Lifeline Response – Protection at fingertips

Lifeline Response is a Chicago based mobile app development company that develops applications that intended to provide personal safety. It utilizes natural human reaction to respond to emergency situations by immediately alerting authorities if the user is in need of help. It incorporated GPS Location & Route Tracking technology and based on touch sensation, with Microsoft’s Bing Maps for GPS tracking. The app is currently available in AppStore and Google Play. The product has got attractive pricing since it cost only $21.99 for an annual subscription while $ 3.99 for monthly subscription. Since it was founded in 2012,  the app delivers outright service within the USA and have received a fair acceptance within the country. It has been received a seed round funding of $0.37M in March 2014. The company has partnered with U.S. Cellular and has enterprise agreements with universities, hospitals and corporations around the US.

The working of the app is briefly noted. The app is available on the gadget’s home screen. When selected and made it engaged, it senses the user’s thumb on the screen. The moment that thumb is removed, a countdown begins from 20 seconds during which time the user could enter a deactivation code for the app if it is activated accidentally. Instead, if you were attacked, your thumb would naturally come off the screen. Even if the phone was confiscated, once the app has been activated, there is no reversing the process without the proper code. After seven seconds without a code an alarm will begin to sound and when the countdown ends, app’s response verification center will be contacted. The center would call the user asking if they are in an emergency. Incase if the attacker finds something wrong with the situation and tries to turn off the app- by providing this code instead of the proper deactivation code, the app identifies the user is in an emergency. At that point, the app makes a call to the local 911 who would respond via GPS coordinates to the phone’s location. Likewise, if the phone isn’t answered, the same procedure would occur. The company provides 24/7 support and an option for 7 emergency contact numbers to be saved to which distress alerts will be sent, to make the service more promising.

The app is directly focusing on female population especially the university students. As a part of this, the company has two versions available for purchase viz  Personal edition and Campus edition. Thus, the company has made enterprise agreements with major universities and colleges(30+) within the state with a reasonable cost of  $2 to $7. As the alternative solutions are costly and include either personnel or infrastructure or both service, the company could directly make an entrance into the standard population.

An innovation in Digital Advertising

Elevate digital, founded in March 2011 as smartDIGITAL is a leading developer and advertising company. The Chicago company provides a platform for interactive digital advertising. Presently, Elevate Digital products, interactive touch screen displays are employed in high traffic area in Chicago. The company utilize the funds raised for product development and to spread out the span across the US and internationally as the company aims for deployments in the top 30 markets by the end of 2014.This venture is obviously an shortest way that public get access free of cost to a wide range of information and services. Besides, the products design is indubitably appreciable as the display units could be placed indoor and outdoor with multiple sized displays cached with information that best fit the customer needs.

Since its founding in 2011, Elevate DIGITAL has deployed more than 70 screens across several cities. The company has also established partnerships with organizations such as Groupon, The Tribune Company and the American Red Cross, among others. The company received about $7.2 M in Series A funding from many investors during past two years. The investors includes SFX Entertainment, Partners Path Investments, Advantage Capital Partners and Metropolitan Capital Bank.

The elevate digital display units incorporates still and video camera, rotating top screen videos, Interactive displays that features video spots, interactive applications, interactive photo and video sharing. Moreover, it makes possible the interactive shopping and so a bar-code scanner, credit card reader. The display unit is manufactured with data collection and reporting feature together with 24/7 system monitoring and reporting, hence advertisers to easily measure campaign performance. If a customer require a well later reference to the information perceived, one can record  as a soft-copy in the form of  email or a printed report. This implies the consumers are more engaged and hence the ads could directly shot at the clients.

A sports blog in unison

SportsBlog.com headquartered at Nashville, the US is a dedicated blogging site for sports fans, sports professionals and leading sports media personnel. It was founded in late 2011 and initially the site aimed at athletes and public who inclined to the same. Later as more audience pay attention to the site, the more site paid attention to heterogeneous observers. The exclusive blogging partnership with WNBPA(Women’s National Basketball Players Association), National Basketball Retired Players Association, NFL(National Football League) Player Engagement department drew a large community of basketball and football fans towards SportsBlog.com. In recent times, the viewers to the site are all combined with professional players, sportsmen, and spectators including expert fans, sports journalists and talk show hosts. All members are provided with their own Sports Blog with customizable sports themes and features.

 The company had received $750k in Series A funding in November 2013 besides the Series A funding received on March 2014 from Sports & Entertainment Advisory Group (SEAG). The company has adopted a niche marketing strategy in the early stages of development which was further broadened to a large circle. Today, it is an amalgam of all those sportspeople that speaks well about various sports and games and related information.

 As SportsBlog.com is a professionally designed blog, its look and feel could attract a major sector, especially the skilled persons in the sports field. Furthermore, there is an option to create a custom SportsBlog mobile app which would enhance the participation of bloggers round the clock with ease.

 Moving on, the site also sites rewards bloggers with the monthly ranking competition. It provides monthly cash and material prizes to top bloggers fulfilling specific criteria. Those constraints include the genuinity of the post, its freshness, within the first half of month also with genuinity of visitors(fraudulent visitors and robotic interventions are checked), their uniqueness- all help to keep the site live and content rich-that attracts the professional audience to site.

What is social commerce and how to use it for your business?

Social Commerce is basically the platform where the buying and selling of products take place with the help of social medias and online media through interaction and development of new relations. In other words, social commerce is the use of social networks in the background of e-commerce transactions. The concept of social commerce was introduced by David Beisel  and by Steve Rubel and the terms was introduced by Yahoo in 2005. E-commerce has expanded so much these days that almost every transaction be it a purchase or selling, takes place through the e-commerce platforms. Some of the social commerce includes ratings, reviews, referrals, recommendations, communities, social advertising and many more.

Facebook is one among the giants in social media platforms. The Facebook commerce, f-commerce or the f-comm all refers to the selling and buying of products through the Facebook page, either directly or through the Facebook Open Graph. Similarly is the Twitter social media where Twitter Commerce rules and makes it easy for the buying and selling of products.

Since there is a huge option of the products, one was confused while purchasing products for better rates and comparison of products. For this the social commerce brings the best products and the best shopping to one place helps one in better comparison and decision making.  There are both the offsite and onsite social commerce. The Onsite social commerce refers to retailers whereas the Offsite social commerce includes activities that happen outside the retailers which includes Facebook storefronts, Pinterest and other social networks.

If one need to build up a good audience they would have to basically implement the 6C`s of Social Commerce, which includes Content, Community, Commerce, Context, Connection and ultimately Conversation. One has to have a good content first to attract customers, then build a community where interactions happen and build sustainable relationships. Then fulfill customers needs with the help of transactional web presence. Tracking of real world events helps to understand and stay in touch through commercing platforms and hence the matter has to be genuine and clear. It all depends on relationships and the more and relationships maintained the more open in the social commercing. And finally conversing. A clear conversation helps in clear communication and thus in a happy deal between two people.

Social commerce also works on a few elementary elements like reciprocating, building a community and being with the community of one’s choice, having social proof like positive feedbacks from consumers on a public platforms that builds confidence in new visitors, liking of the page which shows that more and more people are confident on our product and when recommendations work, people are more confident in joining and buying products and finally being there for customers and showing the importance of having the product and how much availability would be there, so that the customer would genuinely want to buy the product.

Based on al this is how social commercing works and social platforms are the best marketing platforms these days for any kind of products.