Rafe's Radar

Wrapp: Giving you free stuff to 'gift' to your Facebook friends

Wrapp rolled out in the U.S. today. It's a mobile/Facebook gifting platform, kind of like Karma, which I covered recently and liked quite a lot. I don't think Wrapp is as slick or as fun as Karma, but it's got a devilishly clever business model, and I'm having a hard time seeing how it can go wrong.

See my Reporters' Roundtable interview with Wrapp CEO Hjalmar Winbladh, below, for more. His perspective on the business of gift-giving is interesting, and it might help you come up with ways you can think around the edges of your business.

What Wrapp does that's so clever: It combines gift-giving with targeted marketing with social metrics. The idea is that if you want to gift someone (I guess that's a verb now), Wrapp will look at the person you're thinking of, figure out where they are and how valuable they are to the Wrapp partners, and display for you a number of potential gift card option. For example, if you're looking at getting something for your fashionable girlfriend, you might see a $10 gift card from H&M you can give her -- at no cost to you.

You can add on to the gift card value (and you'd better, you lout), to give her $100 (at a $90 cost). Or you can just cheap out and go for the freebie.

Either way, H&M gets a good potential customer into the store, and for a very reasonable (to H&M) expense of only $10.

Wrapp, of course, takes a fee when the "card," which resides on the recipient's smartphone, is redeemed. The company also helps brands collect data on who's connecting with whom. If the companies working with Wrapp are smart, they're also correlating big data about who's buying what based on their social profiles.

Personally, I'd rather pay for a box of chocolates with cash and give that as a gift; I don't like the thought of an honest gesture being exploited as a datapoint on some product marketing wonk's Powerpoint. But that's because I'm a romantic. Wrapp is a smart business and it really could help more people connect through gifts and gift-like gestures.

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A father's lament: The real world is not a game

There was something about the Mama Bear family tech conference a week ago that creeped me out. I am the father of a 5-year-old boy, and perhaps a third of the people at this conference were trying to build apps for him. All the apps were well-intentioned. All were, at some level, educational.

Still, all the apps felt wrong to me. I wanted my son to have nothing to do with any of them.

I've been trying to understand why these educational apps were getting under my skin to this extent. It's not like I'm anti-technology when … Read more

How Google's Drive helps kill Microsoft's Office

Google's hard drive in the sky, Google Drive, is a big threat to other cloud storage products like Dropbox and Box. But it's also a stab straight at the heart of Microsoft's mainstream business software, Microsoft Office.

While Google's productivity application suites, Docs (now incorporated into Drive) and Apps (for businesses), have been making some headway into Microsoft Office's territory, the important battlefield is not the application. It's the data. If Google can move the battlefield to a place where it has the bigger army and better weapons, the whole game changes. Google Drive … Read more

How Wavii understands news (Reporters' Roundtable)

The startup Wavii fascinates me. I've spend a career honing my writing and analysis skills, and here comes a punk startup that can read what I write and summarize it in a clear headline that's often better than my own.

How does it do it? Is my job threatened? I sat down with the CEO of Wavii, Adrian Aoun, and we talked about how the product works, why he built it, and how it traces its lineage back to the famous linguist Noam Chomsky.

For more on Wavii, read my review, Wavii groks the news so you don't have to.

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LinkedIn iPad app wants to have coffee with you

LinkedIn suffers, a bit, from dating site syndrome. The service is highly useful when you're looking for someone, or something from someone, but a bit less so when you're not. To get users back to the service more frequently, LinkedIn has been updating the site and the mobile apps to show its users information they can use even when they're not looking for a new job or to make a sale.

An iPhone app launched last year shows you what your contacts tell LinkedIn they're reading. Today the company is launching an iPad app (and updating … Read more

Google Drive terms of service: 'A toxic brew'

Google has inadvertently stoked privacy concerns about files uploaded to its newly released Google Drive by issuing poorly written rules that are more apt to confuse than to clarify.

While private files winding up on Google Drive may not be as privacy-protected as the ones on your hard disk, fact is that Google is not granting itself free rein to use personal data. But you'd be hard-pressed to know that given a "toxic brew" of conflicting claims found in the company's omnibus privacy policy, according to a legal expert who has closely reviewed Google's policies. … Read more

PageOnce drops subscription fee

SAN FRANCISCO-- Building a freemium service? You might want to pay attention to this tidbit: The mobile bill-payment service PageOnce is dropping its $4.99 subscription fee and going to an a la carte model.

PageOnce CEO Guy Goldstein told me at the Future of Money conference that the company has been testing different price points for its paid service. While getting financial account data and seeing bills remains free, helping users pay bills is where the company makes money. To date, PageOnce has charged $4.99 a month for this. Starting in early May, the per-month fee will be … Read more

Mama Bear conference lesson: Aim for the grandparents

At the Mama Bear Family Technology conference, a series of practical talks from entrepreneurs tackling the family market yields solid advice.

The overriding theme: this market is big. Huge, even. Two trillion dollars, says Dave McClure, organizer of the conference. $250 billion, says Jody Sherman, of the family products site Ecomom. Either way, big.

Addressing this market is complex, speakers said. The consumers of the products aren't always the buyers. Parents buy for kids. But it's the grandparents who have most of the money. And teachers make a big difference as well. You need to sell to all … Read more

Mama Bear conference sees money in moms

"Too many single white kids are getting funded," 500 Startups founder Dave McClure says. "We're missing a big f---ing market."

McClure is kicking off the MamaBear Family Tech Conference today in Mountain View, Calif., to attack that market. At the same time, he wants angel investing to open up. It's overrun by men, he says.

"There's no lack of female founders anymore," according to McClure. He says that about 20 percent of his portfolio companies are run by women. Many are addressing family markets, he says. There are also a number … Read more