NEWS
10 Israelis making a mark on New York’s tech scene
A musician, tech pioneers, content-discovery evangelists, big-data gurus, eagle-eye investors and a kibbutznik with a hot idea for shared workspaces.
By Viva Sarah Press SEPTEMBER 19, 2016, 8:00 AM
Gil Eyal is one of the pioneers of the influencer marketing industry, which swirls together the power of celebrity endorsements with algorithms, databases and audience demographics.
Before cofounding HyPR , Eyal was an executive at Mobli Media, Disney and Dell. Before that he was a commercial lawyer and earned his MBA from Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University.
One of the go-to veteran Israeli entrepreneurs for advice-seeking new Israeli companies, Eyal is credited with introducing the concept of celebrity investments to startups and technology companies – driving 20 million users to Mobli by partnering with 120 celebrities, among them Lil Wayne, Adam Levine, Nash Grier, Austine Mahone, Zandaya Coleman and Stephen Curry.
Eyal said he created the company to “revolutionize influencer marketing by providing tools that help analyze the audience of every celebrity and influencer in the world, as well as automate the ability to run measurable, targeted campaigns, at scale.”
HyPR has its headquarters in the World Trade Center and its R&D in Tel Aviv.
Startup Offers Payment Insurance for Apartment Hunters
TheGuarantors helps tenants qualify for units and gives protection to landlords in expensive markets
By
LAURA KUSISTO
Sept. 28, 2016 9:45 a.m. ET
As the apartment market soars across the U.S., one financial-services startup sees opportunity in helping tenants get into units they can’t qualify for on their own.
TheGuarantors, launched in New York in 2014, sells payment insurance to tenants, providing landlords with a guarantee they will be made whole if the tenant becomes delinquent.
The offering is a symptom of a pricey market in which rents have risen faster than incomes and landlords can be picky about the qualifications they demand. Rents have climbed about 20% nationwide over the past five years while incomes have only recently started to rise.
The insurance, similar to the private mortgage insurance many lenders require of borrowers who have small down payments, provides a new level of protection for developers putting up new buildings in pricey markets where the applicant pool might be thin.
It could be a boon to landlords in places like San Francisco and New York in particular because rent growth has far outstripped income gains in recent years. Cliff Finn,executive vice president of new development at Douglas Elliman in New York, said 10% to 30% of the tenants in buildings he is leasing are now insured through TheGuarantors.
Some of New York City’s largest apartment complexes, from the 11,200-unit Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village on Manhattan’s East Side to the 1,258-unit Gotham West complex near Hudson Yards, are willing to accept TheGuarantors, the company said.
“It reduces the exposure to vacancy,” said Jonathan Miller, president of appraisal firm Miller Samuel, who sits on TheGuarantors’s advisory board. “It basically opens it to another category of tenant.”
In New York, landlords have stiff requirements. They typically demand pay stubs showing that prospective tenants’ annual income is at least 40 times greater than one month’s rent. Tenants also must have credit scores of about 700 or better on a scale of 300 to 850 and solid rental histories. Those who can’t meet those requirements must find a guarantor who earns 80 times the monthly rent—no easy feat as rents keep rising.
TheGuarantors has a lower bar. It insures tenants who earn as little as 27 times the monthly rent and have credit scores as low as 630. The company also takes into account savings and other liquid assets and income earned outside the country. Even the cost and quality of degree a college student is pursuing can offer clues as to how likely they are to miss a rent payment.
The premiums work out to two weeks to about a month’s worth of rent a year, depending on how risky the applicant is. The company, which issued its first policy earlier this year, said it is experiencing its first default.
“We’re taking a little more risk than the landlord, but we’re charging a premium for that,” said Julien Bonneville, founder and chief executive of TheGuarantors.
The company is partnering with Worcester, Mass.-based Hanover Insurance Group Inc., a $5 billion insurance company founded 160 years ago.
For tenants, the product is likely to produce mixed results. It will help some people who otherwise wouldn’t qualify for an apartment. But the worry is that landlords could decide to require the insurance from borderline applicants who might have qualified for the apartment anyway.
Mr. Bonneville, a native of France, moved to New York in 2010 to attend business school at Columbia University. As a student with little income, he struggled to qualify for an apartment. He eventually used the services of Insurent, which was launched in 2008 to offer a similar type of insurance to tenants.
Mr. Bonneville formed TheGuarantors in 2014 and said he now has about 300 buildings signed up. He declined to disclose how many guarantees the company has issued, but said it is profitable.
Insurent remains the biggest player in the nascent market. The company said it is accepted at 3,000 buildings and has issued some 13,000 guarantees over the past eight years.
Xiao Xu, a 25-year-old recent graduate of the Illinois Institute of Technology, likely wouldn’t have been able to find an apartment without such insurance. Mr. Xu is starting an internship at a New York bank in October but needed an apartment this month. He found a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side for about $3,500 a month, but his starting salary of $20,000 was nowhere near enough.
He said he contacted TheGuarantors at midnight and got a reply the next morning. Everything was completed the next afternoon, he said.
Without getting insurance, qualifying for the apartment would have been “impossible,” he said.
Hypr launches App Blaster to put you in front of 1 billion social users
STEWART ROGERS MAY 16, 2016 10:48 AM
TAGS: APP BLASTER, APPS. MARKETING, GIL-EYAL, HYPR, MOBILE USER ACQUISITION, SOCIAL, SOCIAL MEDIA, USER ACQUISITION
So you’ve built an app. With over 2,300 launching on the two major app stores every day, how will you make sure people see the digital embodiment of your blood, sweat, and tears?
We have been analyzing mobile user acquisition strategies and tactics for some time at VentureBeat, summarizing the results of over 14 billion mobile ads and talking with leading user acquisition experts. When something different comes along, we take notice.
Enter App Blaster, a new and intriguing app user acquisition tool from Hypr, the influencer marketing search engine and database.
So what is different about App Blaster and its approach?
The tool promotes an app through influential social media accounts. Sounds simple enough, but there’s a twist. It utilizes its network of over 800 themed social media accounts, each of which creates a series of social posts that “blast” apps throughout different platforms. These posts are exposed to as many as one billion social media users who are directed to the app stores to install the app.
For example, let’s say you’ve created a new sports game. Popular social media accounts that discuss athletes, equipment, and sporting events will promote your game to their audiences. Because the accounts are sports related, it is likely that your app will be downloaded by bona fide sports fans, resulting in high engagement.
App Blaster has another interesting element. Hypr’s technology crawls every public social media account in the world and analyzes them to understand audience demographics. That depth of understanding allows App Blaster to select accounts that speak directly to the audience most likely to be interested in your app. I wondered how it determines the best users to target.
“Hypr’s sophisticated engine looks at the follower lists to understand audience demographics,” Hypr CEO Gil Eyal told me. “We look at any platform that has a following mechanism, including, but not limited to, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Vine, Periscope, Meerkat, and others. By taking a representative sample of the audiences of each social account, we’re able to compare them to our proprietary database and understand if an audience is particularly interested in specific subjects, as well as generate a demographic audience map for the account, including a breakdown of audience interests, gender breakdown, age breakdown, income levels, education levels, ethnicity, location, and more.”
That level of understanding provides complex targeting and segmentation.
“It allows our system to insert automated targeting into the account selection process,” Eyal said. “By understanding which accounts reach which audiences, we are able to ensure that a larger percentage of relevant followers is exposed to the app. For example, if the app is about basketball and targets teens 15-18, male, in the U.S., it would be a waste to post on a fashion-oriented account that targets females in Latin America.”
Although the company says that campaigns are effective across all platforms, some produce better results than others.
“Typically, the most effective platforms have been Instagram and Facebook,” Eyal said. “Our posts are carried out on themed accounts, thereby giving us control over the content and posting time. Message delivery includes a short video and a caption, regardless of platform. Where it is possible to include a link, we include one.”
App Blaster campaigns are first tested with a pilot campaign that costs $5,000. The system optimizes posts in order to reduce user acquisition costs. Once the posts are optimized, customers can scale increasing organic downloads to hit their rankings or download quantity goals within the app stores. In comparison to other user acquisition techniques and tactics, the per-user costs are low, considering Hypr’s claim of delivering high-quality users.
“The pilot is focused on understanding the cost of installation on our network for a specific app,” Eyal said. “Prices [per user] typically don’t exceed $3, and often go below $1 for extremely high-quality users. There is no incentivizing during the process, and users will most often go and download the app organically from the app store, resulting in a major boost in the ratings, as well as highly engaged users who chose to download the app.”
We know from our research on App Store Optimization (ASO) that paid acquisition campaigns deliver a 20 percent uplift in organic installs. High-quality users become advocates for your app, increasing reach via word-of-mouth and social sharing.
“There are many services that send volume downloads in an effort to drive an app up the rankings,” Eyal said. “From the outset, our goal was to only send extremely high-quality users who will engage with the app, leverage any viral features, and write genuine positive reviews. No one knows exactly how the app store algorithms work, but we do see a major boost for apps that have positive engagement [and] high user ratings. As an app developer, the days of just obtaining a lot of downloads are gone. Apps are measured based on the quality of their users and how often they come back, and we believe there is no value whatsoever in a user who downloads the app and leaves shortly thereafter. Our goal is to generate the highest-quality users at the lowest cost.”
App Blaster is available from today.
Apester Picks Up $12 Million To Help Publishers Embrace Native
http://adexchanger.com/publishers/apester-picks-12-million-help-publishers-embrace-native/
by Allison Schiff // Tuesday, April 19th, 2016 – 9:00 am
Apester, a self-described digital storytelling platform, rounded out its Series A on Tuesday with $12 million, bringing its total funding to $17 million.
The fresh infusion, which came after an initial $5 million round in July, was led by Blumberg Capital, with participation from Mangrove Capital, Wellborn Ventures and several others.
The cash is earmarked for three main purposes: R&D, hiring salespeople and international expansion beyond existing offices in New York, Tel Aviv, London, Berlin, Tokyo and a soon-to-open outpost in Istanbul.
“We’re trying to meet digital publishing needs, and that’s not market-specific,” said Apester CEO and co-founder Moti Cohen.
Those needs include increasing engagement and time spent, both of which are acutely lacking in the mobile and social referrals that comprise a larger and larger portion of overall traffic.
According to AddThis, most social referral traffic bounces after landing on the first page.
“Social usually acts as a way to get someone from one point to another, but they’re unlikely to dive into other articles, let alone advertising,” Cohen said.
Apester’s approach is to try and limit the bounce rate by adding elements to the page that spice up the editorial and keep users from heading out after reading the headline and scanning a couple of paragraphs.
The technology works by integrating into a publisher’s CMS. From there, publishers can embed interactive units – quizzes, polls, personality tests and videos – directly into content so that they look like a native elements of the story.
Although funding in the ad tech space is notoriously running dry, native advertising still seems to be able to bring in the bucks. Survey and quiz platform Playbuzz, for example, one of Apester’s top competitors, raised a $15 million strategic round in late March led by Saban Ventures with pinch-hitting from Walt Disney Co.
Apester's platform also collects user feedback, preference info and sentiment-related data based on a reader’s engagement, which it supplies back to the publisher and uses to help recommend more relevant content to keep the reader reading.
Some Apester clients use the tool to enhance their editorial output, while others use it to power their sponsored content, including The LAD Bible for McDonald’s, The Weather Channel for Michelin and The Huffington Post for Virgin America and Clorox.
In the Clorox example, The Huffington Post used Apester to drum up engagement around the fruits its content partnership with the brand by creating a “Would You Rather” quiz aimed at parents. (“Would you rather step on a LEGO or be head-butted by a toddler?”) The quiz had a 72% click-through rate, and nearly 5,000 of the readers who engaged with the poll went on to read other Clorox-related articles on HuffPo’s site.
Entertainment Weekly created an interactive video on the 40th anniversary of the release of Queen’s "Bohemian Rhapsody" that prompted readers to test their knowledge of the song’s lyrics. The video garnered a 56% engagement rate despite its placement at the bottom of the page, a 93% completion rate and an average time spent rate of six minutes.
UK publisher The Telegraph created an interactive quiz to accompany a story entitled “Who said it: Donald Trump or Adolph Hitler?” The quiz generated a 14% click-through rate and more than 60,000 engagements the week it was published.
“We use the same mechanisms for brands and for advertisers,” Cohen said. “There’s no point in disguising yourself. If you bring value, it doesn’t matter if you’re a brand or not. Look at Red Bull and extreme sports – I mean, it’s just an energy drink, but people engage like crazy.”
Founded in 2011, Apester first hit the market at the end of 2014. Over the last year, the company upped its headcount from eight to 50, a number it plans to double by 2017 using funds from this most recent round.
LifeBEAM Grabs $16M for Wearable Exercise Technology
Square Peg Capital led the round, with participation from Wellborn Ventures, Cerca Partners, Atomic14 Ventures, Triventures and angel investors.