JOOR is an online marketplace for wholesale fashion buying. The company is on track to do more than $350 million in transactions in 2013, which is more than three times the amount from 2012. More than 580 brands and designers and 30,000 buyers use the platform including many of the biggest names in fashion. JOOR recently opened up an office in Milan and is opening one soon in Sydney.

This is a prime example of a company applying technology to an industry that is predominantly offline, and succeeding. Founder Mona Bijoor said that most transactions in fashion wholesale happen at trade shows, market appointments, and with handwritten orders. JOOR’s business platform puts the sales process online so retailers and brands can connect in a more efficient way.

“This is a highly fragmented market where retailers can only source products from places they actually go and there is limited data available about the inventory,” she said in an interview. “If online sales of clothing makes sense for the consumer world, why shouldn’t it make sense for wholesale? Our job is to make retailers and brands better, smarter, and faster.”

Bijoor spent most of her career working in fashion with brands like Chanel, Elie Tahari, Cynthia Rowley, and in the buying departments of global retailers. She experienced the pain points on both sides and saw an opportunity to “pioneer wholesale evolution.”

The platform’s core technology connects brands and retailers. Brands create a profile page with marketing materials and retailers put up pages with information about their clients and inventory. Search capabilities are available on both sides using filters like price, trend, region, product etc… and the system finds relevant matches.

Buyers have access to real-time analytics about orders, notes, fulfillment, shipping and billing, as well as lead generation tools. Retailers can look at best selling items, discover new brands, and build and place orders on the platform.

The global fashion industry generates over a $1.5 trillion dollars a year and is growing. Most of the discussion surrounding about fashion tech focuses on consumers, but consumers are at one end of a very long and complicated supply chain that JOOR is  trying to make “less archaic.” This is more important than ever as “fast-fashion” has caused consumers to expect rapid turnover.

Joor’s clients include fashion heavyweights Diane Von Furstenberg, Phillip Lim, Alexander McQueen, Rag & Bone, and Thakoon. Right now the platform is only available for women’s apparel and menswear but Bijoor said she is exploring opportunities in footwear and accessories. Competitors include NuOrder, Balluun, Brandboom, but none have the high profile clientele that JOOR does (although NuOrder raised money from Rachel Zoe).

JOOR is based in New York with offices in LA and Milan and has raised $5.5 million to date from Battery Ventures, Lerer Ventures, Great Oaks VC, Landis Capital, and Forerunner Ventures.

Photo Credit: electric stove/Flickr

MinoMonsters is a mobile gaming startup that released major updates to its game today and shared some news surrounding the company’s progress. MinoMonsters is a Pokémon-inspired game in which players collect, train, and battle “minos.” The popular app is No. 75 on the top grossing charts in the Apple App Store, now has more than 2.5 million players, and generates millions in revenue.

Today, MinoMonsters also announced that it acquired a small HTML5 gaming startup, signed a kids’ book deal to help transform into a bigger brand, and is now under representation of WME, one of Hollywood’s biggest talent agencies. Founder and CEO Josh Buckley said that the company is starting to ramp up their licensing into toys, trading cards, TV, movies, and so on … and next week, MinoMonsters will launch animated shows on YouTube.

“We’re creating one of the biggest kids brands in the world,” Buckley said in an email. “Big brands used to start out as TV shows or movies; however, now the model is changing. Hollywood is approaching us. The next Disney is going to start out as a character-driven mobile game, and we’re at the forefront.”

Buckley went through Y Combinator at the age of 18, the youngest founder in the program at the time. After graduating from the spring 2011 class, he raised $2 million from Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, General Catalyst, Ignition Partners, and Alexis Ohanian.

This whiz kid from Kent, England began freelance programming at the age of 11. He built a series of applications and sold Menewsha, a community for people to create avatars, for six figures when he was just 15 years old. He then became a young angel investors and went on to create MinoMonsters in 2010. His ultimate vision is to be a cross-channel brand that extends beyond the gaming world.

At first, MinoMonsters was paid-for download, but now it is free with the addition of in-app purchases. Buckley also changed the focus of the game away from an exploration to battle. The new update lets players battle anybody in the world, and new animations will be released next week.

Photo credit: MinoMonsters

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That’s just one of the questions I had for Roman Tsunder, founder and spiritual leader of the TED of the marketing world: PTTOW. Pronounced just the way it’s spelled, PTTOW brings together the people and the companies who are shaping our digitized, commercialized, and sometimes commoditized culture, for good.

Our youth culture, that is.

“Sixty percent of the world is under the age of 30,” Tsunder says. “In the Middle East, that’s up to 70 percent, hence the revolutions. What I want to do is bring together the leaders of every major industry whose customers are between 17-30 … to talk about their most inspiring projects.”

That vision has produced events where Activision and the State Department, QuikSilver and the Gates Foundation rub shoulders with music industry giants. And where beauty and fashion — Diane von Furstenberg — meet brains and technology: Google Glass.

Source: SMH

Google Glass on the runway

“Who would have thought of that kind of partnership?” Tsunder marvels. Von Furstenberg famously featured Google’s augmented reality Glass project on the fashion runway last year. “We want to inspire things that have never been done before.”

PTTOW brings together an invite-only list of corporate bigwigs — you have to be at least a VP at a major international corporation or a C-level exec at a media company to attend — with artists, athletes, and other shapers of youth culture to come together, create community, inspire each other, and win.

The conference has inspired partnerships between notables like Elon Musk of Tesla and Virgin Atlantic. Skull Candy and Spotify started working together at PTTOW. And the U.S. state department partnered with QuikSilver to send cultural attachés — aka skateboarders — to Eastern Europe. In other words: wild and wacky and wonderful partnerships that, maybe, couldn’t have happened anywhere else.

Will.i.am will be a prominent guest at the upcoming PTTOW in May, and he’ll be talking about causes, culture, and media.

“We honor certain icons,” Tsunder says,”and his passion for science and math and technology is really quite awe-inspiring.”

Four years ago, the invite-only event was 25 people. Bob McKnight, the CEO of QuikSilver, was an early believer who attended at the first conference. Today, the event brings together hundreds of Davos-level people: a few dignitaries, some artists, and the high-level corporate executives for whom this is perhaps their only professional development event of the year.

It’s professional development because each can wow others with tales of where they win. Furstenberg learns from Red Bull how they get 10 million viral views on YouTube. Google learns from Furstenberg how fashion and life mingle. Virgin Atlantic sees what Elon Musk is doing in space, and Virgin Galactic is born. Each inspires the others.

“We want to inspire the best marketers in the world,” Tsunder told me. “That’s our biggest aspiration.”

Oh, and the Dalai Lama?

Like everything else — and everything that happens at PTTOW — it’s about relationships. And, critically, about not being afraid to ask.

I talked to Tsunder how he managed to get the Dalai Lama, a foreign head of state, to attend his conference focused on youth and marketing. It’s the first and only time the Dalai Lama has ever spoken a media and marketing group.

“Well, you become friends with his emissary for peace,” Tsunder answered. “I was introduced to Lama Tenzin and we were having lunch, and he said the Dalai Lama speaks to young people all the time. I said, ‘I’m sure it’s impossible, but would he be willing to speak to the leaders of companies whose audience and fans are young people, and inspire them to be more thoughtful about peace and harmony?’”

Lama Tenzin meditated on it, and the Dalai Lama meditated on it. And Tsunder got a phone call, saying that what he was trying to do was a great thing, and the Dalai Lama would like to support it.

Which is how you get the Dalai Lama to speak at your conference.

photo credit: Akbar Sim (NO TIME TO COMMENT) via photopin, kk+ via photopin cc

Billing itself as the “video ad network for the modern age,” Virool has raised a whopping $6.62 million “seed” round, the largest round in Y Combinator’s history.

Considering the size of the round and the inclusion of institutional investors, calling this a “Series A,” or the first round of institutional funding, may seem more accurate. However, founder Alex Debelov said the entire round was raised in on covertible debt and Virool is not taking any members on its board. Hence, it is a seed round.

Virool offers a self-service social video advertising platform to make video content go viral. Advertisers can use it to blast their content out to multiple online publishers, who get paid for the videos they show inside their properties. Developers can also integrate Virool’s API into their apps to more easily execute wide-reaching video advertising campaigns, and companies have access to real-time analytics to track their success.

According to Debelov, many social video ad platforms require a minimum of $100,000 to promote sponsored video content, which makes it inaccessible for smaller advertisers. Using Virool, anyone can start a video campaign for as little as $10 and only pay for the ad when someone watches their content for 30 seconds or longer.

Video advertising is predicted to skyrocket in the upcoming year, a trend investors are clearly paying attention to. Since launching in March, Virool has grown from 200 to more than 30,000 customers, ranging from independent artists to large corporate clients like Intel, Samsung, K-Swiss, Sony, and Orbitz. The platform apparently reaches 750,000 people a day and more than 22 million a month.

The list of contributors include big names in venture capital and angel investing, and Virool will use the funds to meet high demand for its product. Institutional investors include Thomvest Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurveston, Yuri Milner, Phenomenon Ventures, TMT Investments, DominateFund, and FundersClub. Individual investors include Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Troy Carter, Dave McClure, Farzad Nazem, Erik Moore, and Garry Tan. Virool was also the first company to officially receive investment from online investing platform FundersClub.

In October, FundersClub broke Y Combinator’s record with its $6 million round, which was subsequently broken by ZenPayroll’s $6.1 million raise in December. And let’s not forget about YC startups Pair, Ark, and SocialCam which all raised over $4 million in seed funding.

Many in the startup community advise against huge seed rounds because it involves giving away significant equity and freedom early on. Ironically, Virool investor Dave McClure spoke just last week about the importance of not taking excessive amounts of seed financing and keeping valuations in check. Often in the bubble that is Silicon Valley, people in all parts of the ecosystem focus too much on fundraising and equate large investments with validation or success.

Only time will tell if this funding lifts Virool up to the new heights, or if it gets crushed by the weight of the beanstalk.

Check out Virool’s video called “The Secret of All Viral Videos” to learn more … kind of.

AfterCollege, which bills itself as the largest career network for college students and recent grads, helps hundreds of thousands of college students all over the country find the best career opportunities. As part of the career exploration process, students select companies they most want to apply to, and AfterCollege shared some of that data with VentureBeat.

“It’s a reflection of an employer’s brand with students,” AfterCollege’s chief executive Roberto Angulo told me. “The data comes from 200,000 students at 2,000 college campuses.”

AfterCollege segments its data by type of student. Google heads the list of who tech students in computer science disciplines most want to work for, followed by Microsoft and Intel. Apple shows up right behind IBM, in fifth spot.

1. Google
2. Microsoft
3. Intel
4. IBM
5. Apple
6. Amazon
7. National Security Agency
8. Facebook
9. NVIDIA
10. AT&T

For engineering students, the list looks a little different — kind of like a who’s-who of the military-industrial complex. IBM sinks to 9th, and Google and Apple disappear entirely. Intel, however, maintains its high ranking.

1. Boeing
2. Intel
3. Lockheed Martin
4. General Electric
5. Raytheon
6. NASA
7. Exxon Mobil
8. National Security Agency
9. IBM
10. The Aerospace Corporation

Business students, on the other hand, are much more interested in banks, consulting agencies, and telecommunications giants. But Google holds a fascination for business majors (who apparently haven’t been told yet that Google prefers CompSci majors), and Apple reappears at the bottom of the list. Intel, surprisingly, is high on yet another list, in fourth position.

1. Wells Fargo
2. Google
3. Target
4. Intel
5. JPMorgan Chase
6. AT&T
7. Bank of America
8. Deloitte
9. T. Rowe Price
10. Apple

I found it interesting that Facebook appears on only one of the lists, so I asked Angulo about the world’s largest social network, which famously started on college campuses.

“Facebook hovers from seven to eight” based on all the lists combined, Angulo said. “Even though 90% of our users are on Facebook, it doesn’t mean they want to work there.”

And as for Apple, which ranked fifth on the computer science students’ list, behind first-place Google, and tenth on another?

“Google has a very good on-campus recruiting program and is thought to have better work-life balance,” Angulo told me. “So while Apple may be a good company to invest in, it may not be the best company to work for.”

photo credit: Kris Kesiak Photography via photopin cc, fisserman via photopin cc

FetchFans.com is one of Fetch Plus’ social media marketing tools. It helps hundreds of franchised brands worldwide create consistent social profiles on Facebook and Twitter. The platform targets companies that need to maintain specific brand guidelines across multiple businesses or locations, while also empowering local franchises to adapt the messaging to their individual markets.

Companies that use FetchFans can centrally make campaign changes across their entire social media portfolio and uphold compliance with brand messaging. However, the franchises are able to modify the brand pages to accommodate different markets and new promotions. Fetch also provides analytical information and statistics to help brands review and compare the effectiveness of their various marketing campaigns, as well as tailor those campaigns to regional needs.

Since graduating from JFDI, FetchFans secured major customers in the real estate sector, including Keller Williams Realty International and Berkshire Property Advisors, as well as media conglomerate Singapore Press Holdings Magazines. JFDI-Innov8 is an Asia-based startup accelerator that gives 50 entrepreneurs from around the world 100 days to create prototype digital businesses and pitch their products to investors.

Fetch also participated in DEMO 2011 when it was still a fledgling company and looking to gauge interest in the model from the tech community. It is based in Singapore and was founded in 2010.

Apple’s brand value jumped 84 percent to $153.3 billion in the past year, mostly due to the iPad’s wild popularity and the iPhone’s continued growth. Google’s brand, meanwhile, fell 2 percent to $111.5 billion.

Given that Apple basically carved out an entirely new computing category with the iPad (or, at the very least, made the long-held fantasy of tablets a reality), it makes sense that the company’s brand would skyrocket. What is surprising is just how far beyond other big brands it is — Apple’s brand value is about $42 billion ahead of Google’s, and even further ahead of third-place brand IBM ($100.8 billion) and fourth place McDonald’s ($81 billion).

Other brands saw massive improvement in the past year as well. Facebook was named the top rising brand, growing 246 percent from last year to $19.1 billion. Chinese search giant (and Google competitor) Baidu was the second top riser, with a 141 percent improvement that led to a $22.5 billion brand value. Amazon overtook Wal-Mart to become the world’s top retail brand.

Technology brand value losers for the year included Nintendo, which fell 37 percent (likely due to slowing Wii sales), and Nokia, which fell 28 percent.

Via Bloomberg