Simple Rolls Out iPhone...

Simple (formerly known as BankSimple), the startup with $13.1 million in funding to build a better banking experience for customers, has today introduced its first  mobile application , suprisingly ahead of its public launch. Operating in private beta/invite-only mode for now, co-founder Joshua Reich says that anyone with a Simple account can now use the app, which had been limited to TestFlight distributions since its private launch last November. With the iPhone app, Simple says the idea is to create something that’s on par with the online banking experience, not “an afterthought.” The iOS app lets you use all the tools you could on the web, and access them in a way that’s mobile-friendly. Everything is tappable, and there’s been a focus on making it quick to see the most critical info – nothing is more than a few taps away. Plus, after signing in, you don’t have to continually enter your username and password – instead, the app is protected by your 4-digit PIN code instead. Simple has been covered by the media quite a bit, despite the fact that the service still operates behind closed doors – a testament, perhaps, to the growing desire for, as they say “a bank that doesn’t suck.” To be clear, however, Simple is not actually a bank – it’s working with FDIC-insured financial institutions to hold customers’ money, while it operates the user-friendly front-end for money management. Reich acknowledges the demand for the service, and tells us that there are now over 100,000 folks on the waiting list, and Simple is letting people in on a first-come, first-serve basis. He says they’re not sure when they’ll finish with the invite list and open up to the U.S. public. Any way to jump in line, we asked? “Either become an employee or marry an employee,” Reich joked. (Well, crap). The company was co-founded by Reich (CEO), CFO Shamir Karkal and CTO Alex Payne, the latter a notable hire following his  announcement  that he was leaving his role as Twitter’s API lead to join the team. And, as noted above, the company has raised a good chunk of funding, too, with a  $3.1 million  round in September 2010 and a  $10 million  round in August 2011. As for the service itself, customers can do all the usual things – make purchases, pay bills, earn interest, set up and track savings, view transaction history and more. But the big idea here is not the what , it’s the how . Simple, as you can guess by the name, wants to make things, well…simple. Transactions appear instantly, you can see your balance and “safe to spend” amount at a glance, and you can send payments to friends, too. Simple is also different from other banks in that it doesn’t profit from fees – there are no overdraft fees, late fees, or domestic transfer fees, for example. In-network ATMs are fee-free, and there’s no extra charge for using an out-of-network ATM (although the ATM’s bank might charge you). In the few cases where there is a fee (e.g. international transfers are around $15), Simple just passes on the cost, but doesn’t add on top of it. Reich says the startup is targeting the U.S. market for now because banking regulations vary widely from country to country, but an international rollout is on the long-term roadmap for the company. At present, the Simple customer base tracks national demographics pretty closely, he says. “We are seeing that customers earn above average incomes,” says Reich. “The median customer is 29 years old, college educated, and fully employed.” And with this iOS app released to the wild, what comes next? “We’re hiring Android engineers right now,” says Reich. If you’re one of the lucky few, you can grab Simple’s iPhone app here . Everyone else, sign up and wait.

Decide.com Brings Its P...

Smart shopping service Decide.com , which started off with a focus on consumer electronics before its recent addition of home appliances , is a unique player in the comparison shopping market. The service doesn’t just return prices and reviews, it actually tells whether to buy or wait to buy a given product by analyzing market conditions, trends, news, product release history, and more. Today, that same shopping experience has arrived in a handy new format: an iPad app. The company also talked today about its plans to expand to new verticals in the months ahead. Already live on iPhone and Android, the Decide.com iPad app now sources the same content – over 500,000 products – which can be swiped through via the HD/Retina glow of the iPad’s screen. The app also allows users to track favorite items and set alerts which work across all of Decide.com’s properties, including its iPhone and Android apps, as well as its website. Plus, the iPad app offers access to Decide’s newly launched “daily deals” lineup, which consist of selected products backed by price guarantees. If you end up purchasing a daily deal item, and the price drops within two weeks at any participating retailer, Decide.com pays you the difference. The Seattle-based company, founded by former Farecast engineers , has been ramping up quickly over the past few months. In addition to its daily deals and expansion to home appliances, the company also recently brought Shauna Causey on board as the VP of Marketing. Causey previously managed communications, community relations and social media strategy for companies and organizations including the Seattle Mariners Baseball Team, Fox Sports Net, WB, Comcast and, most recently, Nordstrom. The move to the iPad platform should help Decide.com see a jump in usage, as already 40% of its traffic comes from mobile devices. (Incidentally, 40% is Fab.com’s mobile number, too.). In fact, even prior to today’s launch, the iPad was the source of the most mobile traffic for the company before the iPhone app hit. Since the Seattle-based company’s launch in 2011, its price predictions have been 77% accurate, and the average savings are at $87 per product, the company claims. To date, those savings – over some 18 billion price observations – would total $72 million+ in potential savings for shoppers. CEO Mike Fridgen tells us that Decide has increased its product coverage by 25 times since launch, and today covers over 77 electronics and appliance categories. He adds that the company is now planning to expand into every major household category this year. Meaning what, exactly, we asked Fridgen? “All ‘highly considered’ purchase categories, including Sports & Outdoors, Home & Garden, Tools & Hardware, Baby & Kids, Jewelry & Watches,” he explained. “We are targeting these major categories by year-end. From there, going into next year, we plan to explore other categories, such as cars,” he added. I guess you can’t call Decide a gadget search engine much longer. Also of note, the company has been piloting a program where its buy or wait recommendations are served up on Bizrate , and it will expand to cover more of its appliances and electronics categories in the coming weeks.

Castlight Lands A Whopp...

One of the biggest causes of the high cost of healthcare in the U.S. has been an utter lack of transparency in pricing, even for the most routine procedures. A recent study at UC San Francisco revealed the enormous price discrepancy, and in turn, a broken system: In California, the cost of a routine appendectomy ranged from $1,529 to a high of nearly $183,000. Patients are often referred to specialists by their physicians, end up paying exorbitant sums out of pocket, and are rarely told up front how much these procedures will cost — nor are they given comparisons. Generally speaking, it’s not the interest of healthcare providers to do so. Founded in 2008, San Francisco-based Castlight has been at the forefront of the movement to bring price transparency and comparison tools to healthcare, offering a B2B service that enables self-insured businesses to provide their employees with the tools to compare costs and quality of a wide range of tests and procedures. While there was plenty of resistance from providers off the bat, the value of this price transparency has been more than apparent in the amount of funding Castlight has raised to date — $81 million. Today, the startup is more than doubling its coffers, as it has announced the closing of a $100 million Series D financing. The round was led by two “major” (but unnamed) mutual funds, with contributions from T. Rowe Price, and Redmile Group. Castlight’s previous investors include names like Morgan Stanley, Wellcom Trust, U.S. Venture Partners, Maverick Capital, Oak Investment Partners, Venrock, and more. Though Castlight declined to disclose revenues or profitability, it’s clear that an IPO is up next, even if not in the short term, acknowledged CMO Peter Isaacson. As to the valuation it raised at? That’s not clear, and Castlight isn’t saying, although Co-founder and CEO Giovanni Colella told Forbes the capital was raised at a “huge upward valuation.” And based on the size of the round, that’s not at all surprising. From what we’re able to gather, based on Castlight’s own research as well as ours, the $100 million raise is one of the largest venture rounds for a healthcare IT company on record. The D round brings Castlight’s overall investment to $181 million, and with that amount of capital, and this huge new influx, one might be led to believe that Castlight is burning through cash. But, in fact, Isaacson tells us that the company still had the majority of that $81 million in the bank. Raising that kind of capital can become a distraction, but now that it’s more than flush, the CMO says that Castlight is going to get back to focusing on its product. To this point, the startup has more or less remained off the radar, and has remained focused on its 10+ customers, which include Honeywell, Life Technologies, and insurance broker Willis North America. Considering that 70 percent of its customers’ employees use Castlight’s price comparison tool (with 61 percent saying they’ve changed their spending habits after using its service), the company is looking to expand. Already at 100 employees itself, Castlight will be using some of its new dollars to expand its marketing footprint and ramp up its sales staff. The market opportunity is certainly there. U.S. health insurance premiums increased by an average of 8 percent between 2008 and 2009 , and, as a result, employers have begun asking their employees to cover the difference. The lion’s share of those with health insurance in the U.S. are covered by their employers, and those numbers continue to grow. As more employers begin offering high-deductible plans, those on tight budgets tend to avoid going to the doctor unless it’s absolutely necessary. Thus, it’s become increasingly clear that the system itself is broken — there aren’t any good ways to regulate costs. What’s more, it’s been nearly impossible for people to accurately predict what the costs of surgeries, procedures or hospital bills will be, and though we are increasingly talking about “consumer-driven healthcare,” the system prevents people from acting like consumers. Castlight developed a healthcare management suite to enable employers to provide their workers with more reliable cost and quality information, which is essential given the tendency for tests and procedures to fluctuate wildly on these terms — even among practices that are geographically proximate to each other. The demand is certainly there, and Americans are yearning for solutions that bring more transparency to a bloated system. Of course, the demand has not gone unnoticed among insurance providers, many of whom are developing their own price comparison software. While this could potentially present Castlight with some competition down the road, being a third-party means being able to maintain relative attractive in comparison with the incumbents — and, Castlight hopes, objectivity. Furthermore, insurance companies haven’t had the best reputation over the years, and, due to contracts with hospitals and the like, some are restrained in what prices they can actually disclose. Given the choice between a third party and an insurance company, my guess is that many consumers would opt for the former. Another upside to Castlight’s model is that its customers have begun to get more sophisticated in the type of coverage they’re offering, as transparency is not only a benefit to employees, in the end, it has the potential to result in more workers opting into coverage, which boosts companies’ bottom lines. So companies have begun to offer reference-based pricing, which means that, if, say, an employee wants to get an MRI, Castlight’s data will show them that the price ranges between $800 and $1,800, with the median being $1,400. Companies can see that the employee can get a quality MRI for $1,400 in their area, so they’ll cover the cost of the procedure up to $1,400, and if the employee wants to opt for something more expensive, then they cover the rest out of pocket. This allows companies to maintain quality and extend of coverage, while giving their employees options that allow them to get the highest quality care without severe pain to their wallets. Up next, Castlight wants to expand its data offering and price comparison capabilities around pharmaceuticals, another area which is sorely in need of transparency and more sophisticated search mechanisms. Back in February, GoodRx raised $1 million from Founders Fund, GRP Partners, Highland Capital, SV Angel, and Lerer Ventures to do just that. Right now, Castlight is focused on honing its B2B/B2B2C products, making them more useful for a wider range of tests, procedures, and treatments. A consumer-only play would be an obvious extension of their current product set, and while that’s on the roadmap, it’s still a ways off. “With Castlight’s latest funding, I think people are starting to realize that there will be entirely new categories of software that emerge in healthcare representing various facets of disruptive innovation,” says Avado CEO and TechCrunch healthtech contributor Dave Chase. “Given the scale of healthcare ($3 trillion and nearly 20 percent of the economy), it will put to shame the transformations that happened with shifts from terrestrial to cellular telephony and analog to digital media. The shift from the ‘do more, bill more’ reimbursement model to a value and outcome-based reimbursement model will turn healthcare on its head. Price transparency is just one of the first examples of many.” For more on Castlight, check them out at home here .

Study: 60% of Marketers...

Marketing has never been that easy. Before the days of the Internet, marketers had to become adept at what I’ll call “The Marketing Two Step”. That’s where you would get into a meeting and someone would ask “So what has this campaign done for our business?” At this point the marketing professional started a vaudevillian like routine talking about eyeballs and mind share and how it all likely connected to the bottom line if you really thought about it. Ba-doom! followed by a cymbal crash. Today, in the world of the Internet where everything can be measured out the ying-yang, it’s not much easier. Why? Because in order to get the information that people come to expect from marketing campaigns, there needs to be ability to juggle multiple tools in order to get the data. At least that’s how most marketers see it these days based on a study done by PointRoll and Kelton Research as reported by eMarketer . Take a look at the number of tools the average marketer uses to execute a campaign. Just over 60% of marketers used 5 or more tools with 13% coming in at 10 or more tools for just one campaign! That’s not an easy task since most of these tools come from different vendors and the integration of the data across platforms needs to be completed in a dotted line fashion by the marketer. As a result, we can often find marketers reverting back to the old Marketing Two Step and trying to explain the connection or cause or correlation or whatever that makes someone hearing the report (and stroking the checks for the budget) feel like they are investing in something that contributes to the bottom line. So while it’s more measurable these days, that by no means is an indicator that things are easier. In fact, it could be quite the contrary. What tools do you use to measure your marketing campaign effectiveness? How do you marry disparate parts together to get the true picture of your campaign’s performance? Let us know in the comments. SPONSOR ALERT: Looking for an integrated marketing tool set that could alleviate some or maybe even all of your marketing measurement concerns? Try HubSpot, our Inbound Marketing channel sponsor. Click on their ad on this page and start to learn about their SaaS platform can make your inbound marketing more productive.

Fwix Becomes Radius, A ...

Remember how most companies don’t sell practically overnight for $1 billion and it actually takes years before a startup finds its “Aha!” moment and narrows in on a working business model? Yes, we have one of those stories today. Fwix, which started out as a hyperlocal news aggregator, is metamorphosing into an enterprise-facing company called Radius that gives salespeople the tools and data they need to scout local businesses. It’s a big bet. While Radius had some early success making in the “low millions” of dollars per year selling access to its content to media companies, its chief executive Darian Shirazi saw a much bigger market opportunity in targeting companies that sell services to small businesses. “I’ve always wanted to build a large sustainable company and it turns out that this is very hard to do,” he said. Shirazi is somewhat known for being precociously involved in the early wave of Web 2.0 companies. He was 17 when he joined Facebook, but left two years later when his parents made him go to college. (Yes, really.) After leaving college, he had the urge to do something on his own and the idea for Fwix grew out of his traveling experiences. “I was basically dying to think of how I could organize the web’s information around location,” he said. That turned into a hyperlocal news aggregator complete with an API for real-time local news . But the media industry — as us bloggers know way too well — is an extremely difficult, penny-pinching target market. Fwix remarkably had some success in spite of this, but it wasn’t a big enough market opportunity. Now the new product takes all of the hyperlocal data Fwix used to pull together from Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, Localeze, Acxiom and CityGrid and turns it into a dashboard that a salesforce can use to keep tabs on successful local shops. If you look at a local business profile (see below), you’ll see news, tweets, reviews and events tied to the place. This data can also be fed into Salesforce, where companies can keep track of leads and follow-though on potential opportunities. Shirazi says customers like daily deals sites are willing to pay for this because they need to understand which local businesses are actually popular with the community. ”You have to try to treat the business like a creditor would,” he said. “You have to go after businesses that are doing well.” Discovering this opportunity wasn’t actually that difficult, he added. Several customers, in fact, kept asking for a product that fed location data into Salesforce. The hard part was deciding to sunset the company’s other products to focus entirely on this problem. Shirazi says his clients now include companies that have about 40,000 salespeople between them and that the majority of these employees should be on Radius by year-end. ”We’ve only had the product operational for two months and we’ve had customers go from trial into full deployment,” he said. “We know it’s working.” Shirazi says there are 10 million people who sell to small businesses in the U.S. and even if he grabs a small slice of that market by charging $39 per month per seat, it’s a billion dollar opportunity. He says the Radius’ main competitor  Dun & Bradstreet doesn’t provide all of this context from user-generated content sites. And for the record, Dun & Bradstreet has a $3.7 billion market capitalization, so yes, this is a bigger opportunity. He says that what Radius does is a much harder technical problem to solve than it appears at surface-level. A business like San Francisco’s Hog & Rocks might be called “Hog and Rocks” in one directory but “Hog & Rocks” in another. Or there might be several coffee shops called “Java Cafe” in one city. “We have to go and correlate all the data. The hardest part of the problem isn’t the data collection. It’s the matching,” he said. Shirazi said all of Fwix’s employees stayed on with the company through the transition process and that he’s just hired his 20th employee. The company has raised $6.75 million in funding from Comcast Ventures and BlueRun Ventures. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes. But that’s how you have to be as an entrepreneur,” he said. “As long as you keep trying, you will eventually stumble upon something that works.”