“With Social Coupons, we now have a way to ensure companies, using our Social Sweepstakes to get new fans and followers, have a way to generate new measurable sales after the sweepstakes is over,” says Harlan Titus Beverly, CEO of Karmaback, Inc for formerly the founder of Bigfoot Networks. Karmaback is a member of the Austin Technology Incubator (ATI).

Organizations using the Karmaback Social Sweepstakes platform can begin a social coupon in seconds through the intuitive setup control panel. The social coupon is then posted to the company’s Facebook fan-page and/or Twitter page, and a link is provided to enable posting the coupon to the company’s website. The viral features of Karmaback’s platform, such as Facebook_fanshare rewards and Twitter share, ensure that the coupon reaches beyond simply core fans to other interested and engaged consumers. Karmaback rewards the community’s participation with Karmaback reward points, which can be redeemed for additional social coupons, chances at social sweepstakes, free product offers, and more.

With the Social Coupon feature, Karmaback measures every click, claimed coupon and viral sharing of the coupon to accurately measure true engagement and number of new Twitter followers and Facebook friends. Companies can also add a feature that requires users to redeem Karmaback rewards points to participate, which helps to protect the Minimum Advertised Price (MAP).

Publicly launched in June 2010, Karmaback’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform allows companies to quickly and easily deploy branded sweepstakes on Facebook, Twitter, and websites to encourage viral growth in Twitter followers and Facebook likes. Utilizing the viral nature of social media sweepstakes and now social coupons, companies can organically grow their social media community while rewarding the community’s engagement.

Which leads me to the subject of this month’s FreshTech post, because if there’s anyone that would know something about “having your back,” it would be my neighbor Dave Thomas. You see, in addition to being a fine example of a veteran software engineering leader, my neighbor Dave Thomas is also one of the top trainers in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (or BJJ) that you will find anywhere.

Through the years, while Dave has developed his credentials in his day job as a software manager at some of the more notable Austin-based, venture-backed software startups – Vignette, VTEL, NovusEdge, and TrustWave (formerly Mirage) where he is now – he has also pursued his passion as a teacher of a branch of martial arts that has experienced explosive growth in the U.S.

This explosive growth has in no small part been due to the popularity of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (or UFC) league, brought to the forefront in the past decade through the entertaining, if testosterone-heavy, Ultimate Fighter reality program on the Spike cable TV channel. In fact, for the semi-curious as well as die-hard fans of UFC, you’ll get your first opportunity to attend an Austin-local event on September 15, with a full program beginning at 8 pm, central, at the Frank Erwin center.

But, while the pay-per-view title fight might be what gets all of the attention, the thing that Dave loves is the preparation and training…the jiu-jitsu teaching. And, naturally, he has found a way to combine his interests in technology and teaching in a couple of ways. One is through an outstanding teaching tool that he developed called the BJJ Technique Catalog, or BJJ Tech.  It’s among the highest trafficked sites in its category, providing training videos, tips and techniques.

But, the other way Dave has found to add a dimension of his software product development and startup experience into the mix is through the development of the web service, 1TeamWeb.  1TeamWeb is a cloud-based application suite for managing any type of team-oriented membership, including sports teams, clubs, groups and paid memberships – literally everything from neighborhood little league programs to the book-lovers-who-ride-Segways club.

Not surprisingly, given his background, Dave built the technology on an open source stack for the infrastructure and incorporated from the very beginning the framework for a robust administrative component that would allow the service to scale as large as needed. It also incorporates nifty features like barcode scan check-in so that team members can carry a little swipe-able card (attached to key ring, whatever…just like the grocery store) to record attendance. And, there is a secure, members-only component that allows team or group members to manage their accounts.

In obvious keeping with the rule of “necessity as the mother of invention,” Dave first felt compelled to build 1TeamWeb because he couldn’t find anything else on the market that met his functionality needs and price range. The competitive software alternatives run in the hundreds and thousands, just to get started, and lack the ability to add-on features that an open-stack product provides.

Fortunately, as a software guy, he was able to do something about it by building his own. But, as the founder and owner of a gym, Dave began to see that the application had broader applicability, well beyond the jiu-jitsu niche.

Granted, 1TeamWeb is a second entrepreneurial priority at best, behind his first love and commitment to teach. And, of course, there are the professional, career responsibilities to his employer and software team he manages, which as well all know requires a focus and commitment well beyond a baseline of 40 hours per week. Throw in an active family life and you quickly find that a venture like 1TeamWeb is a burning-the-midnight-oil-venture, labor of love.

But, for me, this labor of love is just another great example of the FreshTech ventures that pop up in Austin all of the time.  It’s one of the things I love about Austin, where the chances are good that your neighbor, or the guy sitting next to you in the cafe, or the gal sitting in front of you at church is in the process of putting their sweat-equity into a new software or services venture.  Meanwhile, speaking of sweat, if your son or daughter is the type who you think would find the sweat-ethic of “better living through agony” appealing, then check out Austin Jiu-Jitsu.

The unique building was built in 1910 by the Slaughter family, which operated a general store on the premises. It was purchased and renovated in 1999 in preparation for the advertising agency. The statistics say that downtown rental rates average $37 per square foot per  year. That would be almost $700,000 per year in rent on a building that the county says is worth $2.5M. Maybe some real estate folks can chime in on how much actual rates become after negotiations, and how much the county underestimates property values.

Congrats to the team at uShip on their continued growth!

Cam.ly will sell you a web-enabled camera for $129. It will do 24 frames/second at 640 x 480 resolution, and has enough local storage to keep 24 hours of video. If you want to add cloud storage, it’s $19.95/month. With that option your live video gets uploaded to the interwebs via your existing home wireless network. You can then view that live video either through a website, any Flash-enabled mobile browser, or the iPhone app. The camera can run off a small battery, or can plugin to the wall.

All that is pretty clever. The company appears to have just launched, so no doubt they have future plans.

It’s a little bit of a novelty at this point really. It would only be a security app if the video were monitored somehow. If you were monitoring your house and someone broke in, you might not even know it. If it was obvious, you could certainly go back and review the video to see if it provided any clues. But there might be more interesting ways to provide monitoring.

What if you hired a security guard to monitor, let’s say, a dozen video feeds for suspicious activity? You could even offshore that task, to attempt to reduce the cost. But people get bored watching the screen, and get familiar with the view the camera has. This complacency might cause a guard to not see a security issue. But what if the video images were randomized and rotated. You had no idea what property you were watching, and every 3 minutes you were watching a different one? It might make it slightly less boring. You could massively distribute this task, similar to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

I’m just sort of riffing here, but it would be cool to divide up the Neighborhood Watch duties, or check in on grandma who doesn’t really need a full blown nursing home.

This round of funding had participation from a long list of investors including DFJ Mercury, Steamboat Ventures, ff Asset Management, and individuals Paul Bricault (on the board of William Morris), Paige Craig (investor in Plancast), Tom McInerney (advisor at Mochi Media), Josh Resnick (partner at Jericho Capital) and Mark Suster. That is a lot of names for this amount of money, and DFJ Mercury continues its trend to become the most prolific early stage investor in Austin, Texas.

“Gendai Games provides a paradigm shift in casual game development,” said Blair Garrou, managing director, DFJ Mercury. “Our firm is attracted to the simplicity and elegance of the GameSalad toolset, and is impressed by the company’s traction to date.”

The launch of GameSalad — a powerful, accessible, and amazingly fast game creation toolset that publishes to the iPhone and iPad App Store — has quickly established Gendai Games as a unique and leading gaming company. GameSalad has been downloaded more than 70,000 times and in the nine months since the launch of its iPhone publishing service, GameSalad has powered over 800 titles in the iTunes App Store.  GameSalad has been used to consistently deliver top-100 ranked games such as Asplosion! HD and Doodle Cannon to the mobile marketplace. Many of these games have been taken rapidly to market, such as the iTunes-featured game Stunt Squirrels!, which was created and published in two weeks by only one designer at Fire Maple Games.

“Brands are continually looking to extend their customer experience into games and other forms of interactive media,” said Beau Laskey, managing director of Steamboat Ventures. “We believe Gendai Games provides a compelling option for creative professionals and developers to dramatically accelerate and simplify the development of sophisticated casual games, which helps to reduce total costs and turn-around time for development studios.”

Customer Care Today

37signals’ dustup with GetSatisfaction almost 2 years ago now for bullying marketing tactics is still cited as an example of how, especially when it comes to customer care, the question of who “owns” your interactions with your users (and they with you) is a sensitive subject.

Two trends since that incident have made the issue even more important today.

One, a focus on great customer care has become, in the era of Zappos, not just a requisite checkbox, but an opportunity for differentiation, and a primary means of acquiring and retaining users (customer care as a revenue generator, not just a cost center).

Second, those interactions are not just happening on customer care platforms – they’re literally happening around the web, as comment strings beneath blogs and news articles, on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn, via Q+A sites like Quora and StackOverflow, and as a result of reviews on sites like Yelp (B2C) and ChoiceVendor (B2B), among many more examples.

GetSatisfaction still hosts unofficial customer communities, and links to them prominently on their website with designations like “37Signals is not yet committed to open coversation about its products and services. Encourage them to join and support the Company-Customer Pact.” They still SEO-optimize those pages heavily, and compete for the attention of users with other channels, whether official or unofficial.

Especially in cases where a less forward-thinking company has no meaningful customer care focus or corresponding community, these unofficial channels can empower individuals who would otherwise be denied a voice. Stories of injustices made right via social media are frequent, if not altogether common.

But in cases where a care-centric organization is fully engaged, no matter where interactions with customers or users take place, the name of the game very quickly goes to data – getting it, triaging it, cross-referencing it and drawing conclusions from it so that you can improve products and processes holistically.

Forest for the Trees

At a micro level, the customer is always right, and winning passionate users is most often a matter of enabling authentic conversations and giving people at those endpoints enough power to make a difference. But at a macro level, marketers and service professionals need to be able to draw insights – cause and effect is everything in customer care. If you can’t look at comprehensive data across all of your efforts and iterate towards a better overall experience, you’re stuck treating symptoms and not diseases.

And as marketers and businesspeople alike become more and more data-driven, linking care data with sales data with PR data with ad data becomes a core competence for any organization.

That data, by the way, might include everything from bug submissions to new product ideas to sentiment scores and voting history. But it also includes more abstract information like frequency of participation, rate of resolution, and submission usefulness.

The problem is, the data isn’t really available. It’s locked up in a land grab.

Who Owns the Data?

It’s certainly healthy to debate whether you, as an application or service provider, or your users themselves own the data comprising your interactions with each other.

In my mind, both parties should have equal access to that data, freely. Access to data around your customers should be unfettered. It should not be throttled or restricted. Nor should it be part of a premium offering – you shouldn’t have to pay to know what your customers are saying to you and about you.

Same goes for users themselves – many pour their heart and soul into care forums and other feedback mechanisms, most of them altruistically. One day soon I hope that everyday people will be able to manage their data the way they would their health or their wealth. But until then, individuals should, at minimum, have read, write and export rights to the data they have created around the web.

What should not be up for debate, however, is the idea that a middleman — a platform provider like GetSatisfaction, or even Twitter – owns the data. Just because you own the means of communication does not mean that you should own the content and data of the communication itself.

Getting (Really) Real

Microsoft doesn’t own the documents I create in Word. Camtasia doesn’t own the screencasts I use their software to create. There’s no doubt that Flickr doesn’t own my photos, and Evernote doesn’t own my product sketches and business card scans.

And Gmail doesn’t own my emails — though it does use them to improve the relevance of the ads it serves me. It is essentially renting that data, in exchange for a free email service and storage in the cloud.

Somehow, somewhere along the line, we decided that our collective contributions to development of great products and services aren’t assets and aren’t valuable. We have been all too happy to cede ownership.

But those interactions cut right to the center of how companies make money, and ransoming the data therein has become almost vogue.

Even despite well-meaning export-bridges to other applications and “open API’s” (a term that drives me crazy), there are a lot of questions around who owns your customer engagement data.

It’s not a good thing. I say this as the proprietor of a customer care platform myself, a platform we created precisely because we were fed up with how vendor and data lock-in were created and subsequently enforced, right under our noses.

Final Thoughts

Whether you are a brand, a developer, an entrepreneur, or a well-meaning customer or user, welcome to the wild wild west of customer care and the nasty underbelly of passionate user communities, where who owns the data is a very political issue, and there are more questions than answers, unfortunately.

Make sure that you fully understand any provider’s policies before you commit to using them. You don’t want to end up beholden to a third party for fundamental insights into your business, and you don’t want that same third party governing your interactions with your own users.

And as a user, speak up! Your contributions are not just valuable – they are critical to almost every company’s success nowadays. You should be afforded basic rights, including read, write and export abilities. Get smart about how your data is used, and demand fair means by which to contribute.

And there are definitely some good guys out there – like Prefinery, BatchBlue, Beanstalk, Chargify, Freshbooks, and Harvest, that make open data a commitment, not just a buzzword, and are growing quickly as a result. Support the forward-looking players and help them succeed, so that hopefully, others will follow suit.

During the podcast we talk about the Austin technology scene, Dachis Group, Capital Factory, and a few startups as well.

Download the episode directly right
here, subscribe to the feed in
iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically,
or just click play below to listen to it right here:

Regional expansion is certainly the first piece of that puzzle. But it’s not just a matter of turning on a new page to a website. My biggest criticism of Groupon (as a business model) has always been the need to actually have sales people on-the-ground to surface the deals at the retail locations. Independent bars, restaurants, and day spas generally aren’t executing digital marketing campaigns on their own, and are too small to hire an agency for that. So the deal websites all need sales people.

Innovation in this business is important. aDealio doesn’t require a certain minimum number of buyers for a deal to be in effect, which is a nice touch. Also, the first few buyers get an additional 5% off. If you refer your friends to the website, you can earn aDealio bucks, which will eventually make some of the offers free. Innovation tends to be grounded in features, and features are easy to replicate. We’ll see how long it takes competitors to copy each other.

As a consumer, I prefer deals on restaurants where I eat frequently and enjoy the food. If you can get me a deal at Perla’s or Justine’s I’ll buy five. But there is the rub — the popular restaurants don’t need to discount and offer coupons. I believe that whichever of these sites builds long-term digital marketing relationships with the top locations will come out on top.

aDealio has plans to open up 12 more cities as demand grows. Congrats to them on their expansion!

“As video service providers consolidate their headends and build converged delivery networks, they require highly reliable IP video solutions that scale efficiently across all subscriber devices,” said Jef Graham, CEO of RGB Networks. “With the integration of RipCode’s mobile delivery technology into our modular, high-density Video Multiprocessing Gateway, RGB can offer a unified content delivery solution for TV, PCs and mobile in a scalable, carrier-class platform. We are already seeing tremendous interest in our multi-function VMG and this bold move quickly takes our capabilities to the next level, providing a unique solution that directly satisfies our customers’ requirements for three screen delivery.”

RipCode’s technology for converting live and on-demand video content to formats required for the mobile environment, complemented by RGB’s field-proven transcoding and ad insertion capabilities for TV and PCs, offers a solution that has never before been available to operators. RGB’s chassis-based VMG already delivers industry-leading MPEG-2 and MPEG-4/H.264 stream processing quality and capacity for advanced video processing functions, including transcoding, ad insertion, transrating and grooming, with exceptional scalability and reliability. With the addition of mobile video delivery capabilities to this modular chassis, network operators will have the ability to perform any-to-any live and file video transcoding, adaptive delivery with Apple Live Streaming, Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe HTTP Streaming, and seamless multi-device ad insertion – all within a single carrier-class platform. This integration of leading technologies completes a one-of-a-kind solution that simplifies network architectures, streamlines operations and minimizes costs.

“Video service providers will require a new generation of high performance, highly reliable video processing solutions to implement ‘three screen’ service in which high quality video is delivered to TVs, PCs and mobile devices on a large scale,” said Gerry Kaufhold, Principal Analyst with In-Stat, based in Scottsdale, Arizona. “Today’s announcement between RGB and RipCode demonstrates that they understand the requirements for these new solutions and that they have the necessary software and hardware components for this new generation of products.”

“Joining forces with RGB makes a lot of sense—not only does our flexible transcoding and delivery technology round out the second and third screen solution needs of RGB’s strategy, but it also strengthens RipCode’s solution scalability for many of our existing customers and opportunities,” said Brendon Mills, CEO of RipCode. “In addition to providing a very compelling solution for three screen delivery, we can also now add high-density, carrier-class transcoding, delivery, monetization and optimization into our existing solutions for web video service providers, mobile network operators and government live and on-demand applications. So this is a win-win not only for RGB and RipCode, but RipCode’s existing customers and partners as well.”

“We examined several options before concluding that integrating RipCode’s technology into our VMG would be the most effective way to complete a three screen solution that would meet the challenges faced by cable, telco and mobile operators,” said Yuval Fisher, RGB’s Chief Technology Officer. “We have built the VMG specifically to enable video service providers to seamlessly implement three screen delivery, serving as the heart of a new generation of IP-centric headends.”

In addition to tightly integrating RipCode’s technology into RGB’s product line, RipCode will continue serving its existing customers and markets with its transcoder hardware and software products. Nearly all of RipCode’s employees are being retained, including the engineering team, and will continue to operate out of RipCode’s office in Austin, Texas.

Like other websites in the quickly expanding “group buying” space, Spreadsy offers consumers significantly discounted daily deals from popular local businesses such as restaurants, spas, and fitness clubs. However, Spreadsy does one better: it marries the proven model of “group buying” with the concept of social commerce by providing a means by which Spreadsy users can procure each daily deal for free simply by “spreading” the deal to other people, such as their own Facebook or Twitter followers. When three people purchase the daily deal from a particular Spreadsy user’s link, that user gets the daily deal for free.

The innovation has proven to be quite successful: Spreadsy has more than quadrupled its daily traffic within one month as more and more users join and “spread” the daily deals to other users in order to receive that deal for free. Furthermore, because the unique “spreading” technology creates a powerful viral and virtual word of mouth effect, it has driven significant increases in both online traffic and physical traffic to the featured businesses’ websites and locations. CEO and Co-Founder, David Matthews, explains, “The idea behind Spreadsy was to create a new kind of word of mouth network that rewards users simply by sharing and more importantly benefits local businesses who are struggling to find direct channels to their target customers.”

Spreadsy’s unique business model has been a powerful attractor for new web-based partners as well. In early June, Spreadsy partnered with the most popular local website in Austin TX, Do512. The “what to do in Austin” website, which boasts a huge daily readership in the Austin area, has agreed to post Spreadsy’s daily deals on its website. In addition, Do512.com will occasionally include Spreadsy deals into communications with their readership. Marketing Director Bradley Markham says, “We are very happy to enter into a partnership with a website as well-respected as Do512.com. Not only does the partnership extend our reach into the Austin community, where we are founded, but it introduces Do512 users to a unique way that they can get great local deals for free. It’s a partnership that benefits everyone involved, from Spreadsy, to Do512, to local businesses and Austinites.”

Spreadsy’s successful Austin launch has paved the way for its expansion into other cities as well. Next month, Spreadsy intends to extend its reach to Dallas, TX. Says VP of Sales and Operations, Mike Gagne, “We are extremely excited to open the Spreadsy platform to Dallas and we are working to put together the most incredible daily deals for Dallas-based consumers from quality Dallas businesses… Our proven model means that local businesses and patrons in all cities can benefit from Spready’s unique social commerce platform.”