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At Disrupt’s Startup Alley, Chicago-based Georama launched the consumer version of its real-time virtual tours. The company, whose enterprise service is already used to giving virtual tours of colleges, museums, and zoos, wants to expand that by offering an array of virtual tours for travel-lovers everywhere — offering people “a new way to travel the world.”
Users can already use Georama’s consumer site to take virtual tours in cities like Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Seoul, and Istanbul. The site has 30 tour guides signed up, who schedule tours of local hotspots and use live streaming HD videos to share their experience online.
Scheduled tours are free, but viewers can pay to ask certain questions or make specific requests. [Read more here]
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What if every time you used a platform, you were given a small piece of ownership in that company? That’s the thinking behind iConsumer, a recently launched website and app that offers coupons and cashback rebates that also offers free shares of stock when you sign up and use the company.
“iConsumer is the only company to offer tradeable stock to all of its customers,” said founder Robert Grosshandler in a statement. “We’re building on the premise that ordinary people, the 99%, should have access to the startup economy. Consumers – if they know it or not – help companies grow big, go public and become very valuable; we at iConsumer believe those customers should be rewarded for their contributions.”
Users get 100 free shares of iConsumer stock when they sign up as a member and an additional 100 free shares if they refer new users. Every dollar of cash back they earn also earns them a dollar of stock. iConsumer offers deals with more than 45,000 brands and 1600 stores
“Congress made crowdfunding a startup possible,” Grosshandler added. “The SEC’s rules made it practical. We turned it inside out by making every customer a shareholder.”
According to a disclaimer in the press release, iConsumer is only “testing the waters” under Securities Act of 1933 regulation, allowing the company to see if the “may be an interest in an eventual offering” of its stock options. iConsumer is under no obligation to give some or all of these users eventual offerings. Read the full disclaimer here.
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Warbler, a new mobile marketing solution that automatically identifies and executes marketing opportunities for SMB, launched this week to help smaller brands and retailers improve their marketing efforts.
“Warbler’s prescriptive technology puts the power of real time, data enabled marketing into the hands of small businesses who often lack the time or know-how to run sophisticated mobile campaigns,” said Justin Jarvinen, Warbler’s Chief Innovation Officer, in a statement. “The results will be major productivity and financial gains for busy business owners, and because it’s completely automated, any marketer, experienced or not, can effortlessly run agency-quality, results-oriented mobile marketing in less than a minute a day. We’ve taken marketing automation and made it fully automated marketing.”
It works like this: a restaurant owner might get a push notification that there are seven open tables tonight, with a specialized promo for a steak special that can be immediately sent to customers’ phones. In addition, a major component of the platform is a customer rewards program, which helps incentivize app downloads and drive customer engagement — with redeemed loyalty points covered entirely by Warbler.
Subscription prices start at $99/mo, and Warbler is giving away a total of 1 billion loyalty points to the first 10,000 marketers that sign up.
