The latest from TechCrunch
- With Olark, You Can Follow Customers Around Your Online Store To Make Sure They Buy
- Xtreme Power Gets $29.5 million to Store More Power From Renewables
- Chatroulette Calls The PoPo And Crosses Fingers In Hopes Of Investment
| With Olark, You Can Follow Customers Around Your Online Store To Make Sure They Buy | Top |
| Last August, we first wrote about Olark , a Y Combinator -funded startup that gave e-commerce site owners a simple way to interact with their customers : an IM widget. Now, Olark is expanding the functionality of these IMs to include detailed information about that shopper in realtime, and partnering with Shopify to make it easy to install. For example, with this new Olark tool, dubbed Shopping Cart Saver , a site owner can get an IM every time someone hits the site. And you can see the referrer indicating how they got there. While they’re there, you can see what pages they’re visiting and most importantly, what items they’re putting in their shopping cart. If a user has a question, this same IM window serves as your way to interact with them. You could get some of this information before with Olark, but now the service is designed to ping you depending on how you set it up. For example, if the value of the items in a user’s cart goes over a certain number, you can get an IM letting you know that. Most importantly, this gives owners a way to stop what Olark calls “shopping cart abandonment” — yes, users putting things in their cart and then leaving. Now, you can see exactly what’s in their cart and ask if they need any help to make sure they completely the purchase. Sure, that may sound a little creepy — kind of like a shop owner who follows a customer around the store to make sure they buy something — but it’s also extremely useful. And this type of tracking is actually not any different than the data most sites can already see — it’s just that with this IM integration, you get to see it in real time. Well, and annoy people. Olark co-founder Ben Congleton is clear with who they’re targeting with this product: small to medium size business owners. Obviously, if you installed this on Amazon.com, your computer might explode with IMs. Olark has partnered with the online store creation tool Shopify to offer this product with the click of a button. This IM tool will work with all the major IM services, iChat, AIM, Gtalk, Adium, etc. The business model for all of this is a freemium one. Basically, you can try out the features up until a certain point, then you have to buy one of their plans, which start at $15 a month and go all the way up to $149 a month. This model has helped Olark reach cash-flow positive status almost from the get go, Congleton says. Beyond the Y Combinator seed round, Congleton says Olark raised a small angel round a few months back. Since they are cash-flow positive, he’s not too concerned just yet about a larger round, but envisions it happening soon. CrunchBase Information Olark Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Xtreme Power Gets $29.5 million to Store More Power From Renewables | Top |
| A Kyle, Texas company that makes utility scale power storage systems, Xtreme Power, nabbed a $29.5 million, series C round of venture funding the company announced today. The investment was co-led by Bessemer Venture Partners , the venture capital arm of The Dow Chemical Company and clean tech investors SAIL Venture Partners . Xtreme Power aims to alleviate problems associated with renewable energy sources with utility-scale dry cell batteries, and software that monitors power flow in and out of them. The company does not sell individual batteries, notes Xtreme Power’s chief development officer, Darrell Hayslip, but “power systems” that include a “containerized unit with essentially large banks of batteries arranged in series and in parallel. A typical unit has 1,200 1-kilowatt hour power cells in it, and has the ablity to store 1,200 kilowatt hours of electricity. [Xtreme Power] manages that rack and system by looking at the voltage within.” The materials included in the units are 90% recyclable, he says, and can store generated power for weeks. Providing reliable solar and wind power storage at a large scale means that when the sun’s not shining or the wind’s not blowing, power utilities can still meet peak energy demand with electricity generated by these non-hydrocarbon sources. Xtreme Power’s fiberglass dry cell batteries are already working in systems from Antarctica to Hawaii. The company says they can work for 20 years, then get recycled. The batteries work even after they've been shot through with bullets, Xtreme Power has claimed. As reported earlier by Industrial Fuels and Power : “Xtreme Power is retooling a closed Ford Motor factory…as part of a joint venture with Clairvoyant Energy with the aim of producing 2000 megawatts of batteries a year…” An Xtreme Power spokesperson today confirmed that part of its newly attained funding will be dedicated to the development of that joint venture, and the site now known as the Ford Renewable Energy Park . The park (in Wixom, Michigan ) will be used by Clairvoyant Energy and Xtreme Power to continue research, development, manufacturing and demonstration of their products. But the 320-acre site will also be open to suppliers and other manufacturers in the energy industry. Clairvoyant Energy and Xtreme Power have another goal of creating a minimum of 4,000 energy jobs in the area. Another piece of Xtreme Energy’s C-series funding will go to to bolster its wind power generating farm project in Hawaii. The New York Times today reported that Hawaii’s “state officials want 70 percent of energy needs to be met by renewable sources like the wind, sun or biomass by 2030.” CrunchBase Information Bessemer Venture Partners Information provided by CrunchBase CrunchBase Information Sail Venture Partners Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Chatroulette Calls The PoPo And Crosses Fingers In Hopes Of Investment | Top |
| Chatroulette founder Andrey Ternovskiy recently posted this strange missive detailing Chatroulette’s commitment to cleaning up its act. In battling the porn plague , Ternovskiy has resorted to tracking offending IP addresses and turning them into the police, among other things (I’m assuming the hilariously named “penis recognition software” wasn’t enough): “While many people understood the concept of roulette, where sometimes you can lose the game – due to randomness, over time it became a major bottleneck in further development of the service, because of a certain difficulties with raising venture capital, legally operating on the United States territory and having to deal with negative feedback.” “Luckily we all live in a real world, and we can easily apply the laws of a real world even on an internet application. With the help of a few good developers we’ve started collecting information, such as IP addresses, logs and screen captures of offenders who actually break US/UN laws by broadcasting inappropriate content in a specific situations. We’ve captured and saved thousands of IP addresses of alleged offenders, along with logs and screenshots which prove wrong behavior. We are initiating a conversation with enforcement agencies and we are willing to provide all the information we have. I hope that with help of a Criminal law we can finally get the problem out of our shoulders and get existing organizations which usually solve these kind of problems to help us.” While the odd tone of the post (titled “Utopian world and its dark side challenges”) can most likely be attributed to the fact that English is Ternovskiy’s second language, this is obviously intended to be a serious response to the lingering issues that have made potential investors wary. Last month, one insider told us : "If he doesn't make a dramatic move soon to clean up the service, the brand will be permanently tarnished.” Ternovskiy is clearly heeding that advice. Interest in Chatroulette has been high but investment has yet to come. However it’s not just the penises that marginalize the platform. Web video is a notoriously tough and unprofitable industry, and the actual tech behind Chatroulette is so simple to replicate that it’s hard to see any kind of exclusivity. Much like 4Chan, Chatroulette is considered part of the seamier side of the Internet, which tends to be a red flag for potential investors. Some hope lies in the fact that 4Chan founder Christopher Poole’s latest venture Canvas Networks just got $625k in seed funding and is currently hiring . “We’ve blocked thousands of IP addresses, reported offenders and service seems to be much cleaner than before. That is cool. Now give us some time to put new features in place (sic)” It is not clear exactly what these new features are as Ternovskiy has not yet gotten back to me. Founder of Rocketboom Andrew Baron has his own Digg-inspired ideas : “For example, what if users who received a thumbs-up, or a positive score of some sort, could rise-up, and thus based on merit within the community, work their way up to the top of the chatroulette charts where their broadcast could be watched by many. Thus, a user who entered into Chatroulette, could have the option to (A) dive in as a participant, as it is set up now, or (B) dive in as viewer only.” It’s certainly possible that Ternovskiy will eventually raise a modest amount of funding, given his sheer effort. However, unless something drastic happens, Chatroulette is doomed to the weird Internet curio cabinet , a fundamental part of its early appeal — like “Ah, remember Chatroulette!?” Perhaps instead of calling the police, Ternovskiy needs to take inspiration from Poole and abandon the “Chatroulette as a business idea” altogether, using his vision to come up with something entirely new, something more immediately “investment-ready”? CrunchBase Information Chatroulette! Andrey Ternovskiy Andrew Baron Canvas Networks Christopher Poole Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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