Startups That Disrupt - Republic Wireless

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http://www.republicwireless.com/
David Morken admits that the promise he made to reward his kids with iPhones if they brought home straight A's was no stroke of genius. But the business concept inspired by the ensuing $1,000-plus phone bills may well turn out to be.

Launched nationally in December 2012, Morken's brainchild, Republic Wireless, is a $19-per-month voice, text and data service that relies on Wi-Fi as its primary network (for more disruptive startups, read about DudaMobile). When Wi-Fi isn't accessible--roughly 40 percent of the time for Republic customers, according to Morken--calls automatically bounce to Sprint's 3G cellular network.

The pillar of the low-cost Republic model is a solid but no-frills Android handset, the Motorola Defy XT, which allows Republic to offer a low-cost, contract-free wireless service package with unlimited voice, data and texting after paying an initial $249 for the phone.

In taking on the $178 billion wireless industry, Morken is counting on customers to flock because they already rely on Wi-Fi at home, at the office and in an increasing number of public and private spaces. "The future of mobile technology and the essence of the smartphone, I believe, is Wi-Fi," he says. "It will continue to eat the world because it's so much cheaper."

Turns out Morken's vision of Wi-Fi dominance may be closer than you think. The Wireless Broadband Alliance predicts that the number of hotspot deployments globally will nearly triple between 2012 and 2015--fortifying a reach that Morken says is broad enough to make the Republic model viable. Already, Republic customers can be linked in automatically to 11 million public hotspots using the company's Wi-Fi+ app.

Republic's model, observes technology industry analyst Jeff Kagan, "is innovative, but there are trade-offs for the customer because all the kinks haven't been worked out yet." Indeed, Republic's unique value proposition also happens to be its weakest link, at least for now: At times users must contend with interrupted calls stemming from a less-than-seamless Wi-Fi-to-cellular handoff.

But that hasn't stopped Republic Wireless from signing up "tens of thousands" of new customers each month, according to Morken, suggesting that mobile phone users are willing to live with those shortcomings. And he vows that they won't have to for much longer; by early fall, the company plans to unveil updated software that he expects will largely resolve the handover issue. Republic will also add two more Android handset options.

Morken says he expects those improvements to attract more first-time smartphone users--the college students, cost-conscious Millennials, bargain hunters and land-line cord-cutters who comprise the bulk of Republic's customer base. But what he really wants is for Republic to be the carrier that breaks the stranglehold on the wireless market held by Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint.

"We can't outspend the major carriers," he acknowledges, "so this is going to have to stand on value." And that's a concept we can all agree is most welcome in today's mobile world.

[Via - Entrepreneur]

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July 04, 2013 No Comments

FreshBooks review (and coupons)

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FreshBooks (claim your $50 FreshBooks coupon here) is known for weird titles.Corey Reid, for instance, is Chief Cat Herder. That's Director of R&D Talent for us mere mortals. Saul Colt is Head of Magic. Perhaps you'd prefer Marketing and Customer Experience Design. And don't even ask me what Freshbooks CEO goes by.

So perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise that FreshBooks isn't really about bookkeeping. Instead, FreshBooks is really one of the first timekeeping and invoicing software turned SaaS (it'll be interesting how FreshBooks reacts to the recent onslaught of free CRM with invocing).

FreshBook is now used by over 5 million users and known for it's "braindead simple" approach. One of the reasons for that that one year after being launched in 2003, it had only 6 clients. That's six. And 24 months into operation, it had only 10. This is how Mike McDerment recalls these days:

"So we tried a PR firm and I like to say that I got my Masters in Communication through that process because we basically…we didn’t get any awareness built out of it whatsoever. And so we shelved that and we went back to putting our heads down and spending our money on direct response type marketing, like being in an email newsletter or pay-per-click. You know, started trying to learn a little more about who was being successful marketing themselves online. So we started learning more about blogging and that kind of thing."

Two things saved FreshBooks - first they changed their pricing. Not once, not twice but actually four times, and every with every time they'd get more and more paying customers. Second, FreshBook decided to become a 'human' company, meaning that if you call their number, you actually get a human being on the other end. And if you have a question, you can an answer. And corporatespeak was banned at the company as well.

Becoming a user centric company transformed FreshBooks in a number of ways. Feeback was collected not as a formality, but in order to stay ahead of competition, so it's no wonder that FreshBooks one of the first to offer iPad app, when others weren't so sure about that anyone would use mobile apps for their invoices. Addition of expense tracking and cloud accouting significantly expanded FreshBooks use beyond its core market of small business owners, lawyers, designers and other professionals (my girlfriend uses iOS mobile app to track her daily expenses). With WaveAccounting and Bitrix24, FreshBooks makes the Holy Trinity of SMB and Productivity 2.0 tools that every business owner should be aware about. Oh, and if you want to try FreshBooks, here's your $50 coupon)

[Via - MadConomist.Com]

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June 28, 2013 No Comments

Hot Startups - Swipp.Com Review

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http://swipp.com

You probably remember how free social intranet provider Bitrix24.com has become the fastest growing social enterprise tool in 2012. But it's 2013 now. Aside from being “social,” Facebook, Google+ and just about every company in the social arena have something in common – to become the social layer beneath every service on the Internet and provide real-time social data that’s measurable, can be referenced and helpful to marketers and data analysts spanning a broad range of industries. Facebook’s recent release of Graph Search and everything else Google has been doing since Google+ was released in 2011 are adding up to this mounting evidence.

Launched on January 23, 2013 in 45 countries and 5 languages, Swipp is a brand-new social media analytics and sharing platform whose main objective is to find out how the general population feels about a given topic real-time. User sentiment is analyzed, and coupled with structured data that is readily available via sites like Wikipedia, app developers should be able to come up with more intuitive applications that can better predict users’ needs.

Despite the fact that companies providing consumer sentiment analytics have sprung up from here, there and everywhere, a lot of social data is unstructured, which means that making comparisons – let alone, drawing conclusions – from such data is easier said than done. Swipp’s answer is to recreate the way things are shared via social media to generate more consistent and functional data.

Technically speaking, you, the social media user, are still allowed to post random thoughts about random things – unstructured data, essentially. Swipp, then, would have you tag your post to signify that it’s under a subject that exists in its humungous library of structured web data. After which, to explicitly address the sentiment analysis side of things, it also would make you rate how you feel about your post using a scale of 1 to 10. And once the data is entered, Swipp lets you know how other people from different parts of the world feel about the same subject.

While Swipp may be able to give its users extra and relevant data, it doesn’t have the follower base Facebook has for Graph Search nor the user data Google has for every meaningful thing it has in store for Google+. Swipp is coming from nowhere and may need to beat insurmountable odds to become a major player in the social space.

Then again, as per Swipp co-founder and CEO, Don Thorson: Every big idea looks impossible up until the exact moment it looks inevitable. Whether he’s right or wrong is left to be seen.

[Via - PickyDomains.com]

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January 29, 2013 No Comments

JustBecause Is One Hot App This Holiday Season

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http://www.justbecauseapp.com/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Via - Uncommon Business Ideas]

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December 04, 2012 No Comments