded, is most famous for helping to repair a torn solar array on the International Space Station. Pictured here is NASA astronaut Scott Parazynski.NASA

Pam Melroy was commanding a space shuttle crew at the International Space Station in 2007 when a big problem occurred. The astronauts were unfurling a solar array when they saw something seriously wrong — a tear was forming between the solar panels. The “fix” NASA decided on was a spectacular spacewalk, where Scott Parazynski rode a robotic arm to carefully stitch the array together with a tool the crew fashioned in orbit.

It’s an experience that Melroy will draw upon in her new position, as a board advisor to Myriota — an Australian company planning to build an Internet-of-things platform where devices can connect directly with satellites above. It’s a technology that could create efficiencies in farming crops or sending information, Melroy argues, and it all starts with creating the right culture as a team.

Space teamwork skills easily translate to startup teamwork skills that Myriota will need, Melroy said. The company is at a point where it is scaling from a small group of key people to a larger employee base, due in large part to closing a Series A round of $15 million last year. Hiring people needs to be done strategically, with business goals in mind, Melroy argued.

Melroy added she has faith the company is on the right path, after many conversations with co-founder and chief executive Alex Grant. The company is starting pilot programs, and they now have a satellite of their own that is dedicated to the IoT technology, she said.

Myriota plans a rapid ramp-up of its customer base from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands in the next year, Melroy added. She says they will most likely hit that target as Australian companies tend not to make announcements until the infrastructure is in place to support their claims. (She joked it is a different situation from the United States.)

Former NASA astronaut Pam Melroy during training for her last mission, shuttle flight STS-120.NASA

Melroy has a broad base of experience to draw upon as she works in Australia, which she visited several times in the past year to advise industry and government on growing their space program. (It was during this time that she first met Myriota, joking “I couldn’t stump” the executive team with hard questions.)

From her time at NASA supporting other astronauts and flying three shuttle missions, as well as her decades of experience in the U.S. Air Force, Melroy said she received “a lot of leadership experience at all levels, including the executive,” especially in building culture.

Melroy was the deputy director of Lockheed Martin’s Orion program immediately after leaving NASA, between 2009 and 2011. She then joined the Federal Aviation Administration in 2011 as a senior technical advisor and director of field operations for the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation. “That gave me the insight into regulatory and policy aspects, especially as it impacts new technology,” she said.

Melroy subsequently worked at DARPA as deputy director of the tactical technology office, a position that she says helped her gauge if a technology is really cutting edge. She also talked with businesses and startups while at DARPA, which helped her “gain an appreciation of what some of their challenges and opportunities are.”

Myriota’s differentiator, she said, is offering is direct-to-orbit services, bypassing the base station that other IoT companies provide. It not only is more convenient for the end user, but it also drives down costs.

“The agriculture here in Australia, there’s an estimate that it could be 50 percent more productive with an integration of IoT technologies,” she said, as farmers get more refined information about soil moisture and animal locations. “But from a productivity standpoint, for almost every industry, this is also a big deal.”

 

[“source=forbes”]

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Tech Update

Ocean State Update: The Biggest Rhode Island Tech & Startup News From January

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

At the end of every month, we recap the biggest tech and startup happenings in Rhode Island. We have an archive of past roundups here. To get this info weekly (Tuesday afternoons, to be exact), sign up for the Rhode Island Inno Beat newsletter.

Let’s take a look.

  1. The Providence Journal reported that Gov. Gina Raimondo’s latest budget includes a new $1.3 million tax credit for “early stage” companies or those “substantially increasing its investment in research and development.” The tax credits would be worth 22.5 percent of the cost of that new research up to $250,000 per company. Current law provides a 5 percent credit for research costs, but many technology startups generate little in the way of profits or tax liability and don’t benefit. By being able to sell the credits to more mature companies, the Raimondo administration hopes to make it much more valuable for early-stage ventures.
  2. Inspire Environmental, a Middletown firm specializing in environmental assessments and seafloor mapping, will relocate to the new Innovate Newport business incubator expected to open this winter, Providence Business News reported. The firm will be the largest tenant at the Innovate Newport incubator, occupying about 4,350 square feet on the building’s second floor. The $7 million-plus construction project involves converting the former Sheffield School on Broadway into an office space and amenities for small companies, startups and entrepreneurs. The project is spearheaded by the City of Newport and the Newport County Chamber of Commerce, which also is relocating to the incubator site. Towerhill Associates will be another tenant.
  3. Gov. Raimondo and University of Rhode Island President David Dooley debuted three Rhode Island Innovation campuses, which together represent the initiative’s first round of projects. The trio of campuses includes the University of Rhode Island and Arizona State University Innovation Hub, the Rhode Island “iHub” and Rhode Island Agricultural Innovation & Entrepreneurship Campus. The private investment in the URI-affiliated projects is expected to top $122 million, a figure that is 10 times the state’s investment.
  4. CVS Health will spend $100 million over the next five years to support community health programs following its roughly $70 billion acquisition of health insurer Aetna, according to CNBC. The initiative, dubbed “Building Healthier Communities,” seeks to improve access to affordable health care, manage health challenges like chronic conditions and opioids and partner with communities. The bulk of the funding will come from the CVS Health Foundation and Aetna Foundation, with the rest coming from the company.
  5. The entity formerly known as MedMates has rebranded. Now known as Rhode Island Bio, the 2011-born group still works to coalesce the life science industry throughout southeastern New England.`Additionally, Rhode Island Bio has become the official affiliate of Biotechnology Innovation Organization, and will “work to secure resources for the Rhode Island life sciences community and provide its members with exclusive access to events, materials and supplies, workspaces, growth partners and more.”
  6. Our deep dive showed how Ocean State Job Lot, one of Rhode Island’s largest employers has survived for more than 40 years using one consistent business model: Finding the best deals on merchandise and then passing the savings to the customer. Also of note, the national retailer has developed a new website and is even considering ecommerce.
  7. Blue tech champion SeaAhead announced it will be establishing a hub at the Cambridge Innovation Center next month. SeaAhead catalyzes the intersection of oceans, innovation and sustainability.” The entity’s influence covers southern New England, 75 miles around its headquarters in Providence.
  8. Four Rhode Island companies represented the Ocean State this month at the Consumer Electric Show in Las Vegas hosted by the Consumer Technology Association. The event showcases more than 4,500 companies displaying over 4.5 million net square feet across the city. These organizations exhibited their newest tech, hardware and other products to more than 180,000 attendees from 150 countries. The event also boasts over 250 sessions of programming.
  9. Seventeen Rhode Island-based food businesses began the Social Enterprise Greenhouse Food Accelerator program earlier this month. The accelerator, SEG’s signature venture development program, includes a 12-week blended learning model that provides high impact social entrepreneurs the tools, networks and resources to validate their idea, understand their customer and formalize growth strategies from fundraising to social impact measurement.
  10. This March, Rhode Island Inno is bringing the tech and startup communities together for some healthy competition — bracket-style. Submit your nomination here or complete the form below. Tech Madness is our annual bracket challenge designed to generate awareness and excitement for the city’s ecosystem, and those that are driving it forward. Rhode Island Inno will assemble a bracket of private, fast-growing, tech-enabled local businesses and seed them based on funding. Then, we’ll ask the community to vote on each matchup in every round. Companies go head-to-head, with Rhode Island Inno’s readers determining who moves on by answering just one question: “Who would you invest in?”

 

[“source=americaninno”]

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Online Marketing

How Digital Marketing Can Take Your Startup To A Higher Level

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Running a startup and surviving the cut-throat competition is an achievement. There are myriad of things that need attention like finances, managing the product, building relationships with clients, and more. Everything requires exhaustive research and an eye for detail. Luckily, digital marketing can help with some of these challenges.

If you follow suitable strategies and techniques, digital marketing can be a blessing to your business. It can eventually grow your consumer base and expedite sales. Below are some of the techniques we successfully practice and implement in our agency’s digital marketing campaigns that can work for any startup:

SEO

SEO plays a leading role in the digital marketing world. It boosts and optimizes a piece of content’s technical setup so that the pages are more likely to appear at the top of a search engine result. Our team follows a market analysis methodology, which includes talking to the client to understand their needs and researching their competitors. We then research and use keywords and write meta descriptions, which ultimately optimizes a website and improves performance.

To help gauge your client’s needs, prepare a questionnaire form to be filled out by clients. Ours includes the details related to their industry, services or products they offer, their target audience, minimum and maximum budget and their goals in terms of revenue.

Intensive research and interactive meetings with clients helps us to find relevant keywords using the Keyword Planner tool. For competitive analysis, we use audit tools like SEMrush and Moz, which helps us in tracking the most effective keywords responsible for generating maximum traffic on competitors’ websites. The on-page and off-page optimization then makes ranking more effective. Following this approach can be advantageous for startups.

PPC

Pay-per-click advertising is basically an online marketing technique where you only pay for the ad when a consumer clicks on it. What adds a feather to the cap is that you can customize ads to appear when particular search terms are entered, developing ads targeted to a particular audience. Using this customization feature in our search campaigns and display advertisements has shown beneficial results for our clients.

Content Marketing

Content is ruling the world, and original and unique content is pivotal for the growth of every business. It incites and encourages digital marketing activities and acts as a pillar of SEO, which is not possible without quality content. Make sure content provides relevant information to the user, and make sure your content management team focuses on writing extraordinary and exclusive content with proper keywords.

Social Media Marketing

Essentially, every single person these days relies on social media to gather information either about a product or an organization. Because of that, social media has become an indispensable part of marketing. Branding your organization on social media platforms helps users have comprehensive knowledge of your brand.

Depending on your audience, use tools like Pinterest and LinkedIn, and communicate knowledgeable information to your brand’s users through blogs and articles. This technique can boost traffic and convert potential clients into customers.

The Importance Of Digital Marketing For Startups

There are diverse reasons why startups should opt for a powerful digital marketing strategy:

Foundation Of Brand Identity

Brand identity refers to the components of a business like logo, font, tagline and other elements that vary it from its competitors. To reach clients, traditional marketing is definitely one option, but that requires hefty amounts of money, which is not feasible for startups. Online promotion and marketing establish brand identity in an effective and budget-friendly way. For online branding, use various channels like Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn to communicate with your audience and spread the word.

Augmented Lead Generation

It is mandatory for a startup to convert potential clients into leads, a task that can be fulfilled by marketing experts. The best ways to generate leads include social media marketing, email marketing and content marketing. There are various sources, like e-books, webinars and newsletters, that convey the most appropriate information to clients and enhance lead generation.

E-books are a way to generate traffic using gated content. This strategy is basically putting your content behind a form that includes details like name, address and email, which helps in capturing information about the reader. Internet visitors won’t mind filling out the information in exchange for value, and the required information can be used for additional promotions such as email marketing.

Webinars allow for seamless interaction with the audience, building harmony and loyalty. Webinars are a way to engage prospects without being restricted to a particular location. The presentation should be carefully organized and managed for better results, which directly affects the number of leads.

Also, startups can make use of a call-to-action button on a social networking site like Facebook that directs visitors to their newsletter. It is important to write an enticing newsletter subject line. Having a goal in mind, like the number of recipients you want to respond, can generate maximum revenue for startups and can build good relations with prospective clients.

Conversion Rate Development

It is simple to evaluate digital analytics and strategies. We use Google Analytics, which can measure the amount of traffic, different regions of traffic and the number of visitors to your site pages. This can help you understand your bounce or exit rate and site speed, and also provides information about your conversion goals.

The contemporary world is all about technology and digital marketing. Developing and expanding your startup must go hand-in-hand with branding, and online marketing is imperative.

[“Source-forbes”]

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Internet

PayPal Buys Payments Startup iZettle for $2.2 Billion

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

PayPal Buys Payments Startup iZettle for $2.2 Billion

HIGHLIGHTS

  • iZettle is poised for a stock market debut
  • It is the biggest acquisition by PayPal, a unit of eBay
  • Small businesses are the engine of global economy: PayPal

PayPal on Thursday announced a deal to buy Swedish online commerce startup iZettle for $2.2 billion (roughly Rs. 15,000 crores), a deal that came as the young company was poised for a stock market debut.

US-based PayPal, a unit of eBay, said that its biggest acquisition to date would strengthen its platform for handling payment transactions at small businesses, particularly in Europe and Latin America.

“Small businesses are the engine of the global economy and we are continuing to expand our platform to help them compete and win online, in-store and via mobile,” PayPal chief executive Dan Schulman said in a release.

“In today’s digital world, consumers want to be able to buy when, where and how they want.”

Schulman described the merging of iZettle and PayPal as a “strategic fit” combining shared values and culture with complementary product offerings and geographies.

The iZettle platform for handling retail transactions is used by nearly a half million merchants, according to PayPal.

The startup has been compared to Square, a payments platform co-founded by Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey that made it easy to take credit card payments using smartphones or tablets.

Buying iZettle will expand PayPal’s reach into shops in Brazil, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Sweden.

“Combining our assets and expertise with a global industry leader like PayPal allows us to deliver even more value to small businesses to help them succeed in a world of giants,” iZettle chief executive Jacob de Geer said in the release.

The Stockholm-based startup founded in 2010 expected to handle about $6 billion in transactions this year, taking in gross revenue of approximately $165 million (roughly Rs. 1,100 crores) in the process. The company said it expects to reach profitability by the year 2020.

After close of the acquisition, co-founder Jacob de Geer will remain in charge of iZettle, reporting to PayPal chief operating officer Bill Ready, according to the companies.

Earlier this month, iZettle filed paperwork to go public with an offering of shares that valued the company at slightly more than a billion dollars.

PayPal closed the Nasdaq trading day in New York with a market value of about $94 billion (roughly Rs. 6.38 lakh crores) based on its share price, which rose a percent to $80 in after-hours trades.

[“Source-gadgets.ndtv”]

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Online Marketing

Here’s how you can use digital marketing to secure investments for your startup

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

What conveys best to an entrepreneur that the idea s/he has invested in over some is truly worth the effort and resources? Investments.

When you can convince others – experienced others – to believe in your seemingly crazy idea, then you can really sit back for a bit and enjoy the moment when you realise that all of your time and money was not spent for nothing.

Thus, investments are often the lynchpin and measuring stick of any startup’s potential for growth and flourishing.

Subhendu Panigrahi, CEO at Skillenza and Co-founder at Venturesity, says: “We are always asked about how we reach out to customers and what the go-to-market strategy is in our investor pitches. The points that we focus on are channels used to reach out to customers. What is the Customer Acquisition Cost? If the CAC is low, the business is interesting.”

So what about the odds?

As many as 80 percent of all venture-funded startups fail, 45-50 percent simply shut their doors, and the rest fail to bring any significant profit to their investors. According to the Bath University, only 10 percent of startups happen to bring some returns to their investors.

Understandable why investors hesitate when approached by startups and asked for investments.

Your job is to convince them otherwise.

To realise what investors are looking for in your startup, you have to know what concerns they have when looking at a startup they probably never heard of before.

I’ve looked at tons of writings from investors who speak of successful or failed pitches they are subjected to daily. And one thing became very obvious – investors aren’t really looking for the utmost innovative product or service, what investors really need from you is to convince them that you have what it takes to navigate your business through the rough patches, and have a solid enough strategy to aid you in handling the grind. What you should also be able to showcase is that your company is not merely an ephemeral idea bound for success, but has already received some traction – via excellent feedback/reviews from existing customers, social Media buzz, appealing mentions from industry influencers, and so on.

So let’s remind us what should be in your Investor Pitch Deck.

Investor pitch deck

Essentially, an investor pitch deck is a 15-20-slide PowerPoint presentation, which presents your startup in an attractive way to potential investors. Forbes outlines what slides a typical presentation should contain:

  1. Company Overview
  2. Mission/Vision of the Company
  3. The Team
  4. The Product
  5. The Problem
  6. The Solution
  7. The Market Opportunity
  8. The Customers
  9. The Competition
  10. Traction
  11.  Business Model
  12. Marketing Plan
  13. Financials
  14. Q&A

The first slides have mostly to do with general intros – about the company, the employees, and eventually, the product itself. The real challenge, though, lies in the other sections.

Slides on HR solutions, financial information, and revenue models are pretty obvious – you state what you already have and plan to do. Every startup has those strategies and information in place. But the rest is a different story. As a startup, you probably cannot afford to conduct a thorough market research that includes focus groups, or pay an agency to analyse your competitive landscape and build up your visibility through publicity, and later send out a comprehensive report on the results.

That is when online marketing and SEO and digital marketing tools enter the stage to resolve some of the challenges you are faced with when creating a perfect Investor Pitch Deck.

Digital marketing/SEO & your investor pitch deck

Archit Gupta, Founder at ClearTax: “Investors look for the proof of sustainable growth in a startup. Understanding your customers and identifying the most cost-effective channels to acquire them become the task of a startup’s growth team.  At ClearTax, SEO, inbound marketing, and word-of-mouth advertising have helped us grow to a million-plus users today. We chose a more direct approach to reach our target audience instead of traditional advertising methods, and it has worked wonderfully for us. It’s also a proof of validation and brand presence for potential investors.”

Tools can’t directly give you all you need to get those desired investments; what they can do is make a big part of your pitching efforts easier.

So we will go through areas of your Investor Pitch Deck that can be covered by certain tools that can give you what you need and what investors are looking for – data-driven solutions and strategies.

Market opportunity

You can have the top product characteristics, the best user-friendly features, and the lowest prices, but if you fail to realise that you don’t have the customer base for your product, what’s really the point?

The very first thing you’d want to emphasise in your presentation is that you know for sure and you have the facts to prove that there is actually a market for your product.

There are various approaches to measuring the market opportunity. But what is it all about, anyway?

Establish your market size and roughly estimate what part of that market your company can get. SEO and digital marketing tools can reveal plenty of insights about your target market. As we mentioned before, it is very unlikely that your startup can invest in a thorough market research, with in-depth Nielsen-like reports and focus groups, but looking at digital usage will also uncover what others spend hundred thousands of dollars on.

Leverage keyword analysis to find your potential market size: SEMrush’s Keyword Magic Tool, LongTailPRO, or Wordstream’s Keyword Tool can point out the search volume for any keyword that you are likely in need to target, and, since most people are going to the web to look for companies and their products, search volume is a great indicator of the number of customers you can potentially interest. By estimating how many users are Googling your product type, you can assume with a level of certainty that these people can potentially be interested in what you offer and can be converted into your prime audience.

LongTailPRO

Furthermore, the cost per click numbers for each keyword you target will give you an opportunity to forecast how much expenditure you should count on to get a designated market share.

SEMrush’s Keyword Magic Tool

According to Neil Patel, competitor analysis will also help you measure your market size and how much market share you can potentially gain.

 Competitors

Competitors won’t only show you your own market opportunities. In fact, investors expect you to know your field from inside out. And competition analysis is a huge part of that knowledge.

By showing your knowledge about your competitors and sharing ideas about their ups and downs, you will be able to showcase your own value proposition.

Ideally, create a table and highlight every feature that your competitors have and check where are your wins and losses, and what particular areas require investments, both money and resource-based. Don’t forget to communicate your competitive advantage.

Here is what you should do:

  • Determine your competitors
  • Define your competitive advantage
  • Showcase your wins against your competitors.

Any business model creation should begin with a comprehensive competition research. But for an investor’s pitch, the competitor research should work to your startup’s advantage and eventually build up your credibility. This is the time to “blow your horn”.

A two-time technology entrepreneur Caroline Cummings advises: “Impress the investors with what you and your team have accomplished to date.”

Note that your competitors are always of particular interest to your investors and they can also be the stumbling block for your investments. It’s in your hands to prove that you have your competitors covered and know where you’re going.

  • The Organic Research Report and SimilarWeb will measure website traffic and organic keywords for each domain of your choice to help you determine your biggest competitors within organic search.
SimilarWeb
  • And probably the most important aspect of competitor monitoring – Brand Monitoring – will allow you to learn from your competitors by discovering their performance and spying on their expenditures.

Once you’ve done your homework on your competitors, you can prove that your performance versus expenditures is more efficient than your competitors’, and that is how you showcase your advantages over your competition.

Your job is to impress investors. And by outwitting your competition even in the smallest areas like spending less to rank higher for the same keyword than one or two of your biggest competitors will play in your startup’s favour. But to gain even more credibility for your startup, you have to show your potential investors that you aren’t just another struggling company; on the contrary, you’ve already gained some publicity and traction from the market you know inside out.

Traction

Eighty-two percent of investors take your brand strength into account when making their final investment decision. You have to show that the traction you received resulted in some feasible evidence of success – increased traffic, higher customer acquisition, game-changing deals. Even some social buzz can do the job.

Here is what traction is all about:

  • Effective PR starts with effective outreach – to the relevant and the most beneficial media/sites. The Link Building Tool, Monitor Backlinks and Open Site Explorer can monitor your competitor’s backlinks to show you what traffic sources bring them the greatest outcomes (traffic, buzz) so that you know which sites you should target and which media/sites you can disregard. Thus, tracking and reverse engineering your competitors’ link-building strategy can potentially help with your own outreach efforts to reach relevant media, connect with the most relevant influencers, and make sure that no opportunity goes missing.
Monitor Backlinks
  • I’d like to find someone who managed to gain an impressive publicity and, thus, visibility without using paid advertising. Hence, a tool like Advertising Research or Moat will uncover your competitors’ advertising strategies and expenditures, show their ad copies, and reveal the particular keywords they target. Use that info to learn their best practices and build your own ad campaigns.
  • And, of course, what’s good traction without good old social media. No brand can afford to disregard social media. SM entails your visibility, customer service, support, Public Relations, and so on. And Social Media Tracker, Brandwatch, and OCTOBOARD can help you build the ultimate social media strategy by looking at your competitors and which channels return more benefits to their business, what content type engages their audience and, moreover, will also monitor and analyse your own social media activities.
Social Media Tracker

Key slides: customer acquisition & marketing strategy

What we considered above should help you eventually dive into the key area of your Investor Pitch Deck – your marketing strategy that will ideally result in some impressive customer acquisition outcomes.

According to Entrepreneur, when it comes to investing in a company, most VCs assign a great deal of importance to digital marketing and won’t invest in a startup that fails to show some solid tactical plan for digital marketing. Basically, that plan is the step-by-step description of how you are going to reach those people who will eventually purchase your product.

And all of the areas and tools we mentioned above can help you find answers to these crucial questions that should be addressed in your investors pitch:

  1. What will be your key marketing channels – paid advertising, social media, email marketing, content strategies etc.?
  2. Which channels already work for your startup and which ones brought you some early victories?
  3. Do you have a rough idea of preliminary customer acquisition expenses?
  4. What publicity-provoking tactics will you employ?
  5. Have you already attracted some early buzz?

Being based at Ahmedabad, the capital of Incubations [There are 25+ Incubation centres at Ahmedabad] and also, being a founder of a digital marketing agency, it’s been a great experience to mix both things. These are my inputs for your pitch deck. What tools are you using for the same?

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)

Report an Issue

Attention coders! YourStory presents IBM Code Day on 14th Feb in Bangalore – Enhance your skills, gain experience in the latest tech, meet the experts, get certified, attend Code Labs, tech talks and much more. Register now!
Kalaari Capital in partnership with KPMG, YourStory, and NASSCOM is compiling a list of digital trends that will impact India’s economy and shape innovation. Tell us what you think will be the key digital trends that Indian startups should watch out for in 2018. Take the survey now!

[“Source-yourstory”]

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Online Marketing

Google buys online marketing startup to boost discount moves

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Image result for Google buys online marketing startup to boost discount moves

Google has agreed to buy the marketing firm Incentive Targeting in a move that gives the tech giant more tools to work with retailers on discounts and other promotions, the two firms said Wednesday.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

We are excited to announce that Incentive Targeting has been acquired by Google!” said a blog post by the Massachusetts-based firm.

“When we founded Incentive Targeting in 2007, we set out to do for retail couponing what Google had done for online advertising: make it simple, relevant, measurable, and effective. So, it is both humbling and gratifying to be joining the ranks of the company that inspired our initial vision.”

A Google spokesperson said: “We look forward to working with Incentive Targeting in our ongoing efforts to help consumers save time and money and enable retailers deliver relevant discounts to the right customers.”

According to its website, Incentive Targeting partners with retail chains to provide targeted marketing for manufacturers of grocery and consumer products, using technology which aims to deliver the most relevant promotions.

The effectiveness of the promotions can be measured in real time over the Internet, the company says.

[“Source-ndtv”]

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
error: Content is protected !!