A cat video with a difference. How to monitor your creative brain waves [VIDEO]
When your brain gets working, neurons start firing up. This creates an electrical signal that can be interpreted, in this case, by giant cat hears.
The post A cat video with a difference. How to monitor your creative brain waves [VIDEO] appeared first on Anthill Online.
Anthill Online
Jen Storey
Should you take it personally when staff leave? Are exit interviews a chore or a charade?
So you run that exit interview when a valued employee walks out the door. But then what? It is a question many bosses find hard to answer. That is because emotions run high with many taking an exit as a personal betrayal. So, the managers swiftly proceed into denial mode, dismissing what an exiting employee More Info »
The post Should you take it personally when staff leave? Are exit interviews a chore or a charade? appeared first on Anthill Online.
Anthill Online
Anthill Magazine
It’s your birthday YouTube! Look at how one company has changed the world [VIDEO]
It was a time before the smart phone (BSP). All of our internet activity was done on laptops and desktops. And, it was only eight years ago. At this crazy moment in our history, three former employees at PayPal had an idea about being able to share videos online. Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed More Info »
The post It’s your birthday YouTube! Look at how one company has changed the world [VIDEO] appeared first on Anthill Online.
Anthill Online
Jen Storey
Tellwut Online Survey Finds That 46% Of Working Women Have Experienced Gender Pay Discrimination
In an online survey conducted on Tellwut’s digital online marketing site, over 2,000 panel members were asked whether they felt that women living within North America were being paid less than their male counterparts. The results were striking. An overwhelming 65% of participants indicated that they believe that wage discrimination exists between male and female coworkers in the workplace. Only a mere 17% did not agree, while 18% were unsure.
SOURCE LINK: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/5/prweb10758177.htm
Tags: crowdsourcing, gender-pay-discrimination, online-survey, pay-equality, tellwut
Will the falling Australian dollar stop us from shopping online at oversea stores? Probably not
With a fall below parity with the American greenback over the weekend, and prophecies of further doom ahead for the Aussie dollar, the question yet to be asked is: “will online shopping take a hit?” To begin, let’s look at the so called “fall” of the Australian dollar. While the media spin seems to favor More Info »
The post Will the falling Australian dollar stop us from shopping online at oversea stores? Probably not appeared first on Anthill Online.
Anthill Online
Gerald Ainomugisha
PopExpert Online Video Education Marketplace Raises $2M In Seed Funding From Learn Capital And Others
As edtech startups continue to challenge the current state of higher education, and various niche startups focus on educating people through digital means, yet another company is getting a boost when it comes to helping people learn.
PopExpert, a learning marketplace that lets students connect with experts in one-on-one video chats, has just raised a $ 2 million seed round led by Learn Capital, with participation by Jeff Skoll, Ken Howery, Michael Chasen, and Expansion VC.
The site’s premise is simple: users can sign in and search for what they want to learn. Right now there are experts in multiple fields across the spectrum of “life, work, and play,” including meditation, nutrition, relationships, productivity, career mentoring, language and music.
Once you log in, you can search for something like “yoga” and see a list of experts, validated with credentials and tagged with a price per session. From there, just choose your expert, schedule the session, and get ready to learn. PopExpert even facilitates payments, so the entire process can be completed in one place.
According to the company, one-to-one learning is “vastly superior” to any other method.
“We are focused on areas that relate more to EQ development than IQ development, for example meditation vs. Excel training and personalized style vs. photography techniques,” explained founder Ingrid Sanders. “These areas of EQ development are particularly suited to personalized interaction with an expert, and a one-to-one interaction is by far the most efficient way to experience them.”
For now, the service is only available by invitation, but there are already more than 1,000 experts using the service to teach and make some money. PopExpert recruits these experts after doing their own mini head-hunt, looking through reviews, online sources, and books to find the best possible teachers for the platform.
PopExpert generates revenue by taking a small service fee from every transaction.
TechCrunch
Jordan Crook
TeamSnap Online Sports Management Platform Acquires Weplay For An Undisclosed Amount
TeamSnap, a company that provides tools for managing sports teams, has today announced that it is acquiring Weplay, a social networking site for athletes, parents and coaches to help facilitate coordination for events, games, practices, etc.
The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The Trinity Ventures-backed startup, Teamsnap, is an online tool aimed at making practice scheduling, conditioning sessions, team rosters, payment plans, etc for all amateur sports. It tracks everything from parents’ payments for big tournaments all the way to who’s bringing the sliced oranges.
So far, the company has raised a total of $ 4.3 million, including its latest round in February for $ 2.75 million.
According to the release, Weplay had raised even more, a total of $ 15 million since its launch in 2008. The service acts as a social network with similar functionality to Teamsnap, wherein parents, coaches, and kids can coordinate practices, games, etc. for sports teams.
Teamsnap claims that it will take over Weplay’s “customer base and technology” in the acquisition, though it’s unclear if the Weplay team will migrate over to Teamsnap or if this is the end of their Weplay chapter. It’s also unclear if Weplay will be rolled into Teamsnap or stand alone as its own product.
We’ve reached out for clarification, but haven’t heard back yet.
The release states that Weplay has over 2.25 million customers which will migrate over to the Teamsnap platform. The acquisition should bring Teamsnap’s total userbase to 5 million users in 195 countries.
The deal makes sense considering just how similar the two platforms are. There are a growing number of services like this out there, and not one has risen to the top as a dominating force. Perhaps some consolidation will help Teamsnap reach that peak.
TechCrunch » Social
Jordan Crook
Free Online Service Matches Small Businesses With Lenders
An art school uses an online lending matchmaker to find capital.
YoungEntrepreneur.com
Michelle Goodman
Online Writing Jobs Site Celebrates 7 Years of Free Service to Community
According to The US Department of Labor, freelance work will continue to expand as more businesses become accustomed to the many benefits of hiring outside talent and as they embrace the technology that makes hiring home-based contractors as easy as pressing a button. Popular crowdsourcing sites like Freelancer.com and Elance.com have also confirmed this upward trend in their recently-released data, according to Scott.
SOURCE LINK: http://www.melodika.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=678175
Tags: article-writing, blogging, brian-scott, copywriting, crowdsourcing, elance, freelance-writers, freelancer, online-writing-jobscom, proofreading
GrubSeam? Online Takeout Giants GrubHub And Seamless In Talks To Merge
Today, thanks to the maturation of the web, digital tech, and smartphones now in seemingly every pocket, startups are finding it easier than ever before to build scalable solutions to finally address the many inefficiencies in our food manufacturing, production and distribution systems.
As interest in food tech balloons, one area in particular appears to already be at the tipping point: Online and mobile food delivery. Over the last few days, we’ve hearing about a merger between two of the largest companies in the space. Rumor has it that “arch rivals” GrubHub and Seamless are in talks which could see them join forces as part of a merger. While our sources tell us that the talks are serious, the terms of the merger are not yet clear and, of course, any potential deal could fall through.
Furthermore, it’s not yet clear what kind of synergies would take place, how management of the new entity would be structured or even what the new business will be called. The two companies would not confirm on the record on any of the above. But as far as the name goes, we’re hoping for Grubless. Or Hubless GrubSeam. But they have a nice ring to them, don’t they?
If these rumors are true, the merger comes at a good time for the arch rivals, who have been seeing mounting competition of late from a laundry list of new startups entering the space, including increasingly popular alternatives like Delivery.com, ChowNow, Munchery (meals from local chefs), Campus Special, eat24 or the bigs of Europe, like Food Hero and Just-Eat.
If the online food-ordering and delivery market is roughly where daily deals were three-plus years ago, then the deal essentially creates the Groupon of food delivery. Like the daily deals market, food ordering has traditionally had a fairly low barrier to entry, which helps explain why we seem to see a new startup pop up every week.
Plus, the business model isn’t particularly complicated, making it replicable. That being said, innovation and tech adoption have been slow to come to the food industry, and, at scale, this model (taking a slice of transactions) has the potential to be able to generate a lot of cash.
This is just one part of why the “food tech” business has been so hot lately. Just ask venture capitalists who collectively poured $ 350 million into food startups over the last year. (Compare that to 2008, when it was less than $ 50 million.) Plus, when you get right down to it: People need to eat. And, as it turns out, people are pretty busy. Uh, and lazy.
Of course, for those who remember the spectacular failure of online food companies like Webvan, Kozmo and HomeRuns, this whole “tech in your kitchen” and online ordering jibber-jabber probably sounds familiar — and not in a good way. But this time it’s different. Research from Cornell University recently found, for example, that over 40 percent of adults in the U.S. have ordered food online, and 10 percent of restaurant orders now originate online — and these numbers continue to head north. GrubHub and Seamless have built successful businesses on this very idea.
Both GrubHub and Seamless have been around for some time: The New York City-based Seamless was founded in 1999, while the Chicago-based GrubHub got its start in 2004. And for the most part, the two companies have catered to two different markets geographically. While both now have fairly expansive coverage, GrubHub has naturally developed a firm foothold in the Midwest, while Seamless focused its early attention on NYC, before moving into cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco. From that perspective, a merger would make sense, allowing the new, consolidated entity to gain penetration into markets where they lacked a major presence.
Writ large, the companies, while having some fundamental differences, do seem to have a lot of synergies on paper — at least “nominally,” depending on who you ask — likely why they’ve increasingly become rivals over the years. Bboth are of fairly comparable size, as GrubHub has more than 18,000 restaurant partners across more than 500 cities, while Seamless has over 12,000 restaurants and serves nearly 5,000 businesses and more than 2 million users. As of February, Reuters reported that Seamless was on track to generate more than $ 100 million in revenue this year as it expands into new cities and focuses more aggressively on mobile.
The company reportedly generated $ 85 million in revenue last year, growing its consumer business by 60 percent year-over-year and “will soon be processing $ 1 billion worth of food orders a year,” Seamless CEO Jonathan Zabusky told Reuters at the time. For the majority of its history, the company focused primarily on New York, but launched a major expansion effort last year, bringing its service to 10 new cities. According to the report, Seamless saw its transaction volume quadruple in Los Angeles during 2012, with transactions tripling in San Francisco.
Another interesting point to note: GrubHub was reported to be considering an IPO last fall. The company denied the rumors at the time, and if this merger is true, then they’ve been given the proper perspective. Certainly, it would seem that this wouldn’t take a potential IPO off the table, instead, likely making an opening price that much higher.
The IPO rumors for GrubHub came at a time when the company was reportedly doing about $ 60 million in revenue (this was in 2012) — a little less than half that of Seamless. Furthermore, Crain’s reported in December that GrubHub’s revenue has been doubling every year and, as the company reported $ 30 million in revenue in 2011, that revenue estimate would make sense and put the company on the path to crossing $ 100 million well before the end of this year.
That is all to say that, although the terms of the potential deal are unclear, these are two sizable businesses that are growing relatively fast, so any potential valuation has got to be fairly high. After all: The two companies were fairly comparably capitalized and staffed, with GrubHub growing to over 250 employees and Seamless over 300, while GrubHub raised about $ 84 million from a mix of venture and growth equity firms (including Benchmark) and Seamless raised $ 51 million, $ 50 million of which came from private equity firm Spectrum Equity.
While both companies have made a couple of acquisitions, this would be the second big M&A deal for Seamless, as the company was acquired by food services giant, ARAMARK, in 2006. Five years later, Spectrum bought a minority stake in Seamless from ARAMARK, and about a year later, the food services company spun-off its remaining interest in Seamless to its shareholders. Free from its corporate ownership, Seamless proceeded to go out and buy MenuPages for $ 15 million, showing up GrubHub, which MenuPages had initially targeted as its acquirer. When GrubHub and MenuPages couldn’t agree to a deal, and it seems that GrubHub was instead in the process of buying Dotmenu/Allmenus, Seamless swooped in — according to BetaBeat.
So, as you can see, the companies have a long history of jostling. While GrubHub had been out acquiring restaurant partners fast and furiously, Seamless stagnated a bit under ARAMARK, but since becoming an independent company (again) and with a new board/investors, the company seems to have been compounding its growth. Together, that growth could be exponentially higher.
Finally, if this deal is in fact a go, it’s worth looking at this quote from GrubHub co-founder and CEO Matt Maloney from back in 2011. In it, he shares his opinion on GrubHub’s top competitor, a little company called Seamless. He told BetaBeat:
I typically don’t talk this much about Seamless because we don’t view them as incredibly strong competition for what we’re doing … Seamless fundamentally is a corporate catering business. They were founded years and years and years ago to do just that. And they’re still best in the business for corporate. They recently got into the consumer and residential pick-up and delivery. And they do it well in New York, but they really have zero business anywhere else. We don’t even consider them competition anywhere other than Manhattan specifically.
So, there you go. A match potentially made in heaven, and one that’s sure to shake up online and mobile food ordering if it happens.
Find Seamless at home here and GrubHub here.
TechCrunch » Social
Rip Empson
