July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Neighborhood boutiques thrive on foot traffic, but in today’s world, a digital presence is increasingly important for survival.

Boutiika is a startup that connects online shoppers to clothing available in local stores. Today the startup announced that it has expanded into three more cities, has more than 300 retailers available on the site, and added in a slew of new features.

Cities like New York and San Francisco are brimming with funky, unique local stores, but learning what clothing items and brands are in these stores at any given time is difficult without making an actual visit. Boutiika helps local store owners publicize their wares online. Users can search by specific stores and brands, new arrivals, and specific categories such as eco-friendly to see what is currently in stock.

Boutiika has updated the platform with a “gold dress” feature where shoppers can hold an item to try on in-store. It is also launching a same day delivery service in San Francisco called Dash by Boutiika. If you need a specific dress or a last-minute gift fast but can’t hit your favorite shops, Boutiika will help get it to you within hours. Major retailers like Amazon, eBay, Walmart, and even Google are all experimenting with same-day delivery models to get an edge in the competitive e-commerce space. Boutiika wants to bring this degree of immediacy and convenience to small, local stores.

“Boutique retailers crave foot traffic to their stores and local customers who will come back again,” founder Ruchika Kumar said in an interview with VentureBeat. “Our local commerce platform helps them show off everything they have in store and attract local customers. Think OpenTable — but for fashion.”

Boutiika grew out of Kumar’s idea to develop a directory of local boutiques. She said her friends weren’t interested in buying from expensive designer stores or big-box retailers — they wanted to patronize local gems. But it was challenging to do this online or on mobile devices. At the same time, neighborhood boutiques are starved for foot traffic and struggle to reach smartphone users. The idea proved popular with store owners and Boutiika was born in July. The company is dedicated to putting customers in boutiques in the real world rather than helping them establish a full-fledged e-commerce platform like competitors Shoptiques and Farfetch.

Kumar said there are five reasons why e-commerce will never replace local commerce. People still want to try on clothes before buying. Fit matters. Secondly, consumers still want to touch, feel, and see items, and they still enjoy the sensory experience of shopping. Going out shopping is also a fun activity for many people — a social endeavor, hobby, or escape that you can’t get online. People also appreciate the instant gratification of buying something in store and the personal attention and expertise of sales associates.

The expansion and updates are all intended to make brick-and-mortar retail more efficient, convenient, and Internet-savvy, while maintaining the strengths and joy and in-store shopping. Boutiika is now active in Austin, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle.

Image credit: Boutiika

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Traditional point-of-sale systems (POS) are another kind of POS, and today yet another startup received venture capital funding to improve them.

Erply provides POS system and inventory management software for commercial retail and e-commerce businesses. Today the company announced raising $2.15 million in its second round of funding, according to a report in TechCrunch.

The iPad app and cloud-based platform provide a centralized place to manage multiple areas of a retail business, including POS, inventory, payroll, accounting, and multi channel e-commerce in an integrated system. Businesses can easily add new locations into the system and the retail CRM feature tracks customers and captures their data. There are also sales and marketing campaign tools.

Erply can handle data across physical shops, online stores and warehouses, and provides real-time dashboards of activity. The software is integrated with other platforms including accounting programs like QuickBooks and web-shops like Magento, Amazon, eBay, and Google.

Old school POS systems are difficult to manage, not connected to the Internet and expensive, not to mention cumbersome. Retailers used to deal with printers, cash registers, barcode, scanners, physical receipts, inventory software etc… and none of these systems were connected.

Over the past few years, a crop of startups has given the POS industry a mobile, cloud-based overhaul. The most well-known of these startups is Square which pioneered a small piece of hardware known as a dongle that is accompanied by a suite of software called Square Register. However retailers that have existing POS systems may not want to throw them out the window, and Erply’s technology helps them bring together the convenience and connectedness of cloud-based systems, with all the features and support they need.

The company has 100,000 small to medium business (SMB) customers and 120,000 users, and its client base is growing by around 20 percent each month. Customers include Elizabeth Arden, BMW and The Athlete’s Foot and the company is making a push to support Fortune 500 companies and gain traction in the enterprise space.

Erply has offices in New York, London, Australia, Denmark, and Tallinn, Estonia. Previous investor Redpoint Ventures led this round of financing to fuel growth and international expansion, and take on bigger players like Square and PayPal, other startups like GoPago and Vend. Index Ventures and Dave McClure also participated in this round.

It has raised $2 million in 2010 and this brings its total capital raises to $4.2 million.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Loyalty and payments startup Marqeta has raised $14 million and announced that it will power the Facebook Card.

Marqeta blurs the lines between online and offline commerce with its “pay in advance” approach. Consumers make their purchases online through the platform, and Marqeta sends them a free card to swipe when picking up their purchase. Retailers use the platform to offer perks like gifting, loyalty, promotions, cash back offers, charitable donations, and so on. Customers earn rewards as they use their card and Marqeta keeps tracks of all that information in one place. This system saves consumers money and offers retailers a channel for loyalty and marketing campaigns.

“Consumers are challenged with managing multitudes of offers, gift cards, and reward programs along with a lack of meaningful incentive to provide repeat business,” said Jason Gardner, the founder and CEO of Marqeta in an interview. “Retailers struggle to crack the code to easily capture customer loyalty and often need POS installation to run a rewards program, and enterprises are often unable to readily participate in relevant transactions within the payments stream, limiting their opportunities to optimize revenue. Marqeta makes the successful ‘pay-in-advance for your coffee’ Starbucks card model possible for everyone.”

The system works without any new software of hardware at the point-of-sale and requires no cashier training. Through the API and platform, merchants can customize their campaigns with different product uses and features. It is available at nine million locations on the Discover network.

Marqeta also announced today that its +M platform will drive Facebook’s gifting product Cards. Cards are like regular gift cards but work at a range of retailers like Jamba Juice, Olive Garden, Sephora, and Target. The cards can be reloaded and the balance checked from Facebook.

“Gifting is a very unique form of e-commerce, and we thought there was a lot more innovation that could be going on there,” said Gifts creator Lee Linden in a recent interview with VentureBeat.

Marqeta claimed in a statement issued this morning that the gift card space is worth $115 billion, but that merchants face significant challenges maintaining consumer relationships once the gift cards are issued. By requiring users to register on Marqeta, retailers can convert their loyalty campaigns into a “true marketing and engagement engine.”

This funding will go towards forming new national partnerships, “aggressively” expand its footprint, and contribute to product development. Existing investors Greylock IL and Granite Ventures participated in this round, along with new investor Commerce Ventures. Marqeta was founded in 2010 and has raised $22 million to date. The company has 37 employees and is based in Emeryville, Calif.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

JOOR is using software to make the journey from runway to retail stores as smooth as walking down a catwalk.

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

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Dongles are a serious business. They are transforming the point-of-sale industry as higher rates of mobile penetration, the growth of e-commerce, and advancements in digital payments lead to a much-needed overhaul.

Today, Javelin Strategy and Research released a report that found mobile point-of-sale (POS) technology poses a significant and growing threat to terminal-based solutions.

Despite the popularity of online shopping, in-store retail still “towers above” the online market with 92.6 percent of total retail dollar volume in the U.S.. However, mobile devices have fundamentally changed the way brick-and-mortar businesses accept payments. Javelin’s report involved interviews with executives at 14 mobile POS providers, as well as data from a random survey of 6,651 consumers, and identified some key trends and themes in the market.

Javelin estimates that mobile POS could expand payment card acceptance by up to 19 million businesses, which could account for up to $1.1 trillion in annual new-card payments. Most of the mobile POS companies offer bundled solutions (hardware + software + services) and charge a fixed percentage fee per transaction, with no hidden costs. Since margins in this area are “razor-thin,” simple sign-up and setup, fast access to money, and strong customer support are necessary for survival. Strategic distribution partnerships, such as Square’s arrangements with Starbucks and Walmart, also help with adoption.

Security is another important concern because without it, neither businesses nor consumers will be willing participants. Javelin found that only 28 percent of consumers consider processing card payments on a mobile device to be secure, and financial institutions require high security standards.

Along with security, convenience is another strong driver of consumer use. A recent report by ComScore found that most consumers are not aware of or actively using digital wallets, but 36 percent of the vendors surveyed still offer one. This is driven by the desire to offer “360 degrees” of services and lock down both the business and the consumer side of the marketplace.

Square was identified as the catalyst in the industry, but there is a significant amount of competition at home and abroad. Clones like iZettle and Payleven have adapted mobile POS to European markets, and PayPal even rolled out a triangle dongle to poke at Square.

As this sector takes off, mobile POS companies are evolving as well by targeting “bigger fish.” Mobile POS systems were first adopted by micro-businesses but have increasingly attracted customers from all parts of the spectrum, ranging from individual craftsmen to massive national chains like Starbucks. By catering to larger businesses, mobile POS startups are able to process a higher volume of transactions. This also requires a greater level of integration, more advanced capabilities, and features like loyalty programs, offers, and online ordering.

Mobile POS solutions provide more cost-effective, convenient and easy-to-implement alternatives to legacy payment systems. They are connected to the Internet, portable, and offer management tools and data analytics. Furthermore, the cloud architecture opens up constant opportunities for iteration.

Shopping is not an either-online-or-offline experience anymore. People commonly browse the Internet before going into a physical shop or search for competitive prices on their phones while standing in the checkout line. Mobile POS is not only changing the POS industry, it is also changing the  retail industry as a whole. The possibilities for integrating the online and offline experiences are endless. Javelin said this technology “will change the way Americans think about the shopping experience.”

Dongles, it seems, will soon take over the world.

Read more about disruption in the point-of-sale industry on VentureBeat. 

Photo Credit: Square

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Small business owners play a big role in the battles against disease, climate change, and corporate wrong-doing. In the past year, a company called CircleUp has helped them with their fight.

CircleUp is a crowdfunding platform for up-and-coming consumer product businesses. In the year since its launch, CircleUp has helped 12 companies raise more than $10 million.

Investors are often reluctant to invest in consumer products companies because it is hard to make millions of dollars on granola. Accordingly, passionate entrepreneurs who lovingly produce organic food products, handmade jewelry, or natural face creams struggle to attract the capital they need to reach consumers.

CircleUp bridges this gap by providing a platform where accredited investors can access a curated, vetted selection of consumer products companies and make equity-based investments.

“We love that investors are able to see, touch, taste, and experience the company’s products first hand,” said CEO Ryan Caldbeck. “An investor on our site can go to their local Whole Foods or Starbucks to see and test the products, which we believe helps them feel more connected to the investment. We also believe the lack of traditional funding for early stage consumer/retail products creates an opportunity unlike other industries, where the risk of adverse selection for crowdfunding platforms is greater.”

In honor of its first birthday, the company shared some information about its momentum. Featured companies raise an average of $1 million on the site and have also been able to expand their distribution through partnerships with large corporations like P&G and General Mills. Since the beginning of 2013, the amount of money flowing through the platform has doubled. Over 70% of companies listed close deals, including products in accessories, back foods, baby food, healthy and beauty products, and food. The fastest raise closed in two weeks, and seven of the twelve companies are women-owned.

Caldbeck attributes the success to three factors- the team, a exclusive, vertical focus on consumer products and retail, and a regulatory approach that lets them help small businesses ahead of the JOBS Act implementation. Furthermore, CircleUp is at the intersection of two significant trends. Crowdfunding is popular right now, as are small-production, high-quality, unique products with a story behind them.

So for all you people out there who appreciate health-food, slow-food, boutique, artisanal, organic, local, seasonal, natural stuff, CircleUp could be partially to thank next time you find kale chips at your local market.

Photo Credit: sleepyneko/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The cash register is a relic of the Civil War era and has reigned as an icon of American commerce ever since.

Walking into a business, selecting what you would like to purchase, and paying for it at a register is an American ritual. However, the average point-of-sale (POS) system is expensive and costly to maintain, inconvenient to set up and manage, and not connected to the Internet. Despite the fact that these types of transactions occur million of times every day, the last significant shift occurred in the 1950s when credit cards and terminals entered the scene.

Now, the point-of-sale industry is undergoing its next wave of transformation as higher rates of mobile penetration and the growth of e-commerce and digital payments set the scene for a mobile-centric, cloud-connected overhaul. At last, Internet companies are fundamentally changing the way brick-and-mortar businesses accept payments.

Dance of the dongles 

Square took the payments sector by storm when Twitter founder Jack Dorsey launched it in 2009. The startup makes a small piece of hardware that plugs into smartphones that reads credit cards. Dongles, as they are affectionately called, quickly rose to the forefront of the international tech scene, with competitors such as iZettle, Payleven, and mPowa cropping up on every continent.

When Square first started out, it primarily targeted its dongle to small business owners who could not afford a point-of-sale system but needed to accept electronic payments to keep their business afloat. Square Register now includes a full suite of software with checkout customization features, management tools, and data analytics. As a result, customers are expanding beyond the initial market of roaming food truck owners, artisans, and taxi drivers. VP of Square Register Jesse Dorogusker said that the set using iPads specifically for physical stores is the fastest growing segment of the business.

“This has been a gathering storm for many quarters,” he said in an interview with VentureBeat. “What is resonating with these merchants is the ability to impact their businesses using analytics and reporting. Our vision for the future of commerce involves a point-of-sale that provides a variety of features to support businesses, and the hands-free experience of the square wallet for consumers. We are changing the way commerce is done to make it easier for everybody.”

In August 2012, Square announced a surprising partnership with Starbucks that meant Square would power the coffee giant’s credit and debit payments nationwide and that it would begin accepting Pay with Square. Starbucks is a massive international business and falls significantly outside of Square’s initial target market. In this case, Square is not serving as a substitute for traditional methods of payment. Rather, the technology works with them to break POS outside of the limitation of cash registers. This move made it clear that Square had ambitions beyond hipster coffee joints and crafts fairs — and the muscle to execute on it. The $200 million venture capital round (at a $3.25 billion valuation) didn’t hurt, either.

For those business that need more than a dongle, but don’t already have a POS system in place, Square released the “business-in-a-box” earlier this year. The package contains a card reader, iPad stand, cash drawer, and printer for stores that want to run their entire payments system using Square’s software (iPad not included). The software is easy to set up and has tools to help merchants keep track of inventory and receipts, and gain actionable, data-driven insights into their day-to-day operations.

Square now has offerings for businesses of all sizes, and perhaps most importantly, those that are growing and want scaleable systems to grow with them.

Cash register vanishing act

Blue Bottle Coffee is a prime example of a company “growing up” with Square. This boutique coffee company recently raised $20 million to expand beyond its home base in California and adopted Square as the method of payment in all existing and future locations. The chain is known for its obsessive attention to detail emphasis on quality. About a month ago, Blue Bottle announced that it would implement Square in all its locations.

“Customers want to go to beautiful, clean places where the people are nice and you can get something that is high-quality and delicious,” said Blue Bottle’s founder and CEO James Freeman. “Square involves no wires or cords, and it speeds people through the line to make the whole experience of transacting as smooth as possible. Giant cash registers are a horrible object to have on your counter, but an iPad is not.”

In addition to aesthetics, collecting and visualizing data is important for businesses of all types and sizes. Reporting and analytics were once beyond the realm of small business owners, who did not have the tech savvy or resources to deal with this kind of information. However, the dogma of data is spreading, and brick-and-mortar businesses also want to benefit from its power.

GoPago is another startup offering an alternative to credit card machines and cash registers. The package includes a preconfigured tablet, data plan, card reader, printer, data plan, and cloud-based software that also offers analytics.

“There was a large need out there to modernize point of sale, because cash registers don’t talk to the Internet,” said Leo Rocco, the CEO of GoPago. “Our automated reporting system allows merchants to slice the information into different categories to provide understanding down to a granular level. These turnkey solutions will be the norm, as physical businesses begin to leverage what companies like Amazon and ebay have done for e-commerce.”

The one true payment service

PayPal is, of course, the grandaddy of digital payments. The company started in the offline world but has dedicated significant resources to establishing a presence in the physical one. PayPal first launched its own point-of-sale product in May. PayPal in stores requires shoppers to enter their phone number and a pin code during checkout, instead of swiping their credit or debit card and pay via their PayPal account. The service is now available in nearly 20,000 retail locations around the country, including 23 national retailers like Jamba Juice and JC Penny.

“We have spent the past year-and-a-half reinventing and reinvigorating PayPal to give the brand a personality,” said PayPal VP of global product Hill Ferguson during a media sit-down. “It didn’t used to mean anything to people unless they were sitting in front of a computer. Now we have a mobile-first philosophy and other programs to reach consumers at every part of the loop. We help offline users get online and inline users get offline to make the shopping experience as secure and convenient as possible.”

PayPal recently announced a partnership with NCR, a point-of-sale company that has been around for 128 years (or since the dawn of the cash register). As if this wasn’t enough, the PayPal also released a triangular dongle of its own called PayPal Here in 2012, which expanded the service into the U.K. earlier this year. PayPal also introduced PayPal Here for iPad.

“We’ve been around for 15 years, and shopping is going to change more in the next few years than it has in the previous 15,” said Anuj Nayar, PayPal’s senior director of communications. “The last major retail innovation was the credit card, and now finally the line between online and in-store payments is starting to break down. From our point of view, there is not a one-size-fits-all solution for all small businesses, so we provide a range of ways that small businesses can start to take advantage of these new technologies.”

Visions of a digital wallet future

PayPal may be building off the innovation of smaller startups, but its vast reach and broad range of products could make it the global leader. Square has three million individuals and businesses using it and has yet to penetrate mainstream America or international markets. In contrast, PayPal has 123 million accounts, and Nayar said there are 40 million terminals around the world that can be configured to accept PayPal payments. Its recognizable brands and familiarity with finance and banking in different economies are a distinct advantage.

Take the example of digital wallets. Square, Google, Mastercard, and Visa all offer digital wallets, but few people use them. ComScore recently released a digital wallet study that identified low awareness, understanding of benefits, and availability among retailers are among the key barriers to the adoption of digital wallets. PayPal struggles with none of these issues, which is why its 72 percent of the study’s respondents had heard of PayPal’s digital wallet and 48 percent had used it. Far behind in second place was Google Wallet with 8 percent, with Mastercard, Visa, and Square hovering around 2 percent adoption.

It is still early days for digital wallet technology, but chances are it will become more mainstream as consumers become more comfortable with the shifting landscape of payments. For both consumers and businesses, Internet companies are going head-to-head to win their hearts (and wallets). It won’t be long before transactions on all sides happen through smartphones.

To put it bluntly, POS systems are POS, but with mobile, cloud technology, and Internet startups are changing that.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

This is a guest post by Rene Reinsberg, CEO and Co-Founder at Locu

There has been a lot of talk lately about how the best business technology, historically only available to big corporations, has become increasingly available to small businesses.

Jeremy Levine, a venture capitalist at Bessemer Venture Partners, recently told me that “innovations in software UI, online distribution and application development will drive massive new software offerings for small businesses.”

So let’s take a step back and understand the technology tools that can benefit the largest group of people who have been hardest hit by large enterprises and new technologies: the tens of millions of local merchants all over the world.

A few weeks ago, Angelica’s, my favorite small café a few blocks from Union Square, stopping making their trademark sandwiches (trust me, they made to order and made with love) to selling only pre-made, wrapped items. Why? The old way of doing things took too long, and lost them revenue.

But what they really lost is the quality of the food and the personal experience that made Angelica’s special. The good news is that there are myriad technology tools that allows local businesses to be more efficient without sacrificing what makes them unique.

The digital equivalent of the big, friendly sign?

For local businesses, discoverability is key — both offline and online. If Angelica’s Café were bordering Union Square, it wouldn’t have difficulty attracting the throngs of pedestrians — a big, friendly sign would probably do the trick. Most local businesses are not that easily discoverable.

They need to leverage the digital equivalent of the big, friendly sign to ensure they are easy to find online. This will most likely still end up being solved by an online assistant – “Hey Siri, where can I get a massage nearby?”

A quick search on Google Maps, Yelp, and Foursquare or specialty sites like OpenTable, TripAdvisor and Citysearch are often consulted by consumers before they settle on a local business. It’s crucial for our café to be on the digital map and listed everywhere with up-to-date information, including price list and menu data. Companies like Infogroup, Yext, Constant Contact and my own, Locu, can help local businesses manage and distribute their information online.

Beyond the third party sites, a local business’s online presence matters. Does the business appear reputable? Website builder tools like WordPress or Squarespace have become more and more versatile and easy-to-use and have started to offer vertical-specific functionality. A great web presence will drive a lot of online visits (that may translate into offline visits) via search, and can be complemented by online advertising, either directly using Google’s Adwords or Facebook Ads, or online marketing facilitators such as Yodle, ReachLocal, or ThriveHive.

How about about social media?

Purchase intent is also increasingly triggered by Facebook and Twitter — it probably hasn’t been too long since you’ve heard someone say, “I really want to buy those pants I recently saw pinned on Pinterest” or “I just got this deal from Groupon today, this could be a great place to visit this weekend.”

Making live updates to Angelica’s web presence is not the kind of thing a busy local merchant has time to do, but it’s so important.

I recommend posting menu changes online, instead of just on their menu board, with photos of specials to allow their customers to easily find and share the information. This is where where automating and optimizing a merchant’s web presence based on the customer, time of day, and other contextual cues will drive foot traffic to a merchant.

It’s all about the transaction

Once the decision where to buy has been made, it is all about the transaction. Whether booking a yoga class on SpaFinder, making an appointment with a hair stylist on StyleSeat, scheduling a car repair via YourMechanic, finding a photographer on Thumbtack or making a reservation at a restaurant with OpenTable, more and more transactions are initiated and facilitated by smart technology. Plenty of companies, including GrubHub, Seamless and Eat24,facilitate take-out and deliveries for restaurants.

The point-of-sale (POS) market has been undergoing a huge transformation, with many of the new solutions operating on non-proprietary tablet devices, such as AppleiPads, reducing the hardware cost and increasing usability.It’s never been easier for a local business to set up areliable POS system and leverage its data to gain insights into its sales and identify areas to improve profitability. The newer POS systems like Square’s Register, Groupon’s Breadcrumb and Instore come with a set of intuitive analytics, and startups like CoPilot Labs can offer additional insights based on POS data (even from the old-school POS systems).

One specific example of how Angelica could benefit from all this would be to allow customers to pre-order sandwiches. It would not only reduce the waiting time but also help Angelica sell more sandwiches during the busy lunch hour.

Loyalty shouldn’t be the last marketing tool

Chris Luo of FiveStars points out in a recent blog post that “loyalty has often been the last marketing tool deployed, and the methods used to drive it have been rudimentary.”  While there have been a number of startups, including Belly, Punchcard and Cardify, that provide digital loyalty programs in all shapes and forms, I still see a lot of businesses hand out physical punch cards.

Digital loyalty systems can help merchants provide customized, relevant promotions, in turn increasing engagement, and ultimately driving word-of-mouth.

What’s next? Integration

It’s easy for local merchants to be overwhelmed by the seeming laundry list of technologies they should adopt to make their lives easier.   In fact, there’s a wide open market for integrating the many tools and signals a merchant has access to, so that they can start to get insights from multiple channels.

Wouldn’t it be nice for a local business to know at the point-of-sale where a certain customer has been, and how frequently they have made a purchase? Some of the new POS solutions have taken an integrated approach, looking to offer a seamless end-to-end solution. As more and more data surfaces at each interaction point between merchant and consumers, and becomes available through analytics tools, local merchants will be able to gain actionable insights to increase revenues.

Marc Andreessen, an entrepreneur turned venture capitalist, referenced the classic ‘Walmart versus local retailer’ example in an interview with TechCrunch, pointing out that “Walmart’s advantage in logistics and in pricing and in data analytics was just so great that they could kill small retailers at will.“ But perhaps not anymore, and he adds, “There is an opportunity here for a shift of the balance of power for big businesses to small businesses.”

The world is a much more interesting, vibrant and beautiful place because of local businesses like Angelica’s café.

Rene Reinsberg is the CEO and Co-Founder at Locu, a startups that helps local businesses manage and distribute their menus and price lists across the web and connect directly with current and prospective customers.

Locu’s API gives developers access to the world’s largest real-time, structured repository of local business offerings data, leveraging a patent-pending technology platform that digitizes and structures real-world content.

Small business owner via mangostock, Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Google reportedly plans to open several retail locations in the United States before the end of 2013, a move that would better position its products against Apple and Microsoft.

The decision to add a retail presence, which was first posted by 9to5Google, would give Google a direct outlet for selling products like its Nexus phones and tablets and its Chromebook laptops. It could also provide a place to educate consumers about Android and help customers that have problems with their Android phones.

If 9to5Google’s reporting is correct, Google hopes to have its first flagship Google Stores open just in time for the holiday season. Naturally, Google will focus on opening up shop in “major metropolitan areas.”

It at least has a little experience in physical retail. Google has been testing a retail presence inside hundreds of Best Buy locations in the United States with its Chromebook displays, so it may have learned a few lessons from that.

Clearly the move is meant to counter Apple, which has had tremendous success with its retail operations. Apple currently has 400 stores in 12 countries, and it plans to open another 30 stores this year.

Microsoft also followed Apple’s retail lead in the past few years by opening several stores through the United States and Canada. The company opened 51 “full line” (large retail locations) and “specialty” stores in 2012, and said it will open six more stores in early 2013. Those stores aren’t always staffed by the most friendly people, but at least they’ve got a direct line to consumers who might need help with Windows or Windows Phone devices.

Google photo via Robert Scoble/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Apple stores aren’t big enough, CEO Tim Cook said today at a Goldman Sach’s conference in San Francisco, and there aren’t enough of them. So the company is moving and expanding 20 existing stores and adding 30 new ones this year.

“Our average store does $50 million in revenue,” Cook said in some amazement. “Who would have thought of that!”

He also likened Apple’s stores to a drug, saying that he uses them as a quick pick-me-up if he ever gets depressed.

“If I ever feel I’m dropping down from an excitement level, I go in a store … it’s like a Prozac,” Cook said. “It’s a feeling like no other.”

Apple currently has 400 stores in 12 countries. One of the 30 new stores the company is adding in 2013 is its first in Turkey, which will be Apple retail’s 13th country. Last year, Cook said, 370 million people came in to an Apple store, including 120 million in the last quarter alone.

Cook credits the stores for at least part of the iPad’s success:

“I don’t think we’d have been as successful with iPad if we didn’t have our stores,” he said. “I don’t think the launch would have been nearly as successful. They’re an incredible competitive advantage … that is not so easy to replicate.”

Analysts had questioned earlier in the call what Apple is doing with its $137 billion in cash, and Cook said that opening more stores was one way the company would be putting that money to work. The new stores help Apple launch new products and educate customers on new categories, he added … perhaps a hint that Apple will launch some entirely new category of products (Apple TV, anyone?) at some point in the future.

Cook also said that perhaps “store” was not the right word for Apple’s retail endeavors anymore, noting that local musicians play gigs there, people come in for a social experience, and that each store is, in some way, becoming a focus for local community events.

None of which detracts, of course, from that $50 million in revenue per store.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

This is the third in my series looking at offline retail. Earlier, I looked at how to reinvent big box electronics and department stores.

The humble receipt doesn’t get much thought. It’s usually a little slip that you get at the end of a transaction. It’s printed on flimsy paper. Leave it out in the sun and most of the text will disappear quickly. It gets crumpled. It gets lost. It also wastes paper to transmit data that could be sent electronically. It’s increasingly an annoyance for those who’ve become accustomed to online shopping.

Fortunately, there’s good news: More and more retailers are offering to email your receipt to you. There’s also bad news: They aren’t doing a great job of it.

Here’s an e-receipt from Nordstrom:

For starters, it took more than 20 minutes from the time I completed the transaction until the receipt arrived in my mailbox. It should arrive instantly. Otherwise, many people will ask for a paper copy just in case.

The item I bought is described as “BTMS-MN SP:STARFISH BM 10149099 728679083086″. Good luck figuring out what that is without Googling it. Knowing what I actually bought, I could translate that as Bottoms-Men. I don’t know what SP is. Starfish is the description. If I were searching my email for the Boss swim trunks I bought, the text in the email would be no help.

Nordstrom is applying the constraints of an old medium to new technology. They are taking the output that would go to the printer and redirecting it to email.

That’s the wrong approach. Descriptions on print receipts are optimized to save paper. There’s an opportunity to do much better.

The transaction data should be translated to take advantage of the infinite space, searchability and interactivity of email.

The email should have:

• Pictures of each item, if available.
• A human readable description. “BOSS Black Starfish Swim Trunks”
• A link to leave a rating of my swim trunks.
• Cross sells for related items. If you liked these trunks, you might like these flip flops.

(Receipts from Nordstrom.com have the human readable description, but not the other items.)

This would improve the experience for the consumer, potentially improve the experience for other customers (through more ratings data), and improve cross sells.

Stores should remember my receipt preferences so I don’t have to provide my email address or even ask each time. Macy’s already does this. When you swipe your credit card, you can say you want paper receipts, email receipts, or both. The next time you swipe the same card, the POS system looks up your preference and acts accordingly.

Ideally, stores would create a seamless offline-online experience. It shouldn’t matter if I bought in store or online. I should be able to pull up my purchase history in my online account.

Rocky Agrawal is an analyst focused on the intersection of local, social and mobile. He is a principal analyst at reDesign mobile. Previously, he launched local and mobile products for Microsoft and AOL. He blogs at http://blog.agrawals.org; and tweets at @rakeshlobster.

[Top image credit: Arno Staub/Shutterstock]

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Yesterday, I wrote about how big-box retailers like electronics stores could improve the in-store experience. Today, I want to talk about department stores. This post does not apply to Nordstrom and JC Penney, which don’t follow the typical department store model.

As online retailers incorporate better technology to improve the shopping experience for consumers, the convenience and experience gap between offline and online gets bigger. Retailers who don’t adopt new technologies and practices risk being left in the dust as online retailers further encroach.

Fake pricing

Many department stores use fake pricing. If you read the fine print on their sale ads, you’ll usually find language to the effect that the “regular” prices are offering prices only and they aren’t claiming anyone ever bought it at that price.

I was browsing through a department store and found a set of flatware on “sale” for $110. (“Regular” price $140.) When I got to the register, the woman behind the counter asked if I had any coupons. I didn’t, but she managed to “find” one for me that knocked the price down to $88. I went ahead and bought it. Because the battery was dead on my phone, I didn’t do what I normally do and check the price on Amazon.

When I got home, I checked Amazon’s price. The “regular” price on Amazon was $80, about 10% better than the super-secret “sale” price I was given.

Mobile phones bring a whole new level of price transparency that makes the fake pricing model break down. If in store, I saw a regular price of $88 and an Amazon price of $80, I’d probably buy it in store anyway. But I was so annoyed with the hoops required to get that price that I just returned the flatware to the store and bought it from Amazon.

To make matters worse, it’s often easier to find Amazon’s price for a product than it is to find the store’s price. Because they change prices so frequently, department stores don’t display the current price on an item’s tag. They usually rely on signs placed throughout the department. If someone moved an item or if your item is an exception, you may be in for a surprise at the register. Or, you might have to do math to figure out what the right price is. (What is 30% of X?)

Amazon frequently changes its pricing, but it doesn’t rely on fake pricing. And the current price is displayed on the item’s details page; no math required.

Size and selection

One of the challenges of in-store shopping is that you’re your own picker. The massive warehouses that companies like Amazon use organize products very well because they are paying the expense of the picker.

When I shop online, I don’t have to worry about digging through a stack of shirts to find my size. I select it from a pulldown and someone else does the work. At department stores, I have to do the work. Because people move things around, they’re often not where they’re supposed to be. Even worse, you might find after spending 10 minutes looking through a stack of shirts that your size isn’t even in stock. (Never mind that you did this after lunch with food residue on your hands and just soiled the whole stack of shirts.)

Although this experience is unlikely ever to be as convenient as online, it can definitely be improved.

For starters, a mobile app could tell you whether your size is even in stock, saving you the frustration of a snipe hunt.

Size-specific RFID tags could be attached to the loss prevention sensors to make it easier to find the right size.

Of the retailers I frequent, Nordstrom does by far the best job of incorporating mobile technologies. You can scan a barcode with the Nordstrom app to see if a product is available. Nordstrom even has seamless inventory tracking across its online fulfillment and its stores. If you are in a store and that store doesn’t have your size, it’s easy to search across the entire system, and Nordstrom will ship it to you for free. Like the Apple store, Nordstrom associates can check you out with an iPod Touch and email you a receipt.

Nordstrom is so far ahead of other retailers that I often forget about the capabilities available to me.

Coupons, coupons, coupons

In order to convince you that you’re getting a great deal and drive a sense of urgency, department stores frequently make use of coupons. Unfortunately, they’re loaded with restrictions that even their own staff can’t understand or explain.

I went to a major department store and picked out a couple of shirts. After waiting in line, I got to the front and presented my coupon. Nope, it doesn’t apply, because the shirts were on a morning special. (Which wasn’t listed among the dozens of restrictions.) Another time, the only explanation the clerk could come up with was, “the computer won’t take it.” When the rules are so complex that your own staff can’t explain them, it’s probably time to reconsider the rules.

The same store has a habit of running two-day morning coupons, valid in the mornings on two consecutive days. But if you arrive later in the day, the coupon won’t apply. You’ll have to come back the next morning.

Time of transition

In a time when it’s getting harder and harder to get consumers in the store, why turn away people who are ready to buy with marketing techniques designed for a different age? When I can shop at home in my underwear at any time of day, why do you want to make it harder than it has to be to shop in your store? I don’t need to be able to shop in my underwear in your store (frankly, no one wants to see that, and I don’t want to see other people shopping in underwear), but stores do need to remove some of the artificial pain points.

There is a danger in going too far, too fast. That’s what’s happened at JC Penney, where former Apple retail head Ron Johnson is now CEO. He radically transformed the store’s structure very quickly. He switched the company’s pricing and promotions from department-store type fake pricing to everyday pricing like Target, Wal-mart, and Costco. Because JC Penney customers had been trained to expect constant sales, JC Penney revenues took a hit.

Johnson’s strategy is the right approach to competing with online retail in the long term, the question is whether JC Penney will be around to see it.

But other retailers can take smaller steps to make in-store shopping more convenient.

Rocky Agrawal is an analyst focused on the intersection of local, social and mobile. He is a principal analyst at reDesign mobile. Previously, he launched local and mobile products for Microsoft and AOL. He blogs at http://blog.agrawals.org; and tweets at @rakeshlobster.

[Top image credit: IMG_191 LLC/Shutterstock]

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

One of the biggest challenge facing big box retailers is that online shopping is getting more convenient all the time.

Stored credit card information makes checking out a breeze. Expedited fulfillment like Amazon Prime, which offers free two-day shipping, dramatically reduces the delay in getting products. (In many markets, Amazon can deliver many products overnight.) These changes make brick-and-mortar shopping even less convenient by comparison.

Last week, I had an experience at a large national electronics chain that highlighted some of these important differences.

Some of these can be improved with technology, possibly creating opportunities for startups to plug these holes.

Returns

My first task was to return an iPod Touch. Around 11 a.m. on a Thursday, there were three people in line in front of me and one person working the returns counter. I stood in line stewing about the wait and getting more and more upset at the retailer.

Although returns have long been a hassle for online purchases, that process has gotten much easier. Nordstrom.com includes a prepaid shipping label that you can just stick on the box to send something back. Amazon lets you print out a label from its Web site. If a return was Amazon’s fault, it pays the return shipping. If not, it deducts the cost of return shipping from your refund. Still, that’s a lot more convenient than weighing your return, calculating postage, and going to the post office.

The ideal solution at retail would be to staff the customer service desk appropriately. But I don’t see that happening. A very good solution would be to give customers tickets and let them shop the store while they are waiting to return something or for other customer service. When the staff is available, they would be paged to the desk. This could be done with devices like the pagers that some chain restaurants use. Instead of getting upset with the store, consumers might actually buy something else.

Inadequate/incorrect/misleading signage

After I returned the iPod, I was browsing through the store and found a table with some open-box items. There was a sign that touted 50% off qualifying open-box items. But the sign had no definition of “qualifying”; it said that I had to ask an associate for details. The first associate I found just said it wasn’t his department. (No offer to help me find someone who could answer the question.) After a few minutes, I found an associate from the department who could answer. It turns out the discount applied to everything on the open-box table; if it was on the table, it “qualified”. So why not just say that?

How much does this thing cost?

A frequent frustration with offline retail is that you often don’t know what things cost. With online retailers, the current price is usually displayed right on the product page. In some cases (when there are manufacturer’s restrictions on minimum advertised price), you may have to add the item to your cart before you see the price. But this is just a click away.

I found an Epson projector on that 50%-off table that I wanted to buy. The store’s regular price was $649.99. It had an open box sticker that marked it down to  $585.99. (I did a quick check on Amazon and found that Amazon was charging $600 for a new unit.) But was the price of the open-box unit 50% off $649.99 or $585.99? Unclear.

As it turns out, the projector was still in the store’s system at $649.99. The clerk pulled out his iPhone and manually did the price calculation ($585.99 / 2 = $292.995). He then put that into the register.

If I had gone to the front registers, they would have had no idea about the discount, and this would have resulted in an even more frustrating experience. If the store had decided on a lower price, it should ring up at the lower price automatically, no matter what register I take it to. Target actually does a nice job on this. Each discounted unit is individually labeled. In cases where only a specific unit is discounted (for example, if it is a return), they go the extra mile to cover up the regular bar code so that the cashier can’t incorrectly ring up the higher price.

Manager to home theater

Back to my open-box projector. Because the correct price wasn’t programmed into the point-of-sale system, the clerk had to page a manager to approve the discount. The manager was busy with someone else, so I had to wait on that. Then the manager had to walk across the store to approve the discount.

I can program my TiVo from halfway around the world, but a manager can’t approve a discount from across the store? This seems like an ideal use case for mobile technology. When a price override request is made, the details should pop up on a mobile display so the manager can approve it from wherever she is.

But without that kind of solution on hand, all of the steps I had to go through at the retail store turned what could have been a 10-minute shopping trip into a 45-minute shopping trip. I was relating this story to a friend and his response was that I got a $600 projector for $300, so I should be happy. True. But given finite resources of store personnel, time spent on customers because of inefficient process hurts all customers.

Later in the day, I decided the projector was such a good deal, I should buy another one. There was a new clerk there who didn’t know about the special pricing. I showed him my receipt from earlier in the day and he agreed to match it.

When he ran my credit card, American Express suspected fraud. Apparently, their algorithms think it’s unlikely that I’d shop at the same big-box retailer twice in one day.

Unless big boxes start to close the technology gap, that will become increasingly true.

Rocky Agrawal is an analyst focused on the intersection of local, social and mobile. He is a principal analyst at reDesign mobile. Previously, he launched local and mobile products for Microsoft and AOL. He blogs at http://blog.agrawals.org; and tweets at @rakeshlobster.

[Top image credit: SVLuma/Shutterstock]

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Target really, really wants you to stop buying stuff on Amazon.

The retailer announced today that it’s introducing year-round price matching to its online store. With the move, Target seeks to prevent consumers from checking out items in its stores and then buying them for less on Amazon, an increasingly prevalent process known as “showrooming.”

It’s not all about Amazon, though. Target will also match prices from rival retailers like Best Buy, Toys “R” Us, and Walmart — though none of those stores come close to the threat posed by Amazon.

But will it work? Probably not, and for one main reason: Price-matching requires too much effort, and most consumers are unlikely to even bother doing the homework required to take advantage of it.

Even Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel has downplayed the utility of price matching for consumers. “We don’t see a lot of price match activity in our stores,” he said in November.

If Target is really serious about year-round price-matching, it should make the process as frictionless as possible. “Price-matching” may sound good on paper, but Target has a long way to go before it rewires consumers’ brains to think of it, not Amazon, as the lowest price guarantor.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Furthering its quest to bring Google Analytics-style metrics to the real world, Palo Alto-based Euclid announced a new product today that will let retailers use their own wireless networks to grab useful analytics from any shopper with a Wi-Fi enabled smartphone.

Dubbed Euclid Zero, the product is an evolution of Euclid’s initial offering, which required retailers to purchase sensor hardware. Since Euclid Zero uses existing wireless networks, retailers don’t have to buy any new hardware. Euclid has partnered with business Wi-Fi providers like Aruba Networks, Aerohive, and Fortinet to offer its analytics with just a single click.

Euclid collects aggregated data on shoppers, including their visit duration and engagement rate, and presents it in an online dashboard for retailers. The company’s technology can grab information about a shopper even if they never connect to an in-store Wi-Fi network. Just like online metrics, Euclid’s data could help store owners learn useful details about their customers. For example, it could let a retailer know if something about their store is causing a significant amount of customers to leave quickly.

Like most companies that collect consumer data, Euclid claims all of its data is grabbed anonymously, and consumers can opt out as well.

After launching last fall and snagging $5.8 million in funding, Euclid has gone from processing a million analytics events a day to handling more than three billion, according to chief executive Will Smith. The company now powers analytics for a dozen of the top 100 retailers.

“Our data set and scale has grown tremendously,” Smith said in an interview with VentureBeat.

Euclid Zero could potentially serve as a selling point for enterprise Wi-Fi networks to retailers, so it’s no surprise to see the big Wi-Fi providers jump aboard.

Eventually, Smith notes the company could eventually bring its tracking technology to other spaces. “There are all sorts of spaces that need to be quantified,” Smith said, citing event venues and conference centers as future targets.

Photo via Shutterstock

The new $5000 EyeSee mannequins contain cameras in their eyes that are connected to facial recognition software that analyzes customers’ faces, classifying them by age, sex, race, and ethnicity. The cameras also, according to a company press release, can tell merchandisers when the store is getting crowded, and what products or clothing are attracting the most attention.

The primary goal of the seeing-eye mannequins is to retailers maximize sales by finding ways to improve product and window displays.

According to Almax, privacy is not an issue, as analyzed pictures are not saved or transmitted, so shopper data is simply aggregated without a record of specific individuals. Bloomberg says the high-tech mannequins are currently being used in three European countries as well as the U.S., and have already led store managers to revise marketing practices after learning that men who shopped early in a sale spent more than women.

Source: Almax

EyeSee mannequins in action

(That may not be a shock to most wives, since some men — OK, yours truly — are horrible shoppers when it comes to getting good deals.)

The facial recognition technology was developed by Italian company Kee Square, a spinoff from the Polytechnical University of Milan. According to its website, Kee Square develops, integrates, and customizes biometrics products for law enforcement agencies and businesses.

The question, I guess, is whether we want our dummies looking back at us, and whether we believe that any collected data will be used, managed, and disposed of responsibly. Many stores, of course, already use sophisticated video surveillance.

But there is definitely something just a little bit creepier about dummies, mannequins, and doppelgängers looking back at us.

Image credits: Almax

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Editor’s note: Keynote Systems’ Startup Shootout Index provides some insight into the three-screen challenge now facing anyone with a web presence. We’ll be bringing you a fresh set of data from Keynote every month. Check out previous Startup Shootout results.

With the holidays upon us, we thought we’d take a look at how ready our index startups are for two great holiday traditions – shopping and travel. Between Black Friday, Cyber Monday, holiday vacations, and winter storms, these sites are about to get a workout.

As part of the Keynote Startup Shootout Monthly Index we track some of the top travel and online retail sites, across desktop, smartphone and tablet devices. We’ve discussed before the impact of this “three screen” world, especially in adapting to mobile. Let’s see if our index startups are ready for the holiday challenge.

The Virtual Shopping Experience

Creating positive online shopping experiences used to be so straightforward: have the right products at the right price, a smooth checkout process, good overall site performance, and the sales will come rolling in. Mobile sites are becoming increasingly popular for shopping and it is important for retailers have a strong mobile presence. But mobile sites present a whole different set of challenges to ensure they look good and function efficiently. The shopper, of course, just expects a consistent level of performance, regardless of device.

Fab.com offers a native app for the mobile visitor, but it is buried at the bottom of the site. Even if a user does manage to find it, it has taken them a while to do so, which slows down the shopping process. Key takeaway? Put that app right up top if you want to get it used.

None of the retail sites offer tablet-specific pages, but some are designed for better performance.  The two fastest home pages for tablet users, RueLaLa and Ideeli, load about three times faster than the others on the retail index. Keeping pages lightweight and less complex, whether the page is specifically optimized for tablet users on not, is key to earning their loyalty rather than driving them to frustration.

Beware of the online retailer that fails to provide a mobile or tablet-specific experience. Otherwise, they are loading incredibly large (desktop) pages across a usually much weaker network and screen experience.

Travel-log

As with shoppers, travelers tend to be in transit if they are accessing these sites from their mobile device. If they are on the road, they may have varying degrees of network support – sitting in an airport or station, driving, on a train, or finding themselves in rural locations with limited access.

Again, we see a number of the travel sites delivering a full desktop page when accessed via a tablet. Companies sometimes assume that tablet users have stronger wi-fi connections than mobile users, but this is not always the case.

Tripology, interestingly, has neither a mobile-optimized site nor app, never mind being optimized for tablets.

AirBnB has an iPhone-optimized site, but the loading time is slow. It loads an excessive element count – which means too many http requests. We can offer a couple of best practices here.

• Keep to ten or less HTTP requests. These each involve round trips from the browser to the server which add to a site’s latency. On the AirBnB site, we are currently seeing 47 http requests. That will definitely slow you down.
•  Redirections can be painful in the mobile world, and again we’re talking about slowing down the service dramatically. With AirBnB, there are two redirections from the original URL – first from a non-secure to a secure to a secure mobile site. Ironically its front page appears to be a secure site, which is unusual for a home page. Secure pages are usually reserved for transaction areas and credit card/billing-type pages.
• We recommend at most two or three domains for mobile or tablet apps due to the network issues they can have. We saw 12 different domains on AirBnB’s home page, each of which can add a quarter of a second to loading time.

Conclusion

We continue to see tablet-specific sites fall somewhere in between the full desktop experience and the mobile experience. A startup might have the desktop and the mobile covered, but not the tablet. It makes a big difference when it comes to the customer experience.

The holidays will keep pushing the web performance of these retail and travel sites, plus we’ll assume many people will receive new devices which will only increase the demand. Let’s hope 2013 brings “three screen success” to all out Startup Shootout companies.

Aaron Rudger is the senior manager of web & mobile performance and Ken Harker is the mobile evangelist at Keynote Systems.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Wholesale fashion buying and crude oil refinement don’t have much in common — except both are run by a pair of Koch brothers. Peter and Karl Koch, not to be confused with titans of industry and conservative sugar daddies David and Charles Koch, are the men behind Balluun.

Balluun is a business-to-business startup that connects fashion designers with retailers. It incorporates social, management, and transactional platforms to simplify the entire process of wholesale buying. While other companies like NuOrder, Brandboom, and Joor are out there, Balluun is notable for putting the social networking aspect of the business at the forefront. And for raising $3.8 million.

Peter and Karl’s family owned a fashion retail business. They grew up traveling all over Europe with their parents to attend trade shows and felt first hand how expensive, tedious, tiring, and inefficient this process is. Now from their headquarters in Foster City, Calif., these German brothers have gathered 10,000 users on the platform, which they say is increasing by 700 each month.

“We knew that companies connect and transact at trade shows, yet they are prohibited by cost and time,” said CEO Peter Koch. “We developed our technology to exactly replicate the trade show experience by allowing fashion brands and retailers to discover, connect, collaborate, and transact in real time, as if they were meeting face-to-face.”

Companies and brands place their collections online, and buyers browse to look for potential business. They can reach out to people already in their network, or use the platform to discover and engage with new brands. Balluun describes the communication feature as “multilevel, thread-based microblogging” that companies can use for initial interactions, purchase orders, and payment processing. For designers, Balluun helps with exposure and distribution. Buyers benefit from an easier channel for discovery and less paperwork.

Finoris AG and a group of Swiss private investors participated in this first round of funding.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Showrooming is a big problem for retailers, but it doesn’t have to be.

A new study from Aprimo and Forrester underscores a lot of what we already know the trend: More people are strolling into stores, checking out prices, then going home to shop on Amazon.

According to the survey, which polled two thousand people, 20 percent of consumers said they compared prices online while in stores. A third of these respondents said their research ultimately led them to buy the products elsewhere.

Naturally, this freaks retailers out. How can any company compete against Amazon’s uncanny ability to steal their business?

For Forrester Research retail analyst Sucharita Mulpuru, the answer to that question is clear: Stop competing with Amazon altogether.

“Eventually, I think the end game to this will be a major contraction of big box stores,” Mulpuru told me on Wednesday.

Sounds grim, but there could be a silver lining: Showrooming itself.

“Over time, whats going to happen is that stores like Best Buy are going to become showrooms where companies can rent space to display their products,” Mulpuru said.

It’s a crazy thought: Rather than fight showrooming, retailers are going to one day be forced to embrace it.

But there’s more to the future of brick-and-mortar retail than just displaying and selling products. Retailers have to do a better job of improving the shopping experience, too.

“There are a lot of retailers that are on fire because they make consumers want to go there. It’s the full lifestyle experience,” Mulpuru said.

For example, consider shops like the Apple Store and Ikea. These are places where shopping is only half the reason anyone visits. There’s an experiential component, too.

In the end, the future of big box retailers will be a complete reversal of the way they look today: Smaller stores, better products, better experience. That day can’t get here soon enough.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Cisco is buying Wi-Fi analytics company ThinkSmart Technologies for an unspecified amount.

By analyzing Wi-Fi data, Cicso says retailers should get a better scoop on how quickly consumers move in stores, when they’re the most crowded, and where consumers go when they shop. (Of course, this assumes that most shoppers are carrying smartphones with them, which is likely the case.)

With the Wi-Fi data, retailers can in turn adjust their own operations to accommodate customer flows. Lots of people coming in at 3 p.m.? Add a few more workers. Shoppers not sticking around for long? Find a way to keep them — and their wallets — in stores longer.

With online retailers like Amazon eating the collective lunch of their brick-and-mortar counterparts, companies are eager to find any way to improve the in-store experience for shoppers. And improving their trove of data is the first step toward doing that.

Cisco’s ThinkSmart buy is the latest in a long line of acquisitions by the company this year, which include security company Virtuata and software maker NDS.

Photo: Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Fab.com, one of the world’s most popular flash-sale retail sites, has just announced a new “Fab Europe” hub for its operations on the continent, integrating fully to the North American platform and introducing a raft of new social shopping features plus fully mobile versions in the next couple of weeks.

Previously only operating in Germany (and in the German language) as Fab.de, today saw the online retailer launch eu.fab.com, a full-blown European site specifically targeted for the EU market. In a mailout to European customers Fab announced: “A few seconds ago, we expanded Fab in Europe to include all the features and benefits that Fab has seen in the States to make it the leading social shopping platform.”

The move follows Fab.com’s acquisition of Casacanda.de in February of this year – a move which gave the company a tactical entry-point into Europe. Since then, it has acquired Llustre in the UK and has seen its European base grow to a reported two million users. It will now serve 24 European countires.

Previously running on the Casacanda platform, the new Fab Europe site has been switched to operate fully on Fab’s Social Commerce Platform, meaning that from today it will feature the same social shopping benefits as North America, such as full Facebook integration, a live feed of best-selling items, new product pickers – in fact, a reported 500 new features.

Moreover, the move to the full Fab.com platform signals a new mobile rollout in the coming weeks too. European customers are promised iPhone, iPad and Android compatible services within the fortnight.

Fab Europe’s 200-strong team will continue to run out of Berlin. Former Casacanda CEO 23-year-old Roman Kirsch, who became Fab.de co-founder and CEO, is now Senior Vice President for Fab.com Continental Europe.

Earlier this year, Rocket Internet’s Fab copycat Bamarang closed its doors as the company decided to focus its energies on slightly more traditional stylings of Westwing.com instead. Fab.com raised a further $105 million, in a round led by Atomico – Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrom’s international venture firm – in July this year. The deal valued the company at between $600 million and $700 million and brings the total invested to $156m.

For related articles, check out:

• Exclusive: The fabulous life of Fab.com’s Tom Claessens
• Bamarang closes shop – Samwer Brothers drop Fab clone in favour of West Wing

This story originally appeared on VentureVillage, one of VentureBeat’s syndication partners, in Germany.

What were you doing at 7 a.m. this beautiful Saturday morning?

If you were one of the 12 construction workers building Apple’s new “prototype” store in Palo Alto, Calif., you were working hard as the sun came up. Seven workers were pouring concrete, and another five were working on the roof.

Since hiring construction workers to be on the job early Saturday usually means paying them double time (or at least time and a half), that suggests that the contractor is in a big hurry to get the job done before a hard deadline. That could be October, when Apple is rumored to be planning another major announcement — perhaps for the iPad mini, but also possible for a new TV product from Apple.

Apple hasn’t officially acknowledged that this store belongs to it. But many details, including the store’s design, strongly suggest that it is a new Silicon Valley flagship location for the consumer electronics giant. In addition, the store’s location puts it directly adjacent to two of the highest-bandwidth Internet connection points in the Valley: the Palo Alto Internet Exchange (PAIX) and a big AT&T switching facility. The store includes direct connections to both of these facilities, which suggests that it has an unusually high need for fast, low-latency Internet connectivity.

In short, it’s a fantastic location for a showcase of streaming video and Internet TV products.

It’s circumstantial evidence. But it’s another strong suggestion that Apple is planning to unveil a new TV product in October.

The photo above show the storefront as it appears today. Below, planning documents show what the storefront will soon look like.

Top photo: VentureBeat. Bottom image: Via Palo Alto Online.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Quirky is a startup that helps inventors bring their ideas to life, and it’s raised $68 million from big-name VC firms Andreesen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkin Caufield & Byers.

Quirky takes the power of crowdsourcing and channels it toward product development. People can pitch their ideas on the site for review by members of the 260,000 community and the Quirky team. The best are then quickly developed into reality, also using the wisdom of the crowd for inspiration, fine-tuning, and tweaking.

“It took one year and 45 days to build the Empire State Building,” said founder and CEO Ben Kaufman. “It takes most consumer product companies 18 to 24 months to launch a new vegetable peeler. Something is wrong here.”

Over the past three years, the company has produced more than 200 products. It is currently putting out two new products each week, and many of these items are available at national retailers like Target, Staples, OfficeMax, and Bed, Bath & Beyond. The selection ranges from convenient little cooking gadgets to headphone props.

The revenue from the products is shared with the people who participated in the project. The projects have an average of 800 contributors. To date, inventors and contributors have received more than $2 million. The community is growing fast, and Quirky will use this funding to increase its product development capabilities as well as refine the platform and grow the team.

With this hefty third round of funding, Quirky has pulled in a total of $97 million. Previous investors Norwest Venture Partners and RRE Ventures also participated.

Quirky is based in New York City. Now I know who to thank for the spoon that is designed to hang off my coffee mug. It makes continuously stirring the soy milk to prevent glopping much more convenient.

Read the full press release.

On Boutine, you can ask a friend for advice, get style tips from the experts, view trending collections (see may favorite below, “The Modern Bohemian Spirit), and purchase items all in one place. Anyone with a strong aesthetic can be a stylist and launch a virtual boutique — once you’ve compiled your collection, you can earn a cut of the revenues for all the items sold.

Today, the San Francisco-based company is launching a nifty new feature: an integration with Filepicker.io that lets you upload pictures of yourself and integrate them into fashion collections. You can pull an image from Facebook, Dropbox, Instagram, Box or straight from your desktop to glimpse how a pair of earrings would set off your eyes, or a color would highlight your skin tone.

The Internet is crawling with e-commerce sites, but there may be a gap in the market for Boutine. While Pinterest has mastered the social elements, you can’t buy and sell directly on the site yet. Meanwhile, online boutique stores and e-commerce giants haven’t fully engaged their user-base on Facebook and Twitter.

Boutine isn’t the only site that offers a fun, collaborative shopping experience — it competes with Polyvore, a mecca for budding stylists; and Style Owner, a New York-based startup that lets you build a store and earn a cut of the sale. On all these sites, shoppers can interact with designers and self-made stylists, which feels more personal than a one-click purchase of a pair of socks on Amazon or eBay.

Pramod Dabir, Boutine’s founder and CEO.

Pramod Dabir, the site’s CEO and founder, told me he had the idea for Boutine when his wife attended graduate school at Stanford. Dabir, formerly a investor at Goldman Sachs, suddenly found himself living in a glorified dorm with six girls.

“Before an event, they would run into each other’s rooms to ask for fashion advice,” he said. “When I realized that this was the basis for their purchasing decisions, I hit on the idea.”

A year ago, he left the finance world to form the site and raised a small amount of funding from family and friends. In just nine months, the site’s staff had grown to a team of seven. Dabir told me they are already generating significant revenue, an increasingly rare feat for an early-stage startup. Boutine charges a 20 percent commission on products sold, and stylists (that could be you) receive a 10 percent commission for styling the look.

At first, it wasn’t easy convincing boutique and independent designers to sign-up, but Dabir said they are starting to approach him directly, as the site has proven to be a strong distribution platform. There are 80 designers featured on the site, and they have a wait-list of about 300.

Next up for Boutine is the iPad app, which is Dabir’s top priority — the first version will let you browse collections and make purchases. With this release, Boutine will be looking to raise its first round of funding.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

AT&T has taken a cue from Apple and Microsoft and is focusing on its retail strategy, opening a glossy new flagship store this Saturday in Chicago.

The store is a showplace for AT&T to flaunt the best tablets, smartphones, and other devices it supports, all in a wide-open, bright, colorful space where customers can browse, lounge, and learn.

“Our Michigan Avenue store is where customers can immerse themselves in everything AT&T is about and truly explore the technology we have to offer,” said the carrier’s president of retail sales and service, Paul Roth, in a statement on the store opening.

“AT&T is about delivering innovation that makes a difference in our customers’ daily lives. All of that will be ready for customers to experience at our flagship store.”

Here’s a clip the company made to introduce its new store:

AT&T already has around 2,300 retail stores around the U.S., but the company says that in addition to showing off its phones and tablets, the new megastore will also give customers a sense of what AT&T plans to do in the future, from home automation to onboard software for cars.

The store will also include an “apps bar,” a “lifestyle boutique” featuring products for different consumer profiles (business folks, health nuts, social media types, etc.), and a gallery of accessories designed by local artists.

Here’s how it’ll all fit together:

“Customers will not only be able to interact with and purchase our products, but they will also experience the forefront of evolving wireless technology and see how AT&T is leading it,” said Roth.

In the race to bring indoor location technology to market, an eight-person startup is taking on big-name players Google, Qualcomm and Samsung. And they have the potential to win.

For the underdogs at Silicon Valley-based WifiSLAM, indoor location services are on the cusp of a second wave. Simply put, services like these aim to do inside what GPS-based navigation does outside. Imagine that you’re in a shopping mall or museum, your smartphone will soon be able to detect your location, within a few meters of accuracy.

If successful, this technology has the potential to impact every industry. “We believe all physical spaces can be as interactive as digital spaces,” said Joseph Huang, WifiSLAM’s cofounder.

Huang isn’t alone in his regard for the space: Indoor location has been getting a lot of renewed interest as of late with companies like Google building dedicated in-house teams. CSR has been demoing the technology for months, and Samsung, Nokia and, Qualcomm recently announced a partnership to invest in and create use cases for indoor location services, which they aim to put in consumer devices by next year.

WifiSLAM is an alumni of Stanford’s tech accelerator “StartX” and has raised a million dollars from a mix of venture capital firms and angel investors, including Google’s Don Dodge and Relay Ventures’ cofounder Kevin Talbot, a mobile computing expert, since incorporating in spring 2011.

WifiSLAM breaks the GPS barrier a little differently than its heavyweight competition, and fellow startups like Finland-based IndoorAtlas (it’s worth checking out — it taps into the magnetic fields that are naturally present in the Earth.) WifiSLAM’s solution uses a combination of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, and allows for a much finer degree of precision than what’s currently available through “indoor navigation” tools.

WifiSLAM collects location fingerprints based on the relative strength of Wi-Fi signals as you move through a building and then uses this data to determine your exact position on a map — your “signal signature,” the founders call it.

The value proposition is that they are marketing directly to application developers, rather than end-users like retailers and merchants. With this strategy, the team has impressed Dodge (pictured left), an angel investor and chief developer relations advocate at Google. Dodge referred the founders to AngelList, and is an outspoken supporter for WifiSLAM. ”Building a technology platform requires application developers to succeed,” Dodge told me.

According to Google’s Don Dodge, indoor location is the most exciting opportunity for investors

Dodge, who joined Google in 2009 from Microsoft, mentioned that he is more excited about indoor location technologies than any other space. My inclination is that this will pave the way for some exciting new functionalities in Google Maps. Presumably, the search giant hopes that advertisers will jump at the chance to serve discounts and deals at the exact moment when consumers are contemplating making a purchase. It’s a development that will change the face of advertising.

For Dodge and other high-profile advocates of the space, the potential for the technology is endless. “Imagine being in a supermarket and having your phone guide you exactly to each item on your grocery list,” he said. Using indoor Wi-Fi, “coupons and offers [will be] delivered to your phone based on where you are in the store,” and you’ll know, “exactly where your friends and family members are.” Parents, you’ll be able to locate your kids, assuming you’ve given them smartphones, if they’re ever lost in a shopping mall!

WifiSLAM’s cofounders, Jessica Tsoong, David Millman, Darin Tay (formerly an iOs engineer at Google) and Huang, remain optimistic about their chances despite stiff competition. They reported that their developer base has grown by 250 percent in the last three weeks through word of mouth. The API is free for developers to improve their location-based apps, and it only takes 90 seconds to try out the beta.

Joseph Huang, WifiSLAM’s cofounder

Huang (pictured left), a Stanford computer science grad, said that developers will be responsible for pushing the technology to its limits. The early adopters have already experimented with a variety of use-cases, including audio tours in a museum. The app can pinpoint exactly where a museum-goer is standing, and serve relevant information.

The remaining challenge facing indoor Wi-Fi services is to prove to the public that the technology actually works.

Indoor Wi-Fi was supposed to be the groundbreaking innovation of the previous decade. When it emerged in 2008, tech companies made grandiose claims about hyper-targeted, geo-located advertising, and retailers ate it up. But these early attempts failed to meet expectations.

Despite this, Huang said that in the coming months, there will be thousands of new mobile applications that will take advantage of indoor location “in ways we haven’t thought about.” And with the recent success of geo-location based services like Foursquare and Shopkick, the climate is much more favorable. “At the end of the day,” said Huang. “Indoor location is coming.”

Window shopping is about to get a lot more interesting.

Samsung says it’s bringing its transparent commercial displays to market this fall, signaling a new and futuristic development in how shoppers will engage with in-store products.

The 22-inch display will, for example, allow stores to dynamically display key information about their products. While the shot above shows that this works really well for smartphones like the Galaxy Note, even sellers of jewelry, shoes, and other small items could make use of it.

Stores could also use the displays to tell shoppers which items are on sale, or to point shoppers to other comparable products elsewhere.

Samsung, however, has bigger plans. Back in January, the company showed off its 46-inch Smart Window display, which accomplishes a similar task on a larger scale. Samsung also says that the transparent display technology could also someday make its way to smartphones and tablets, which opens up a lot of possibilities for device design.

In any case, Samsung is getting ahead of a big trend with transparent displays. The market is expected to hit $87 billion by 2025, according to Display Bank. Perhaps bigger news for retailers, the product could also help bring some of the excitement back to in-store shopping, which has taken a hit in our online shopping-focused times.

Here’s a video of the new transparent display in action.

Photo: Samsung

If you run an online shopping/ecommerce business of some kind, you’re gonna want to get your mobile act together, STAT. A new survey shows that in 2012, holiday shoppers will be taking to their phones more than ever.

The survey was conducted among 2,200 adults in the U.S., and three out of five said they would be doing some of their holiday shopping on their mobile devices, expecting to make purchases for everything from clothes and toys to books and DVDs. (Exact breakdowns are included in the graphic below.)

Consumers in the U.S. are already trained to look to their smartphones when it’s time to shop, and many smartphone users said they’ve come to expect certain benefits from mobile shopping. In this survey, respondents listed on-the-go deal hunting, digital coupon redemption, in-store price comparisons, and at-work stealth-shopping as some of the top reasons they’ve gone mobile for their shopping needs.

And when retailers didn’t have a mobile presence, survey respondents said the brand came off as old-fashioned and they worried they’d be wasting time and money with that brand. Younger consumers further said the lack of a mobile presence made them think the brand didn’t respect its customers.

The study was conducted by research firm Harris Interactive and was commissioned by Apigee, an API management platform.

“These findings demonstrate that the app economy is having a big impact on the way we live, and people are increasingly demanding a lot more from the apps they use every day,” said Chet Kapoor, Apigee CEO, in a statement on the findings.

Top image courtesy of violetkaipa, Shutterstock

Electronics retail chain Best Buy reported dismal results in its fiscal 2013 Q2 earnings report today, with profits taking a 91 percent nose dive.

The poor earnings caused Best Buy’s stock to reach a nine-year low — dropping as far as $16.23 per share during morning trading. However, the stock decline first started with yesterday’s announcement of new Chief Executive Hubert Joly, former head of hotel and restaurant company Carlson Cos. And while Joly does have a background in tech (he also previously ran Vivendi Universal as well as IT company Electronic Data Systems), his appointment as CEO caused investors to lose even more confidence after today’s earnings.

Revenue dropped 3 percent to $10.5 billion overall for the company, with the majority of losses coming from international store sales in China and Canada. The only significant point of growth for Best Buy was in online sales, which isn’t surprising considering that Amazon and other online retailers are somewhat responsible for declines in the brick and mortar stores.

The stock dropping to record lows is even more significant because of a rumored offer from Best Buy founder Richard Schulze to take the electronics chain company private.

Schulze, who stepped down as Best Buy’s chairman earlier in the year, currently owns 20 percent of Best Buy stock and is offering others $24 to $26 per share to do this. His offer is over 30 percent higher than the stock’s current price of $17-$18 per share, effectively valuing the company at $8.5 billion.

Considering the radical changes that Best Buy will need to stay competitive (not to mention profitable) over the next few years, a buyout option from Schulze seems like an even better deal for investors.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Apple is building a new store in the heart of Silicon Valley with an extremely high-bandwidth connection to one of the Internet’s major hubs.

With the 16,600-square-foot, two-story store, Apple will be trying out a “new prototype” of its retail environment, according to documents filed with the architectural review board in Palo Alto, Calif., where the store is located. Along with the familiar all-glass storefront and the prominent use of stone, the new store will include interior trees and a skylight.

It will also be linked to one of the busiest and highest-capacity access points on the Internet, the Palo Alto Internet Exchange (PAIX), which will give Apple the ability to demonstrate bandwidth-hungry services — such as live, streaming video — to hundreds of individual customers at a time.

Photographs of the building site at 340 University Ave. in Palo Alto, as well as construction documents filed with the city of Palo Alto, strongly suggest the company’s plans. None of the public documents name Apple, and the storefront does not yet carry the company’s name, but multiple strands of evidence point towards the site’s ultimate tenant being Apple.

• The architectural firm Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, which submitted the architectural review for the site in 2010, has designed many Apple stores around the world.
• At the time of the architectural review, Palo Alto city officials were convinced Apple would be the store’s ultimate tenant, based on the details of the application. “It was clear, when they said where the sign was going to go and when they talked about the project details, who the tenant would be,” an architectural review board member said, according to Palo Alto Online in 2010. “It was just really obvious.”
• The construction firm overseeing the remodel of the site is DPR Construction, which also built Apple’s flagship store in downtown San Francisco.

As for the location, it’s just one block from the current Palo Alto Apple store. But the new location is just around the corner from PAIX, on Bryant Street. Located in the old “Telephone Co. Building,” PAIX is an interconnection point for Internet service providers including Equinix, Bell Telephone Canada, and others. Although crowded, this site still offers massive pipes for anyone who needs to send and receive a lot of data and wants to get its equipment close to the Internet’s major backbones. For instance, Facebook is a PAIX tenant.

PAIX is a high-security facility, whose windows have been replaced with opaque barriers. Guards and surveillance cameras guard the site. Behind PAIX and adjacent to the new retail storefront is a large private switching facility for AT&T.

Notably, the current construction connects the Apple store (or whatever it is) with both PAIX and the AT&T building. Plans filed with the city of Palo Alto call for a pedestrian tunnel, presumably leading between the Apple store and the telco facilities next to it.

Why would Apple need such high-bandwidth neighbors for its “prototype” store? Well, one explanation is that it wants to give the best possible showing to new video services, such as a revamped Apple TV. The company was recently reported to be negotiating with cable companies to offer them an Apple-made set-top box that would work with cable services, and it’s reportedly building a Apple TV that will blur the distinction between live and on-demand video.

But what if Apple decided to offer an Apple TV that worked with its own internet service, bypassing the cable providers that have so far rebuffed it? It certainly has the data centers and high-bandwidth server centers capable of delivering live video; it’s long been a leader in streaming video over the internet.

If you were showing off video services to an eager public, you’d want to make extra sure that your storefront had the best, most reliable, highest-bandwidth connections to the Internet. In other words, you’d want to make those connections as close to major interconnection points as possible.

340 University Ave. would be a very good location indeed.

Image credits: VentureBeat, Google Maps, Palo Alto Online