Start-Up Watch COD: CardMunch makes getting contacts from business cards remarkably easy

Today’s post is about personal productivity rather than marketing services, but the problem it solves is so ubiquitous I hope you’ll find it useful.

CardMunch is an app (recently acquired by Linked In) that makes it point and shoot easy to build a database of contacts from all those business cards gathering dust in your drawer. We all know that there are card readers out there, but they can be inconvenient, a little pricey, and some have significant accuracy issues. They can also offer odd quirks, like the use of proprietary DB platforms only.

The accuracy issues have been exacerbated by the fashion of making credit cards more creative and visually interesting. Two sides of contact info, or unusual arrangements of data, or perpendicular/angled text, all pose significant challenges. Certainly in the marketing services industry the tendency to be more creative in the presentation of info on a business card is even more common.

CardMunch solves those problems with a combination of image recognition and human QA. To use the service, you simply take photos of your business cards with your iPhone. The app handles the rest. An image reader identifies and transcribes the contact into a database, and then the image and the database entry are passed to a team of people who review the record created and make any necessary corrections.

Records are collected in a contacts database on your phone that can be viewed in a “cover flow.” You can also connect your records to Linked In with a single click. When you synch your phone, you will also be synching your contacts, which helps make your new database of contacts even more useful.

You can collect records in two separate databases, one business and one personal. That’s an important feature, in my view, given the number of business cards one collects over the course of a month.

The human element of this service is a critical part of the work flow because even a high degree of accuracy – like 90-95% - means that there can be serious errors in virtually any record. A transposed digit, or a misread digit, for example, makes an entire record useless. CardMunch’s approach completely prevents this problem.

Here’s a short video explaining it all.

Overview of CardMunch in 21 Seconds from CardMunch on Vimeo.

The service offers 5 card reads for free. After that, you can buy credits in the app or on their website. At the time of this writing, the service was offering free credits to get its start – my suspicion is that when they shift to a pay model, the costs will still be rather reasonable.

The service was launched on iPhone, with plans to expand to Android and Blackberry quickly. Speaking as an Android user and a Linked In junkie, the expansion can’t come soon enough! My groaning, overstuffed card file will be even more pleased when it happens.

Thanks to ad:tech for publishing this first.

Start-Up Watch COD: Retailigence Connects Mobile Apps to Local Retail Inventories

Local shopping apps are increasing in number and popularity. Essentially what they do is help consumers understand where they can obtain an item in their immediate vicinity.

A company called Retailigence helps retailers, brands and agencies communicate local availability of products to web and mobile apps via its free and open API. It connects inventory management systems to the mobile web, so that as users of apps search for products, partner stores’ inventory can appear in the results. It’s a cloud-based Data as a Service (DaaS) solution providing seamless access to thousands of retailers and a host of end-user applications.

Say you are a shopper in the market for a Nikon Coolpix S5100. You use your phone to find out where to get one. When you make your query in a shopping app, Retailigence facilitates listings by providing data that they have aggregated from the inventory management systems of local stores. If a nearby retailer stocked the item and had one in stock, Retailigence would ensure that the app listed that local retailer in the results.

Here’s a vid that explains the concept:

Introducing Retailigence from Retailigence Corp on Vimeo.

Retailigence currently has access to the inventory of more than 65,000 retail locations, and works with most of the major back-end inventory management systems. In fact, Retailigence recently announced partnerships with ERP and POS systems like ERPLY and B2B Soft. The total number of products in their database exceeds 5M, across a large number of retail categories like electronics, apparel, books, games, toys, etc.

Without using a service like Retailigence, brick-and-mortar retailers are generally left out of online and mobile search results. Even though shoppers may be standing right outside a store , they won’t be aware that the store can fill their needs. Instead, what they’d get in their search results would likely be dozens of dotcom purchase options. While many online searchers favor dotcom buying, there are millions of people who would want to purchase today in a store nearby. The local Chamber of Commerce likes that. Not to mention that shop owners.

To continue with the camera example, I did a search for a Nikon Coolpix S5100 on my Android phone. Google returned only one listing on the first page that offered a local purchase option, and even then I would have had to query that retail chain’s database on their site to check availability in stores near me. That anecdotal search demonstrates the need for local retailers to get connected. A host of apps have been built for this purpose. Retailigence powers many of these apps with rock solid inventory info.

For brands and agencies, the opportunity to partner with Retailigence has clear benefits. Marketers can ensure that Retailigence lists local retailers that stock their products. By driving more visitors to those locations, they can drive sales and be a better partner to retail organizations.

For retailers, participating in platforms like Retailigence should be a no brainer. For most stores and chains, the biggest challenge of all is getting folks in the door. Retailigence can make a big difference in their foot traffic. And chances are, those feet will be propelling souls anxious to plunk down credit cards immediately.

I’ll close with the words of Jeremy Geiger, the CEO: "Smartphones and location-based services are changing the very face of traditional retail. We are excited to be at the forefront of this revolution by driving high-intent foot traffic directly to the retailer’s doors. Our ability to deliver location-relevant inventory data to apps is not only making apps more functional and useful, it's also providing retailers (large and small) a way to be visible at the right time and at the right place.”

Thanks to ad:tech for publishing this first.

Start-Up Watch COD: Adventive raises the bar on in-banner interactivity with drag and drop app integration

Banners are a much maligned advertising medium, and not without reason. Click rates for standard gif or Flash banners are just a hair above zero, and there appears to be validity to the idea of consumer banner blindness. Good creative, of course, can combat those sobering facts. Some online advertising delivers gangbuster clicks and the like. But good creative is easier said than done in a little square and a 30K max.

Another approach to improving results from banners is to bake in more functionality and interactivity. When there are more ways to interact, there is generally more consumer attention and interaction. A company called Adventive has developed a platform that enables marketers and agencies to capitalize on high quality creative executions with powerful interactive apps that can be drug and dropped into the units.

Functionalities like data collection in a banner aren’t new. But what Adventive does is offer template DIY versions of the best such technologies within a platform that makes it easier and cheaper to create and modify app-enabled banners. So for example, a brand could contract with an agency to design templates for lovely banners, and then have a different team of less expensive people build in app functionalities.

By leveraging multiple apps, the brand can create ads that eliminate the need for site redirects. Without getting engineers involved, you can offer a banner that:

•Collects a lead
•Requests a zip code and then delivers localized offers
•Offers multimedia
•Provides multiple pages of content
•Delivers traceable incentives to attribute sales more accurately

Brands can benefit by reducing costs and time required to field and modify creative. Agencies can shift some of the work of making and modifying banners away from expensive designers and art directors while still offering clients great creative.

Adventive ads are IAB compliant, and hundreds of sites have certified them for use on their pages. The list of certifying sites is growing. Adventive is a SaaS solution, minimizing initial outlays for brands and agencies alike.

Thanks to ad:tech for publishing this first.

Start-Up Watch COD: Clovr Media connects the digital promos shoppers see with their credit and debit cards

Over the past couple of years, a number of companies have been working on a way to definitively tie online advertising to offline sales. Nielsen and IRI are partnered with a variety of ad networks to use their scanner panels as a way of demonstrating estimated volume impact of banner ads. Solutions like GSN deliver marketing messages to consumers at what they call the Moment of Decision – when consumers are planning their shopping trips on grocery chain websites.



A start-up called Clovr Media is taking a different approach by directly connecting banner, video, text, and mobile ads to the user’s credit or debit card. It’s what they call a CLO, a card linked offer.

It works like this:

•You see a Clovr enabled ad online.
•You click the ad to grab the offer
•The offer is then tied to the credit or debit card associated with the account
•When the user makes the purchase and uses the associated card, they get the savings automatically.
•The savings appear on their credit card statement, after purchase

Here’s the how it works vid:



Retailers benefit by reducing handling costs for ROP or online printable coupons, while reaping the benefits of increased sales driven by the offer. Because Clovr requires no interaction at the POS, it requires little or no effort from retailers to participate.

Consumers get an easier way to accrue savings on their everyday purchases. The offering seems “greener” as well, and eliminates the possibility of forgetting your coupons at home and whatnot. Additionally, the Clovr ads are targeted to opted-in users via data on their past purchases, which increases the relevance of the ads and offers they see.

Brands get to foster broad scale adoption of their offers; the ease with which savings are associated with a card means that more people are likely to participate than would clip coupons. Further, the challenge of traditional and tradigital coupons is that they are very likely to reach a deal prone consumer that won’t grow into a loyal user over time. Their affinity is to saving, not a brand.

On a more strategic level, the brand is getting full accountability for the sales impact of its banner marketing efforts. Since many of the existing methods for linking online advertising with online sales are limited to certain sites and networks, the more comprehensive footprint of Clovr may prove compelling.

The biggest winner, though, may be the bank issuing the card you associate with your account. Not only would members be more likely to charge their groceries, they would also be more likely to always use the card associated with their account. Banks call this being “top-of-wallet”, and it is one of the juiciest and most challenging goals of that business.

At any rate, there are some clear benefits to this service, and I think it makes a great deal of sense to keep your eye out from them as they grow in size and partnerships.

Thanks to ad:tech for publishing this first.

Start-Up Watch COD: Perfect Market helps pubs monetize their content vaults

How long does a piece of content remain engaging to consumers? It depends, of course. How long is it valuable to a pub? Well, under ordinary circumstances, only as long as a news story is in the fiery eye of the storm of nearly universal consumer interest. By which I mean great content that would have evergreen relevance to passionate audiences often drifts off the SEO and content widget radar quite fast. The pubs that produce the good stuff often fail to get all of the value from it they can. And passionate consumers are by default less aware of information and ideas that might be very interesting to them.

But wait, there’s more. Given the billions spent each year on Search optimization, the best content doesn’t always make it to the top of results. Why? Because the core competency of media companies is in content development, not SEO.

Meanwhile, content farms pump out tons of drivel, but search optimize it to the hilt, so their stuff often appears at the top of results. While Google and Bing are always improving their methodologies, so too are the farms constantly innovating to maintain their edge. Quality pubs get the short end of the stick over and over.

So how can producers of quality content make more for their efforts? A company called Perfect Market believes it has the answer. Perfect Market helps media companies, including leading newspapers like the LA Times, Hearst newspapers, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, and the OC Register, better monetize their content through its technology platform. Essentially the service breaks down into four key buckets:

• Content Analysis:The platform examines context for KWs and semantic meaning. This can be combined with monetization info to help pubs better understand what type of content is most profitable, so the pub can focus more resources on those areas.

• Audience Segmentation: It analyzes site traffic and separates the audience into distinct buckets like Search users and visitors from social media, and surfaces insights about what key groups are looking for.

• Optimized Content Pages:The service helps implement segmented content pages that better meet the needs of different types of visitors, and pairs CPA and CPC ads to them to improve monetization. The offering is particularly adept in serving up existing content in a way that makes it more attractive to search engines, so it appears higher up in more results. Further, the optimized content pages that drive the most revenue get continued attention to optimization.

• Cost Per Action Ads: The company identifies pay for performance ads likely to appeal to readers of the optimized content, and pairs them with pub content, driving dramatic increases in revenue. It’s a rev share play, so no risk to the pub.

While Perfect Market provides value for both new and archived stories, it really drives the greatest results for the archive – stories that often fade to obscurity quickly.

Here’s something interesting. Lots of pubs do search baiting in order to boost their traffic and (theoretically) their revenue. But an important study commissioned by Perfect Market shows that while celeb cellulite photos may drive eyeballs, they don’t necessarily bring in the dough. The reason is that context drives revenue, and often the most popular content isn’t desired by brands.

Here’s an excerpt from a NY Times post about their research:

Perfect Market measured revenue per page view and found that articles about Social Security were the most valuable, generating an average of $129 for 1,000 page views. Articles about mortgage rates made $93 for every 1,000 page views. On other topics, values for every 1,000 page views were $28 for items about unemployment, $33 for articles on jobs, $20 for articles on the egg recall and $26 for pieces on immigration reform. By contrast, articles on Lindsay Lohan generated $2.50 for every 1,000 page views. “There are not a lot of contextual ads on Lindsay Lohan stories,” said Robertson Barrett, the chief strategy officer at Perfect Market.

The key to this conceptually is the drive by visitor. Perhaps someone who doesn’t read the OC Register every day, but would be interested in their coverage of a key topic or issue. By attracting these enthusiastic eyeballs, the pub can better monetize the great content they write.

If there is any controversy here, it’s that the editorial team can see what sorts of topics and stories make the most money, so that they can respond with more such content. For some, this is a violation of the Chinese Wall between ad and edit. I guess I see it a little differently. While I understand the concern, I also see far too many good pubs closing because of a lack of revenue.

I would suspect that most editors take their responsibility very seriously, and that they can draw an appropriate balance. But in my view the dirty little secret of the content business is that it was always designed around advertisers, or at least at the intersection of consumer and advertiser wants. There is car edit because most papers have an abundance of car advertisers, and people are more likely to peruse all those ads if they are interspersed with content. This simply takes that concept online and makes the analysis more granular.

And the other thing is, it's actually hard news that wins the monetization battle, not photos of pantyless actresses and addict actors who love chain smoking on webcams in the company of their goddesses.

Thanks to ad:tech for publishing this first.

Start-Up Watch COD: Proximic improves results through the power of granular contextual and audience data

If site and audience data are key tools in the effort to get better results from online ads, it stands to reason that more precise data may make a real difference in results.

That’s what Proximic describes as its value proposition. Proximic provides more granular contextual and audience data to DSPs, networks, pubs and SSPs. The offering is based on real time analysis of the content of a page and the precise interests of your target audience. Think about their data in the context of three layers.

•More specific contextual data: Proximal offers more contextual buckets than most data vendors. So, for example, not just sports by extreme sports or snow sports. While this might have only minimal value for a brand aimed at M LDA-34, it could have profound value for products aimed at more specific sports audiences. You don’t want to try and sell skis to pro soccer fans. Or at least you might not want to. In toto, the company says that it matches content across “hundreds of thousands” of categories and reverse engineers that match to the keywords and concepts you care about.

•Highly specific brand safety data. Not just porn/no porn. There is a rating system for content maturity, violence, negativity, language, alcohol consumption, and the like. Perhaps for you G rated is essential. For another brand, the idea might be PG 13 or even R, but no X. That kind of granularity might prove very valuable if you’re selling Maxim versus Boys Life subs.

•Rich audience interest data. By collecting information about what prospects are examining, the platform can help refine contextual parameters AND expand the range of sites in your buy. This, it promises, can grow focus AND scale.

Given the correlation between user engagement and content, ad performance climbs when the user sees ads on content that is more likely to strongly reflect their interests. According to Proximic, that granularity opens up a lot more mid and long tail sites to brand advertising, which grows reach and drives down CPMs.

Here’s their elevator video:



One of the interesting twists about this data solution play is that its contextual analysis is not based upon linguistic algorithms. This means that its power is not limited to English language pages. Instead, a global brand can reach its audience across nations, languages, and cultures, focusing instead on the contextual interests that are most closely associated with brand response.

Available through the DSPs as well as to networks, pubs, and SSPs, Proximic would appear to offer benefits to the sell side in that it enables greater real time understanding of what is on all pages, so that their true value can be monetized.

One thing that I think is clear is that more brands will be widening their site selection parameters. Because audiences don’t cluster in such large numbers on the top sites anymore. Clearly Proximic exists to help brands go broad AND deep.

Thanks to ad:tech for publishing this first.