Postmates Debuts ‘Get I...

One of the things that people who move away from New York City lament is the lack of delivery services elsewhere. In the Big Apple, you can famously get pretty much any kind of food — or anything else really — delivered straight to your door, 24 hours a day, rain or shine. San Francisco, for example, is a bit more limited. You actually have to leave your apartment to get most things (first world problems, I know, but it is a thing that people complain about.) Well, at least that was the case until today. Postmates , the urban logistics startup that launched its flagship business-to-business courier system back in December , just launched the public version of its first consumer-facing app, “ Get It Now. ” The app, which is currently available on the iPhone and active only in the San Francisco Bay Area, lets users get anything in San Francisco delivered to them in under an hour. ‘Hacking’ The Local Delivery System As my colleague Ryan Lawler has reported , Get It Now has been a big hit in insidery SF startup circles since it launched the private beta version of its app two months ago. It amassed about 1,000 beta users, and grew its courier capacity to be able to fulfill 1,000 deliveries a day with an average delivery time of 30 minutes. And the people who used the app really used it: In private beta, Get It Now averaged $116 in revenues per user per month. Postmates co-founder and CEO Bastian Lehmann tells me that the company has simply outfitted its current courier fleet with credit cards, allowing them to purchase goods for users. The company takes between 20 to 40 percent commission on each purchase. The big thing here is that it allows consumers to turn any place into something that delivers, he said: “It allows consumers to hack the system. It’s no longer that if you want delivery there’s only that one Italian place, or that one Chinese place, that they can order from. You open the app and see that you have all these beautiful places around you.” A Sleek Exterior, But Specialized Tech When asked about the competitive landscape — you can use Taskrabbit and Exec to find someone to deliver something for you, for example, and on-demand car service Uber looks like it’s dipping its toes into the delivery space — Lehmann said that specialization is what gives Postmates its edge. “Uber is a premium product, and I don’t see them starting to deliver food for $7.99 per order. Taskrabbit and Exec are all cute… but if you want efficient delivery of something specific in your city, Get It Now is going to be the fastest option. We’re doing one thing, and we’re doing it really well.” He said that with its logistics platform, he sees Postmates as a startup more in the vein of companies such as Amazon , FedEx , and Square . “It’s a huge technology play, and we’re taking something that was super complicated for a lot of merchants and making it very easy.” Shifting The Focus From B2B To Consumer Postmates will continue to operate its business-to-business courier service, but sees the Get It Now app as a way to effectively promote itself to merchants more effectively than its own small sales force could. “Initially, our plan was to concentrate on merchants. What we realized, though, is that it takes a lot time to sign up all these merchants — if you are a small business, you have several startups coming in every week trying to sell you on a a rewards platform, or a new daily deals app. We realized that maybe sales is not in the DNA of our company.” From a business perspective, it seems to be a very smart move toward efficiency. Postmates currently has 12 full-time employees, and has raised $1.75 million in seed funding from a group of angel investors. Lehmann says that geographic expansion beyond the San Francisco Bay Area is certainly in the company’s plans, and that Postmates will likely raise a Series A round before it moves into other metro areas. Here are a few screenshots of the Get It Now app in action (click on images to enlarge):

Tiger Pistol Raises $1M...

Tiger Pistol , an Australian startup offering social media marketing tools that it describes as both “small business friendly” and “enterprise powerful”, is coming out of its closed beta test today and launching to the public. It’s also announcing that it has raised $1 million in angel funding. Co-founder and CEO Stephen Hibberd says that the goal was to create something that could take most of the difficulty and uncertainty out of creating marketing campaigns on social networks. You can start off with pre-built campaigns and templates, so you don’t have to create anything from scratch, and you’re tapping into Tiger Pistol’s knowledge about best practices. There’s a drag-and-drop interface, so you can customize those campaigns without any technical knowledge. Then you can track the data about your campaign’s effectiveness and reach, including the number of participants and their conversion rates. Now, there’s clearly a glut of social media marketing tools out there already, but what caught my attention was the variety of customers that Tiger Pistol serves. Yes, there are many small businesses who participated in the closed beta, but the company says it also worked with larger customers like Expedia, Hotels.com, The Weather Channel, Village Roadshow, Under Armour, and the BBC. Hibberd says he wants Tiger Pistol to be a global product, so it works in any language, and customer support live chat is available 24 hours a day, so companies in any timezone can reach out for help. All told, there were 1,600 participants in the closed beta from more than 100 countries. There was a strong response in the Asia-Pacific region, Hibberd says, but the United States saw the largest number of installs. Tiger Pistol is currently limited to Facebook, but plans to add Twitter, LinkedIn, Sina Weibo, and Kaixin001 soon. The funding it was led by Australian investor David Solomon. It sounds like the round was actually raised a little while ago (Hibberd credits it with “getting us where we are now”), so Tiger Pistol may raise more in the not-too-distant future. As for the company name, it refers to the tiger pistol shrimp , which can apparently make the loudest sound on Earth. I guess that’s intended to illustrate, in a way, the power of social media. The weirder part is the fact that the tiger pistol shrimp uses the noise to stun and eat its prey — whether or not that weakens the metaphor or actually improves it is an exercise I leave for the reader.

Wave Accounting Raises ...

Wave Accounting , which makes 100 percent free accounting software for small and medium-sized businesses, has raised $12 million in a Series B round of financing from the Social+Capital Partnership (s23p), along with existing investors Charles River Ventures and OMERS Ventures. With the funding, Wave plans to continue aggressively increasing headcount, in engineering as well as sales and business development. Wave was founded in July 2009 and launched its software in November 2010, introducing a cloud-based solution for small businesses that didn’t have accounting expertise. The app offers double-entry accounting, invoicing, expense tracking and financial dashboards, which provides data to small business owners who might have previously been reliant on spreadsheets to track payments. The product is completely free, with Wave making money off of advertising and offers that are made to users on the web. So far, the software has been used by more than 250,000 small businesses in more than 200 countries around the world, although VP of Community, Content and Communications Rob Maurin says that about 70 percent of users come from North America. The company helps to manage more than $24.3 billion in income and spending for small businesses, most of which are nine employees or less. Altogether, Wave Accounting has raised a total of $18.5 million. That includes a $5 million Series A round last October, along with a $1.5 million seed round in June 2011. It’s been adding personnel pretty quickly — doubling to about 45 employees since the beginning of the year — and it expects to keep hiring over the next several months. Maurin says most hiring will be in engineering, though the startup is looking to boost sales and business development.

43 Facebook Pages Have ...

What has 4,177,653 Facebook followers, 245,839 Twitter followers, 1,018 YouTube subscribers, 294,467 Google+ fans, but only  67 followers on Pinterest? * The answer is Amazon.com! Those combined numbers landed them in the number one slot on Campalyst’s Top 250 Internet Retailers on Social Media index . The index is proof that not all social media is created equal and that’s a good lesson for everyone. Amazon is rocking Facebook, but there are more than 50 companies on the list that beat them on YouTube. As for Pinterest, no one is pulling astronomical numbers but several companies are created a nice little fanbase there. The infographic Campalyst created to go with the index shows that nearly all 250 companies use Facebook, Twitter, and even YouTube (90%). 67% are using Google+, which isn’t bad, but I have to wonder if they’re keeping them up or if they’re doing them any good. 61% are already on Pinterest and that’s kind of an elbow to the eye of Google+. Facebook has the strongest social media pages thanks to their age (by social media standards, they’re the grandfather of the bunch) and their associated advertising options. Here’s another slice from the Campalyst infographic. Overall, the Top 250 list is populated with companies you’d expect like Amazon, Staples, Walmart and Dell. But the list also has a few lesser known quantities that are making strides, like iHerb with 329 Pinterest followers (more than Kohl’s) and ThinkGeek with more than 44,000 YouTube subscribers. If you’re a small business owner, don’t let these numbers get you down. These top companies have plenty of help when it comes to running to their social media channels. If you’re a company of ten or less, concentrate on building up Facebook and a second channel that speaks to your audience. There’s no sense driving yourself crazy trying to update Pinterest or YouTube if your customers don’t hang out there. You can see the full Top 250 Internet Retailers on Social Media index and infographic when you visit Campalyst online. *Data is based on numbers on the day the index was created and have changed since then. Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

Carrier-Led Mobile Wall...

Isis , the carrier-led joint venture between AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, is gaining steam and has today announced a new addition to its mobile wallet: American Express. The Isis Mobile Wallet will now support American Express’ Consumer, Open Small Business and Serve cards, joining Chase, Capital One and Barclaycard, which have previously committed to the program. A mobile wallet leader has not yet emerged – Square is growing, and Google Wallet has been floundering – but the space is still really new. Although half of the U.S.’s mobile population use smartphones, making transactions via the phone has yet to establish itself as a real, or more importantly, as a better  alternative to the swipe. But if there’s a piece of the mobile payments pie to be had, you can be sure the carriers want in. Hence, Isis. The initiative is slowly moving forward, with its  bankcard partnerships having been announced in February,  new POS partners Verifone, Ingenico and ViVOtech announced in March, and last summer, its partnerships with payment networks (Visa, MasterCard, Discover, American Express) and device makers (HTC, LG, Motorola, RIM, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson). Of the new AmEx relationship, the Serve addition may be the most interesting. Serve, as you may recall is American Express’ new digital payments and commerce platform which is, in effect, its own digital wallet of sorts. Serve integrates a variety of payment options into a single account that can be funded by a bank account, debit or credit card. With Isis, the Serve digital platform becomes a bit like a mobile wallet within a wallet. This actually makes more sense, as a real mobile wallet should mirror our offline counterpart and include all the bank cards we use, not just those from a single entity. Later this year, Isis will roll out its first pilot tests in Salt Lake City, Utah and Austin, Texas, in advance of its public availability. While the moves seem slow to those watching the space, you have to acknowledge that building up the partnerships in advance and then thoroughly testing the product before hyping its launch, maybe be a smarter way to encourage eventual consumer adoption of the Isis wallet over..well, Square perhaps, and whatever Apple might announce one day, if it chooses to do so.