Kiind Launches An API For Its Digital Gift Card Platform

Just in time for the holidays, virtual gift card service Kiind today announced that it now offers an API, which will allow third-party vendors to hook right into its services and to create gift cards from their own systems. The company also today said that it has added Nike and Apple's iTunes as gift card options to its store. These are two major deals for Kiind, which already offered gift cards from major retailers like Amazon, Columbia Sportswear and Gap. Unlike other gift card services, Kiind's system, which launched earlier this year, is based on deferred payments. The sender is only charged when the gift card is actually claimed (and a surprisingly large number of gift cards remain unclaimed). For shops like Amazon, Kiind also offers gift givers the ability to pre-select certain items from their stores, though the receivers can always change these selections. The new API allows developers to easily create and send cards from Kiind, but also to create their own gift card marketplaces based on Kiind's inventory. As the company's CEO and president Leif Baradoy told me earlier this month, the Victoria, Canada-based Kiind has seen good traction in the B2B space and decided to focus on this over making its service available to consumers. In the business world, most enterprises already use similar services to offer their employees or good customers gift cards. Kiind hopes that at least some of these services will use its API to also offer cards through its service. Some businesses, the Kiind team believes, will also integrate this API into their regular CRM or HR tools (and real estate agents, apparently, have taken to it to send gifts to homebuyers after a deal closes). The idea here, Baradoy said, is to extend the reach of the Kiind platform as wide as possible. As for the relationships with Nike and Apple, Baradoy couldn't say too much, given that these deals tend to be confidential. He did, however, note that the company likes to create direct relationships with vendors whenever possible. He sees the fact that some of these major brands are now interested in the service as a sign that Kiind “has something interesting going on.” The company also recently launched a user-based referral program to attract more businesses to its platform. Referrers now get 5 percent of the first gift and 0.5 percent for every gift after.

Wibidata Machine Learning Platform Offers Capabilities Comparable To Amazon.com And Google

Wibidata, a big data application provider, has a new platform for building real-time apps that shows the increasing accessibility of machine learning and how e-commerce companies can provide an experience similar to a giant like Amazon.com. The new WibiEnterprise 3.0 platform allows a company to power a site with advanced analytics that fine-tunes itself, providing better recommendations and other features over time, including more relevant search results and personalized content. The platform is designed for the customer who is beginning to use data science, said Omer Trajman, vice president of field operations at Wibidata. “They are not classically trained but they have an analytics background. They have been doing marketing analytics. The mechanics are similar, what has changed is the availability of data.” WibiEnterprise 3.0 is built on an open source framework called Kiji, which provides a common platform for building applications that leverage large data sets. At its core, Wibidata is offering a platform that takes into consideration the fact that companies often have just a few seconds to engage their customers. People use all sorts of personal devices and can turn to a competitor with just a few clicks. But with all this data, companies also have an opportunity to learn about their customers by analyzing their digital interactions. Doing that means building a storage system that provides a 360-degree view of the customer. Like Google and Amazon, Wibidata’s Kijii framework uses a central storage system that allows a customer to collect user interactions across all of its applications, searches, purchases, likes, clicks and requests for product information. It’s what is called an “entity-centric storage system,” which essentially pools all the data so a company with sophisticated apps and services can do real-time queries and act on a customer’s recent information to deliver content personalization, relevant search results and recommendations. Wibidata’s approach is in contrast to traditional data warehouse systems that manage data in a much different way. In the context of e-commerce, these older systems store transactional information such as likely purchases, or shopping cart manipulations in a central fact table. For a retail bank, this data might include credits and deductions from accounts. SKU information or geographic location data are stored in dimension tables to provide a detailed view of the transaction. There are two problems with the approach, Wibidata argues. It can get expensive and it centers around the transaction instead of the user that is generating those transactions. Furthermore, it gets even more complex when using historical data, which has to get extracted from other systems, cleansed and then integrated with the current transaction data. Companies using WibiEnterprise 3.0 include a top 10 retailer which has integrated it with its website to create relevant, contextual shopping recommendations during the online sales process. An international retail bank is also using WibiEnterprise 3.0 technology to combine multiple customer data sources and apply in-house debt models to better detect fraud and credit risks. Opower uses WibiEnterprise 3.0 to deliver personalized reports to utility provider customers explaining how to reduce energy usage and save money. And one of the largest SaaS providers uses WibiEnterprise 3.0 to help their customers identify prospective customers. Wibidata is a powerful platform but it also reflects the complexity that comes with managing data across so many different devices. There is an infinite data supply but the technology needed to use it means a new way of organization that cuts across the way a company treats its own historical investments. There are the added cultural hurdles that come with a change in business approach that is more customer, than transaction-focused. These sets of challenges also impact new startups like Wibidata, which are advocating disruptive approaches that put them in direct competition with companies like Oracle and established SaaS providers like Baynote. There is no doubt that it is getting easier to have the same capabilities as a company like Amazon.com. But the challenges come with the will of the customer and the ability of a company like Wibidata to keep ahead of the competition.

IronSource Announces KudosKits, Allowing App Users To Show Their Appreciation With Money

Israeli company IronSource has come up with a new way for developers to ask their users for money or other forms of support. Chief Design Officer Dan Greenberg told me that the product, called the KudosKit, evolved from an experiment conducted with the iOS app good weather, which was initially developed by Fried Cookie and distributed by IronSource (IronSource has since acquired Fried Cookie). Greenberg added that developers are “all struggling to earn money for the work that we're doing,” because for many, existing monetization systems such as in-app purchases have proven to be “very, very hard for them to crack.” With a KudosKit, instead of requiring users to pay for the app, or for additional content/virtual goods within the app, developers can present them with a screen asking for their support. That can ask users to “buy us a cup of coffee” (make a small donation), Like the app on Facebook, tweet about the app, rate it in the App Store, and more. In some ways, it's similar to the “tip jar” widgets that you'll see on some websites, but customized for mobile. And with the underlying analytics technology, Greenberg said his team is “100 percent focused on making this work.” Specifically, he said the KudosKits can identify the most effective points in the app to ask for support, direct requests at specific user segments (so loyal users see the message while first-time users don't), and localize the messages in different geographies. Greenberg said that although the company is only announcing the technology broadly now, six months of early usage are promising, with 700,000 users donating a total of $1.2 million. The KudosKits have supposedly seen an 0.58 percent conversion rate to paid “appreciations”, with an average appreciation size of $2.10. By the way, IronSource is adopting a similar approach in how it makes money from the KudosKits itself - it's a revenue sharing arrangement, but developers can determine what percentage of the proceeds they give to the company. In Greenberg's words, “We're actually giving the developer the opportunity to decide how much they appreciate our service.”

Agent Makes Your Smartphone A Little Bit Smarter

You can't teach an old phone new tricks. Hah! Just kidding. Of course you can. This isn't 1998. Agent is an app that aims to make your Android smartphone just a little bit smarter, using all of your phone's sensors to detect what you're up to and tweak your settings automatically. Driving? It'll automatically respond to texts to let people know you're busy, and remember where you parked your car. Sleeping? It'll only let the most important calls through. Agent is a spin-off, of sorts, of another Egomotion product called "Trigger" (or, as it was once known, "NFC Task Launcher"). With Trigger, Egomotion sells packs of programmable NFC tags which can fire off actions on your phone. Want your phone to silence itself and set an alarm when you go to bed? You'd stick one of their NFC tags on your nightstand, then set up a series of tasks to fire whenever that tag is detected. Want it to automatically launch your favorite music app when you get in the car? Tuck one of the tags into your cup holder.

In time, however, the team realized that many of the most popular use cases didn't really require NFC. Instead of an NFC tag on your nightstand, why not just auto-silence the phone during certain hours? Instead of hiding a tag in a cupholder, why not just detect when the user is connected to their car's Bluetooth? Thus, Agent was born. Agent takes the core concept of Trigger and boils it down to its essence. Gone is any mention of NFC tags, instead relying on the handset's built-in capabilities - things like its accelerometer, clock, or WiFi/Bluetooth. Gone is the relatively complicated task setup process, with Egomotion instead providing a small set of pre-built actions that they call "Agents". At the moment, the app's got five different built-in agents: Battery Agent: When your battery starts to fade, the battery agent kicks in to irk a bit more life out of your phone. You can tell it to automatically dim your screen, turn off automatic data syncing, or turn off Bluetooth. Once you're plugged in, it'll automatically flip everything back on. Sleep Agent: Automatically silences your phone between specified hours, but with a clever white-listing system. You can specify which contacts are allowed to wake you, and allow for repeat (and thus likely urgent) calls to ring through. It can auto-reply to texts, telling the user to reply "urgent" if it's an emergency (at which point, your phone will ring loudly to wake you up). You can tell this agent to only start if your handset is plugged in. That way, it probably won't silence your phone during a night out at the club. Parking Agent: Attempts to automatically remember where you've parked your car. By default, it works by detecting your speed; once you've stopped moving over a certain speed for more than a few minutes, it figures that you've parked your car and marks the location accordingly. Of course, doing things like riding the BART might fire off a false positive, so you can tell the Agent to base its logic off Bluetooth connectivity if it's an option in your car. Meeting Agent: Silences your phone during meetings. Uses your Google Calendar to determine your meeting schedule. Drive Agent: Uses bluetooth to detect when you're in your car. Can automatically silence your phone, read your texts aloud, and respond to incoming texts to let them know you're driving. The company says that they've got more agents in the works, potentially offering add-on agent "suites" tailored to certain use cases - one set that'd be good for school, one set that'd be good for work, etc. That way they can keep adding more functionality without complicating the core application. If you're a battle-tested Android expert, Agent's tricks might not raise an eyebrow. "Pft, I've got Tasker!" you say. "And I rooted my imported HTC J One and flashed it with a custom rom that does all this ages ago." For the less intense folks (read: most people) out there, though, Agent should hit a sweet spot. It's simple, it does exactly what it promises to do, and the setup is very straightforward and well thought out. My one hesitation: while I normally hate when people say "But what if company X just decides to do this", it's a pretty valid concern here. With all of the data that Google gobbles up and pipes into Google Now, it's almost certain that they're tinkering away with similar concepts right this second. Actually, it's not almost certain. It is certain. Google-owned Motorola has already released an app that they call Assist, which aims to do much of the same stuff that Agent does. As Egomotion co-founder Kulveer Taggar pointed out to me, Assist only works with a handful of Motorola phones, whereas Agent works on many, many Android phones. But Moto's handsets tend to be a test bed for Google (See: the always-listening "Okay Google" voice command debuting on the Moto X months before being integrated into Android 4.4). If the concept proves popular, how long will it be before Google starts tying such functionality right into the core of Android itself? In the mean time, though, it seems like Egomotion is on to something: according to the company's stats, 95% of agents that get turned on, stay on.

Journaling App LifeCrumbs Turns Your Favorite Photos Into A Visual Calendar Of Happy Memories

The holidays are often less than merry if you have to deal with things like balancing work with travel, financial stress or seasonal affective disorder. I usually cope by listening to Merle Haggard's “If We Make It Through December” over and over and over again. This year, however, I also plan to make visual journaling app LifeCrumbs part of my daily routine. Made by a startup called Tomofun, LifeCrumbs was created around the idea that even on the gloomiest of days, there is always at least one good moment to salvage. The free iOS app, which will launch its Android version soon, lets you turn those moments into a visual calendar filled with photos of good memories. Founded by Victor Chang and based in Taipei, Tomofun's mission is to build products that “find joy in the ordinary.” LifeCrumbs is actually the startup's second product; the first app they built never left the prototype stage because it did not receive enough positive feedback to justify a launch. After that disappointment, Tomofun's team decided to regroup by going to the Philippines and spending summer 2012 volunteering with a homebuilding program. “I met a five-year-old girl who had just lost her dad in a typhoon. When I gave her a cookie, she took that cookie, ran back to her family and split it six ways with them. Then she ran back to me, split it in half again, smiled and said thank you,” said Chang. “That changed my life because it made me realize you don't need a lot in life to be happy. That notion was so inspiring that I wanted to share it with other people.” Inspired by that moment, Tomofun began working on a journaling app to let people record meaningful moments from each day after returning to Taiwan. LifeCrumbs launched in closed beta in October 2012 before opening to the public last August. Since then, the team has continued to incorporate feedback from users and redesigned the app to make it even more visually oriented. LifeCrumbs is integrated with Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, so you can select updates from each network to import. Tomofun is currently self-funded and exploring several revenue models for LifeCrumbs, including selling sticker sets and letting users order their photo calendars as prints and other products. There are a lot of other great apps that are designed to make journaling easy and pleasurable for busy smartphone users. Some standouts include Step Journal (which I profiled in May), Day One, Momento and Gratitude365. LifeCrumbs seeks to differentiate by creating a positive and upbeat community within the app. The official LifeCrumbs account uploads inspirational quotes and photos each day and users gain points for uploading status updates and photos (though they can also choose to make their journals private). The team plans to launch more engagement features and activities like hashtag prompts to encourage people to upload and comment on photos around the same theme. The idea of keeping a gratitude journal or participating in a community filled with people intent on finding a memorable moment during even the cruddiest of days might seem cloying or (for the more curmudgeonly among us) even downright horrifying. But it can pay off. Researchers have found that keeping gratitude journals encourages healthier habits, better sleep and can even improve emotional and physical resilience. I also like the idea of having a safe place to indulge my inner Pollyanna without being accused of being an “Instasham” or irritating my wider group of Facebook friends. LifeCrumb users have dedicated their visual calendars to daily updates about their children, pets, weight loss progress or best meals. Some have even turned the calendar into a budgeting tool by taking photos of what they bought (or didn't buy). If you update your LifeCrumbs journal regularly (or at least go back and fill in the days that you missed), then by the end of a few weeks you'll have a collection of about 30 good moments to enjoy at a glance (even if the month was otherwise lackluster). “People kept coming back and letting us know that it is great to be able to see your memories laid out in a calendar format,” says Maggie Cheung, LifeCrumbs' community manager and Tomofun's director of social marketing. “Each visual acts like a mnemonic to bring back the memory.”

PingTune Raises $1.6M And Unleashes Messaging App Based Around Music

With the success of SnapChat, Line and others, many have been wondering who will own the next big messaging service. Now, we're not saying it's necessarily the next big thing, but it is interesting to us that PingTune (formerly named Tuneit) has appeared with a service which slices off a fascinating niche of the messaging space with an app for music fans that want to send slices of music to each other in an easy and simple way. The startup, based in London's ‘Tech City' in the East, has also just raised £1m ($1.6m) worth of investment to do it. The seed investment comes from Rupert Hambro (former Chairman of Hambros Bank, currently Chairman of JO Hambro) and Dominic Perks (serial entrepreneur and active investor). PingTune is an iPhone app which lets users search for music from sources like YouTube and SoundCloud, then simply message friends with that track. You can also choose a specific section of the tune or video to send, which, if you think about it, works quite well when you want to tell a friend something which just the chorus in a song is talking about. Clearly the flirting possibilities are endless. CEO Henry Firth says “We saw that people were sharing music on social networks, but it can be clunky. Copying links between windows is hard work on a mobile phone. We wanted to make that process easier… so we built PingTune.” PingTune's 12-strong teams consists of staff formerly with Yahoo, Spotify, Skype and Sony. He says the business model will eventually be selling mp3s and other music-related purchases. Note Spotify's partnership with Tango and Sony's campaign with Kik, speaks to this trend for music and messaging getting together. Messaging could well be the next wave we'll see in this space.

Amid Some Fistfights, Walmart Sells 1.4M Tablets On Thanksgiving, iPad Mini A Top Seller

Walmart is already crowing about Black Friday and we're only a couple of hours into the actual day itself. That's because depressingly, Black Friday has somehow subsumed Thanksgiving Thursday and become the Day That Spans Many Days. Oh well; at least they sold a huge boatload of tablets. Walmart puts its one day sales of those mobile computing devices at 1.4 million, and while it doesn't break down by brand or model, the company also cites the iPad mini as one of a short list of top-selling items. Also included in that list are the generic categories of big screen TVs and laptops, so you can imagine that the iPad mini likely accounted for a significant portion of those 1.4 million slates to be called out by name. Other top-selling items included Microsoft's new Xbox One, and Sony's PlayStation 4, indicating that the home console market is still alive and kicking despite the rise of mobile game and sluggish sales for Nintendo's Wii U console, which made its debut last year. It's worth noting that Walmart sold twice as many towels as it did tablets, at 2.8 million moved on the day when Americans get together to give thanks, stuff themselves with turkeys and buy towels. And of course, Walmart's press release sort of glosses over the fact that its stores have become sites for riots, fights, bad manners and all sorts of various reminders that humans are essentially the worst. At least some of those 1.4 million tablets sold went to the victors of squabbles, according to Twitter.