Geo-based marketing is just getting started, and local businesses are feeling their way around how best to use service like Foursquare, Facebook Places, Gowalla, and even Twitter. It’s hard enough if you have only one store. For chains and national retailers, managing Foursquare Specials across 400 stores is a nightmare. MomentFeed is trying to bring some order and analytics to this chaos with a location-based marketing dashboard aimed at businesses with more than one location.
The LA-based startup just raised a $1.2 million seed round from DFJ Frontier, DFJ JAIC, Factual founder Gil Elbaz,and Rapleaf founder Auren Hoffman, and Walter Kortschak.
MomentFeed pulls in merchant location data from Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter, and Gowalla, and gives retailers a unified view of all the check-ins, deals, and specials across their locations nationwide. (It is also built on Factual’s location data, which helps to harmonize locations between services). With one dashboard, a retailer like 7-Eleven or a fast-food chain can see that maybe more people are checking in with Foursquare in New York, but with Facebook Places in the midwest and adjust their targeting accordingly. “We are built on the place signal, instead of the keyword as the primary signal,” says CEO Rob Reed.
The startup offers tiered services, from analytics to campaign management to CRM, which range in cost between $29 and $99 per year per location. It is still not clear what merchants will be charged to run specials on Foursquare and other services, but Reed expects to share revenue with each location service. “We are happy to share revenues with Foursquare and others for the data,” he says, “similar to Twitter with DataSift.” (DatSift also raised money today in a $6 million series A).
MomentFeed is a location-based analytics and campaign management platform that integrates Gowalla, Facebook Places, Foursquare, and Twitter. The MomentFeed solution is designed for enterprise marketers that manage tens, hundreds, or thousands of location across the US and globally. It provides a unified and comprehensive dashboard for LBS data as well as campaigns and CRM.
At DFJ Frontier, they believe entrepreneurs are extraordinary. Their team consists of investors who have also founded and grown companies, so they know how to help because they have done it themselves. Their philosophy is to provide support to help you turn your idea or technology into a self-sustaining business with real value. They expect the managers of their portfolio companies to own significant equity stakes. DFJ Frontier typically invests $100,000 to $1,000,000 initially, with additional capital reserved for follow-on...
Gil Elbaz is the founder of Factual, a new information-sharing startup. He is also the co-founder of Applied Semantics (ASI), a new language that helped create Google’s Adsense. ASI helped to define and build new addressable markets with its AdSense platform and other contextual advertising products. The company formed important partnerships with key players in both internet and content spaces such as Overture (now Yahoo), Verisign, and USA Today, effectively paving the way for markets which are today...
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