#kiosked

[omarboulakjar]

Co-founder Antti Pasila becomes CEO at programmatic ad company Kiosked

 Kiosked, a company that dynamically inserts ads into a publisher’s content, has a new CEO — co-founder Antti Pasila. Pasila, who previously served as the company’s chief strategy officer, said his appointment is part of a broader shift: “The key thing is, we’re focusing our resources on the supply side.” In other words, while there are no plans to get rid… Read More http://j.mp/2disvEN

[smithieddigest]

Cate Blanchett was snapped at the opening of the “Beauty in Wonderland” exhibition in Milan last week, wearing a stunning red and white dress by Prabal Gurung. Predictably, the image circulated swiftly online, attracting the eyeballs of countless fashion consumers. Now, a new service called Kiosked, aims to let people buy the products contained in images like these, with just one click. Well, almost one click.

“Kiosked” images — denoted by a small ‘K’ icon in the corner — are embedded with real-time information about where to buy the products they contain. When shoppers hover over these images with their mouse, they see product information pulled from the e-commerce sites of partnering retailers. In a world in which online imagery (especially of celebrities) if a powerful driver of purchase intent, Kiosked is definitely onto something.

Participating retailers can also post Kiosked content on their websites, blogs and social media pages, and track exactly where and how customers are interacting with it. “We can track everything. We can tell which items are most popular, in which colour, at what price and where. We can collect an immense amount of data and it’s all in real time,” said Kiosked founder and chief executive Micke Paqvalén.

[smithieddigest]

Kiosked Oy, a startup that links images on the Web to online stores, plans to triple its workforce after attracting a Digital Sky Technologies partner to its board in its second round of multimillion-dollar funding.

The Finnish company collected $6.9 million from private investors including John Lindfors, who is joining the board with event producer Kevin Wall. Lindfors has been at Digital Sky, billionaire Yuri Milner’s investment firm that backed Facebook Inc., for three years, and previously ran Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s Europe technology investment banking.

“What these people bring us is substance and credibility,” Kiosked founder and chief executive officer Micke Paqvalen said over coffee at the company’s glass-walled headquarters in Espoo, Finland. “Now we’re going to hit the accelerator hard.”

Kiosked, founded in 2010, develops technology that makes it easier for people to buy an item they see in an online picture or video clip — be it a news photo or sports highlight reel. It is seeking to expand in a market also targeted by companies such as Mountain View, California-based Luminate Inc.

[kadonneettytot-blog]

Kiosked - tuotesijoittelun uusi sukupolvi?

On hyvä olla itseä nuorempia ystäviä, he usein ovat ensimmäisenä perillä uusista kuvioista, virtauksista, trendeistä, hullutuksista, ohjelmista, tai niinkuin ystäväni Jennifer tästä:

Kuva kaapattu Kiosked:n sivuilta 

"Kiosked is a leading platform enabling Smart Content™. Kiosked turns any online content, images, videos and applications into interactive and viral storefronts. Kiosked has been selected as one of the world’s best technology companies and won many major advertising and design awards."

Käytännössä palvelu mahdollistaa parhaimmillaan kaikkien netissä näkemiesi tuotteiden ostamisen. Esimerkkinä vaikka tällainen: Rihannan uudella musiikkivideolla hänellä on päällä mikroshortsit, jotka tahdot itsellesi. Jos musiikkivideon päälle ilmaantuu pieni Kiosked:n logo

   sitä klikkaamalla pääset suoraan shortseja myyvään nettikauppaan. 

"With Kiosked anything you see can be yours. When browsing the web you can buy the products you see in any type of online content, immediately and intuitively, and from any device."

Tämä suomalainen (!) keksintö mullistaa tuotesijoittelun, mutta pidänkö siitä? Ainakin sijoittelu on melko selkeästi merkittyä, mutta palvelun myötä siitä tulee varmasti entistäkin yleisempää. Kuka tahansa voi myös ansaita rahaa palvelulla, siksi pelkäänkin, että tulevaisuudessa ystävien Facebookiin lataamat lomakuvat tulevat olemaan täynnä näitä pikkuruisia mainoksia.

Logojen klikkaaminen myös tuo erittäin paljon keskitettyä kallisarvoista tietoa asiakkaiden ostokäyttäytymisestä; minkä ikäiset klikkasivat esim. Facebookissa olevaa linkkiä, mistä he ovat kotoisin ja miksi he ostivat ystävänsä suosittelemana juuri tämän tuotteen.

Olen varma, että tämä yritys tulee menestymään. 

Pikkuruisia K -kirjaimia odotellessa,

Janica

[30feethigh]

Nike Gyakusou Line

[savalancheblog-blog-blog]

A Glimpse Of Future for Savalanche

Finally we got the new Savalanche web pages out, revealing the new Savalanche and its renewed scope. The process of renewing the concept has been ongoing whole year and it’s a pleasure to finally get this out in the open.  In my previous post I gave some hints about what’s going on, and now we can reveal the whole package. It’s been quite a long journey up to here and we have certainly tried a lot of things. Some of them were working well, some not that well. But I believe it was a journey we had to take to end up in situation and understanding that we have now. The core of our platform is still the same (eCommerce platform with build-in revenue sharing and easy installation to any page), but we needed to scale up a bit on what it comes to customers.  So instead of relying on individual bloggers and smaller sites as “resellers”, we started to lure bigger media as our customers and we saw quite clearly the problems that publishing industry and media is currently facing. The performance of banner advertising has dropped drastically in few last years (CTR being commonly 0.1-0.2%) and few gigantic providers like Google and Facebook are competing for same customers. This has more or less made online media offering quite obsolete for SME-companies and forces media to outsell the ad inventory with cheaper prices through ad networks and  exchanges. So industry is craving for new solutions and innovations, that also some Finnish companies are trying to provide (check Thinglink and Kiosked as couple of my favorite examples).  This is why Savalanche Shopping Malls concept got started: to make online media a distribution channel for eCommerce. See the big picture here:

What does this mean in practice? Well, soon you will see various shopping malls on side of popular online media. There will be smaller ones, concentrating on certain niche like KotoLiving for housing, handcrafts etc, and there will be bigger malls that will reach the whole population with generic malls. Merchants can then decide in which media they want to sell (not just advertise) their products, own media and Facebook being still one of the option.  We will also soon introduce the premium web store interface,  that will have excellent shop-in-shop experience with widest possible integration to Facebook and optimized for search engines. We are also introducing some new improvements on our banner-stores and other tools for integrating the products with the content (some on our own, some via partners).

So what makes this unique? Having been on the road whole year and telling the story towards potential customers, we always get the question: what makes you different than Company X?  X being mostly replaced with companies like Kiosked/Thinglink, Fruugo and Payvment. To explain our position better, here is a quick comparison with those companies:

Savalanche vs. Kiosked vs. Thinglink

I wanted to raise Kiosked here, because I truly like what they have done on product discovery side. They have very well-functioning product banners (check Suomi24 Kiosks!) and image tagging technology combined with Image bank for publishers (just love the idea, the tagging is devious job in large scale!). But still, they only operate on discovery and advertising side, the product purchase transaction is always done on retailers own store.  We at Savalanche provide full functioning web stores (shop-in-shop) for the media, that have also multi-supplier shopping carts and checkout included. Just like in Amazon.com, our merchants don’t necessarily need own web store at all. Plus we of course allow regular online shopping experience with search and recommendations.  We do have some similar technology for advertising the products within the content, like our banner store and image store provided in co-operation with Thinglink, but that is not the core of Savalanche now. Actually I would love to see Savalanche Mall integrated also with Kiosks someday, I believe we do more complementary than competing technology. Please Micke and rest, correct me if I got it totally wrong :). And what is comes to Thinglink, I think what we do with them is a great example what they do the best, making image available as platform for everybody (check their new API!).  They tell stories within the images and ecommerce is many times only small part of that story. I’m looking forward to see some of our common projects coming alive, keep your eyes on Koto Living.

Savalanche vs Fruugo

Fruugo was something that we got compared against many times, at least in the beginning. They basically do just the same than us, allow multiple merchants to sell through one shopping mall and take part of the revenue. However, there are two important things that separate us from them.  1. They have Fruugo.com, we build shopping malls into multiple online media. So Savalanche is rather a mall platform while Fruugo is a real shopping mall. 2. They have concentrated to make international ecommerce as easy as buying from local online store. We are building a network of malls and merhants, which can together create totally new channels for eCommerce.

With these differences in mind, I believe we solve totally different problems. Our main customers are the publishers, Fruugo works only with the merchants. Again like in Kiosked case, I would rather see us providing their merchants a new channels than competing side by side.

Savalanche vs Payvment (and dozens of other Facebook Stores)

Well, I guess this comparison is becoming obsolete after explaining the previous ones. It might be already clear, that the Facebook stores will play only minor part in our future. Facebook itself will be integrated deeply into our products and you will still see the good old Facebook store as one window into whole offering. Especially there will be some interesting campaigns and fan-only stores coming in near future and we are intrigued to see how publishers can monetize their large online communities in Facebook.  We also hope that Facebook is wise enough to make better offering for SME merchants inside Facebook (search and discovery for stores would be great :). So comparing with Payvment might have been relevant year ago, not anymore. I hope they succeed to make Facebook stores known to the people and earn some money out of their work. That would give space for us others also. Pioneering is not always easy...

 What next?

As said, this was just the glimpse of our future roadmap. We have big plans to make Savalanche THE platform for combining eCommerce with content and advertising, and Finland is only the first step. Keep listening and check this blog and www.savalanche.com regularly for news :)

After a long week it's now time to relax a bit. Savalanche just had it's 2nd anniversary this week and I am definately looking forward for next two! Please contact if you want to be part of that somehow :).

Have a nice weekend folks,

Pasi Vuorio pasi.vuorio (at) savalanche.com