Why Zuckerberg’s Lobby Is Collapsing Like A House Of Cards Outside Of DC

“Power is a lot like real estate. It’s all about
location, location, location.” — Frank Underwood,
House of Cards At this very moment, Mark Zuckerberg’s political
lobby, FWD.us, is probably taken aback at how
reviled it has become, both from the public and its
own members. After all, there are countless political
technology lobbies, including Facebook’s own
Political Action Committee, which routinely offer Republican candidates campaign cash for quid pro quo political favor. So, why, after discovering FWD.us indirectly supporting the controversial Keystone
Pipeline initiative, have would-be supporters flooded
their Facebook page with scathing comments, and its
A-list supporters, such as Tesla’s Elon Musk, ditched
the group? Unlike other lobbies, FWD.us burst on to the scene
with a very public op-ed from its celebrity founder,
promising to galvanize the latent civic passions of
Silicon Vally’s netizens in a noble crusade to advance
the knowledge society. While one hand extended
towards grassroots supporters, the other reached into its wallet pocket and discretely doled out funds to
controversial candidates. There’s a reason most lobbies don’t bother with
grassroots activism: communities don’t get excited
about the kinds of soul-crushing moral compromise
necessary in DC politics. So, when FWD.us rolled up
with millions in hand claiming to be the voice of the
technologists, those who felt misrepresented freaked out. Even more confusing, when confronted, FWD.us
chose to do something no other major organization in
technology has done: it remained silent. Even the
notoriously tight-lipped Apple holds a press
conference after public uproar. Californians haven’t been become jaded to the kinds
of secrecy common for Wall Street banks and
campaign SuperPACs. The unfazed backdoor
dealings caricatured in Netflix’s (addicting) House of Cards series may work for lobbies based in our nation’s capitol, but Californians evidently won’t
tolerate it in their backyard. “I revised the parameters of my promise.” – Frank
Underwood Twitter co-founder Evan Williams tweeted a link to a
scathing blog post from former Twitter employee Josh
Miller, explaining, “In service of noble causes, FWD.us is employing
questionable lobbying techniques, misleading
supporters, and not being transparent about the
underlying values and long-term intentions of the
organization. More discouragingly, the leaders of the
technology industry (and of FWD.us) have built their careers on bringing meaningful change to the world.
They should be doing the same in Washington.” FWD.us would-be grassroots supporters agree, “Will
Fwd.us prostitute climate destruction & other values
to get a few engineers hired & get immigration
reform?”, wrote one commenter on their Facebook
page. Folks in San Francisco had a sense that FWD.us
understood technologists’ natural aversion to
Washington culture, “People in tech have often felt a
cultural disconnect from the political process, which
is a shame considering we are naturally idealistic,”
went a press release of FWD.us’s launch last month. True to their word, unlike any other lobby, they were
building tools for grassroots activism, with the
audacious aim of bottling the rare Internet flash mob
protests that brought down the entertainment industry-
funded, Stop Online Piracy Act, and helped
smartphone taxi service, Uber, overcome the Washington DC regulators. But, unlike Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is actually
planning a social media campaign to push for
Immigration reform, FWD.us’s grassroots promise is
nowhere to be found. “There’s a value in having secrets.” – Frank
Underwood Like many of us at TechCrunch, tech luminaries have
been begging FWD.us for a hint of transparency, “It’d
be easier to believe that FWD.us will be a positive
force if we knew the full breadth of its agenda,” wrote
popular blogger and entrepreneur, Anil Dash.
Unfortunately, they refuse to talk to anyone. Even at our own Disrupt conference, Director Joe Green didn’t
(or couldn’t) be interviewed, instead opting for a
generic story about the value of immigration reform. See, their strategy feels like patronizing, as though us
overly-idealistic Californians can’t possible deal with
the realities of DC politicking. As Dash concludes, not
only can we handle the truth, we’re begging for a dose
of reality, if it’s the best way forward, “It’s already clear that with FWD.us, the tech industry
is going to have to reckon with exactly how real the
realpolitik is going to get. If we’re finally moving past
our innocent, naive and idealistic lack of engagement
with the actual dirty dealings of legislation, then let’s
try to figure out how to do it without losing our souls.” “Friends make the worst enemies.” – Frank
Underwood What have been the results?–near unanimous
condemnation from ever corner of Silicon Valley. Just
last week, superstar innovator Elon Musk, made a
very public departure, after a list of environmental
groups, including the Sierra Club, boycotted
Facebook over FWD.us-funded ads that praised Republicans for supporting the Keystone pipeline
(below) Ironically, the group can’t post a single update on
Facebook without being flooded with angry
comments. Just 18 hours ago, after FWD.us posted
about a congressional immigration hearing, 50% of
the comments are about Keystone, “How can you
justify completely selling out on he keystone pipeline in order to further your own immigration agenda? This
is politics at its worst.” In other words, FWD.us poisoned its only mechanism
for grassroots activism: social media. Forget Twitter,
forget Youtube, forget Tumblr. Every conceivable
social platform permits open dialog, which has now
become the bane of their existence. A Way FWD (Pun Intended) When we first wrote about FWD.us, the reader
comments were largely positive. Most readers
(including myself) were excited to see what a team of
technology titans could accomplish. But, since then,
the suspect secrecy is killing their trustworthiness. Their calculation is clear: a win on immigration reform
will absolve their sins. They’re wrong. Since they’ve
chosen to mimic other lobbies, their accomplishments
will be indistinguishable. So, each of their investors
could just as easily fund a tech lobby employing the
same tactics without the public heat. Personally, I like the organization and its mission. We
routinely advocate for many of the same issues and
carry the voices of their partners. But, evidently,
FWD.us underestimated just how little tolerance their
supporters have for compromising the value of
truthfulness. I understand the consequences of writing this piece:
when Joe Green eventually does speak, it certainly
won’t be with me. But, until then, I’ll leave them with
one thought. If FWD.us is so committed to traditional
DC politics, perhaps they should also take Frank
Underwood’s advice on transparency, “There is no better way to overpower a trickle of doubt than a flood
of naked truth.”

Packing For Walden

I’m probably going to be consigned to whatever level
of hell is reserved for pretentious editorialists for
saying this, but sometimes when I’m trying to
evaluate some new piece of technology, I consider
whether Henry David Thoreau would have taken it to
Walden Pond with him. Wait, just give me a second. I know how it sounds.
Let me explain. I’m not some Neo-primitivist who thinks we should all
go barefoot and use calorie-impoverished diets to
extend our miserable lives. On the other hand, I’m
suspicious of things people invent that have no
purpose except a slight increase in convenience. Yes, time is the only thing that we, as privileged first-
worlders, can’t purchase. Convenience is the nearest
thing to buying time, however, and it commands an
understandable premium. That said, I can’t help but
feel that our connected world (inclusive of the web
and the devices we use to interact with it) is being populated with tools that would not look out of place
in Skymall. Google Glass is one of them (and I expect to see a
knockoff in my complimentary seat-back magazine
soon), but the objections against it are so obvious
that I abandoned several articles enumerating them
as unnecessary (one working title: HUD Sucker); at
any rate, they have been expressed perfectly well by others, and I don’t plan on duplicating their efforts.
Now that you know this isn’t about yet another opinion
on the thing, you can move your cursor away from the
“close tab” x, unless you’re reading this on Google
Glass, in which case I beg to inform you, sir or
madam, that it is not becoming. But to proceed: Technology is about empowerment,
and in fact I think that Thoreau’s modern analogue
would find many useful tools to bring with him on his
sojourn in nature. The man was, after all, hardly a masochist or even
what we would now call a Luddite, not that he had
many technologies to which he could object in those
days (“glow-shoes, and umbrellas”). He brought a
grinder with him in the days when mortar and pestle
were still in vogue, and of course many books, which were one of the primary means of entertainment,
along with drinking and conquest. Picture this modern Thoreau embarking on his
hermitage. He is not trying to return to the necessities
of cavemen — he wants to carve and fill a niche that
is big enough to hold him, his needs, and his edifying
pleasures — but no more. So while it seems unlikely he would find room in his
bag for a Slap Chop or personal air conditioner, there
are many marvels of modern technology which he
would be happy to utilize. If he could bring the entire
Western canon on an iPad (or e-reader, to conserve
power), surely that would be preferable to choosing a bare two dozen paper books. A compass would be
essential, but surely a GPS unit would not be amiss?
If a knife, why not a multitool? And if I’m honest, if
paper and envelopes, why not Twitter? But there
things begin to unravel. Enablers and facilitators Anyway, the point is not to make an inventory of
Thoreau 2.0′s bag (heavy waxed canvas, I think), but
to express that the criteria he might use to select
what goes into that bag are useful ones. The idea is
to find things that extend our own natural powers, or
grant us new ones. There is a real difference between the tools, digital or
physical, which empower us with new actions, and
the tools which merely make existing actions easier.
If you want to chop down a tree, it is not realistic to
do it with your teeth. Yet once a man has an axe, it is
only a continuum of difficulty between felling the tree with that, and felling it with a chainsaw. The
difference between the two is only effort. Similarly, if you want to communicate with someone
across the world, or retrieve information hosted on a
server thousands of miles away, you will need a tool
— even the most stentorian or far-sighted among us
could not hope to work in place of the most
fundamental element of a phone or the Internet. But once that connection is made, as you add speed and
modes of consumption, past a certain point you are
no longer enabling new actions, but rather facilitating
existing ones. I’ve always liked Samuel Warren’s description of
difficulty in Ten Thousand A-Year: “What is difficulty? Only a word indicating the degree of strength requisite
for accomplishing particular objects; a mere notice of
the necessity for exertion; a bugbear to children and
fools; only a mere stimulus to men.” Do we all need the digital equivalent of chainsaws,
reducing the necessity of exertion to its absolute
minimum? Note, I don’t think we’re quite there yet –
our devices and networks are still developing. But
once you see that something is not actually new, but
only does what another thing did before faster or cheaper, isn’t it a rational choice to draw a line there
— whichever side of that line you choose to stand
on? For more powerful tools carry risks and problems of
their own, and some find that the cure is worse than
the disease. It’s a mistake to write off such people as
simply old-fashioned, or ignorant, or afraid of the
future. There are sophisticated objections to these
things on the tumultuous outmost margin of technology, every spasm of which is breathlessly
extrapolated into some magical future by pundits with
brief memories and narrow considerations. Sometimes, on reflection, I find myself among their
company. That’s why I like this little Thoreau
exercise. A simple question: Does this add something
new, as an axe or a mobile phone does? Or does it
make something easier, as a chainsaw or Google
Glass? And in either case, at what cost? The answer is rarely surprising, but the process helps
clarify what exactly it is that I think I need from these
things, what they really provide, and what may come
in the future to replace them.

Five Woot Execs Check Out, As Daily Deals Site Feels The Strain Under Owner Amazon

Woot, the daily deals site that Amazon bought in
2010 for $110 million, built a reputation for its “pile
‘em high, sell ‘em cheap” business model for shifting
goods. Now, the company is facing up to a shift of a
different kind: that of its own talent. In the last week,
TechCrunch has learned that five key executives are parting ways with the company. They include Darold Rydl, who had been president of
the company and one of its very first employees;
CTO Luke Duff, who has been the technical lead for
all things Woot since 2005; CFO Rene Gonzalez;
Dave Rutledge, who had been the creative lead on all
of Woot’s editorial content as president of Woot Workshop; and Jay Johnson, leading both the deals
and affiliate marketing divisions at the company as
director of deals.woot. Rydl and Gonzalez have
already left, and the other three have given notice but
will be with the company for another week. This
comes 11 months after founder and CEO Matt Rutledge (brother of Dave) also left the company. No, these six are not banding together for a new
startup. Rydl distributed a note to staff and then later
posted it on Facebook (we copy it below) describing a
desire for a change of scene, and we understand that
each is doing his own thing. (We have reached out to Amazon for a response to
this story.) But we have also been hearing another story about
what’s going on at Woot that may have spurred some
of these departures, simmering issues with Amazon
management that have finally started to boil over. “I
don’t think any of us ever envisioned leaving Woot,”
one person told me. “I thought I would stay there and grow with the company as the industry changed. But
there were a lot of frustrations.” These, we understand, are connected to a gradual set
of changes at the company over the years as it has
bedded down at Amazon. “Amazon wanted to come in
and do things in a different way, not considering the
importance of the other stuff,” I was told. It seems like one of the thorny points is Woot’s CEO,
Garth Mader, who had been put in place by Amazon
to work under Matt Rutledge, and was promoted after
Rutledge left. In short order, changes pushed through by Mader
have spread to various aspects of Woot’s business. Turning straw into gold The site, founded in 2004 by Matt Rutledge when it
was first incubated inside Rutledge’s preexisting
company Synapse Micro, was one of the pioneers of
the “daily deal” model of selling goods online. It did so
in an irreverent way aimed at disrupting the
relationship between buyer and seller by making it far less formal. The original concept was to sell one
“crap” item at a time that was at the end of its line
(consumer electronics was a mainstay) at a
competition-busting price, and then to launch another
product at midnight each day. Breaking up the pattern of single items for sale until
they sold out, once a month Woot also sold a “Bag of
Crap,” a group of items for a single price. Frank and
funny commentary ran through all of this, along with
an attempt to remain transparent with consumers
through forums and details about how much of an item was sold. All this brought a cadre of loyal users to the site —
some 5 million per month at its peak, according to
Rydl’s letter — rushing to buy things that, in a sense,
no one else wanted to buy. Turning straw into gold, as
Rydl describes it in his letter below. Today, things have changed. Woot no longer shares
data on how much of a product has sold. If you think
about it, that kind of transparency also runs counter
to how Amazon is about its own sales numbers for
specific products. Meanwhile, the Bag of Crap stopped getting sold
monthly, because it was deemed to be too much of a
strain on the system, and the server crashed every
time it was sold. “That wasn’t an acceptable customer
experience,” the source says Woot was told. “But
there were a million people trying to get 1,500 items, of course they would crash.” It didn’t make sense to
scale up the hardware to support something we did
once per month, he said. The workaround was that
the company ended up creating a scavenger hunt to
find a (less frequently offered) Bag of Crap, but given
that users had to “like” Woot on Facebook to get the first clue, “the perception for many was that it simply
went away.” Another change was more backend but crucial to
Woot’s business model. The company made a “big
push” to ship products using Amazon’s fulfillment
system but this proved inefficient and far less
profitable for the kinds of products that Woot sold.
The Woot method involved a big palette with the item able to be taken and thrown into a shipping box; the
Amazon method was less simple, if perhaps more
professional. “The end result was that our variable costs
quadrupled. We used to be able to sell
50,000-100,000 items per day at a lower price point,
but now we can’t profitably sell items under $10
because the variable cost for shipping got too high.”
It’s unclear whether at some point Woot will revert to what it had been doing in the past. However, there is more possible pain to come in this
area, with wider ramifications. Along with the push to
move product into fulfillment by Amazon, Woot
scaled down its warehouse operations but has never
communicated to the operations staff what the plan is
for them. Our source says that “has left the remaining operations staff with an uncertain future and has had
a dramatic effect on morale as others across the
company wonder if their group will also be shuttered
as more Amazon services are used. The fear is that
soon, all Woot employees will be asked to move to
Seattle [from its current HQ in Carrollton, TX, north of Dallas] or they will be replaced by Amazon services.” The bigger picture for daily deals To be fair, there have been other pressures on Woot’s
business that have less connection to Amazon’s
ownership. Daily deals, as we have seen with
Groupon and Living Social, have become less
fashionable, partly because of an oversupply of
companies working in this space. “The fact that so many retailers started doing these
kinds of promotions and started pushing so many
emails I think led to fatigue,” our source says. Woot
resisted emails, until two years ago, but “even then a
small percentage came from there. Most still came
from direct traffic, from people hitting the site every day to be engaged with the content.” That direct traffic on the site, nevertheless, is down
nearly 30 percent year on year, and is continuing to
decline. But ironically, because Woot is selling significantly
more items now than it did in the past, this hasn’t
impacted business. In fact, Woot’s revenues have
been growing at a 20 percent rate over the last two
years, and 2013 appears to be shaping up in the
same range. Specifically, through Woot Plus, its flash-sales section, the site now offers more than 400
SKUs every day instead of six a year ago. (Amazon does not break out how individual
businesses are performing in its earnings
statements.) The Zappos fairy tale The story of how Woot was acquired and subsumed
into Amazon can be a cautionary tale for other
startups. Our source says that Woot had envisioned it
would follow in the path of Zappos, the shoe and
fashion e-commerce site that was acquired the year
before Woot for $1.2 billion. Into that sale was built the idea that Amazon would stay hands-off. At the
time of the acquisition, Zappos CEO Tony Hseih
noted in a letter to employees: “We plan to continue to run Zappos the way we have
always run Zappos — continuing to do what we
believe is best for our brand, our culture, and our
business. From a practical point of view, it will be as
if we are switching out our current shareholders and
board of directors for a new one, even though the technical legal structure may be different.” Indeed, while some of Amazon’s acquisitions still do
get to do things their own way, more or less, there are
others that have been held to more integration. This is, of course, to be expected: Amazon’s wafer-
thin-margin business model is predicated on
economies of scale, so it doesn’t make much sense
to run different organizations within it in ways contrary
to that. “Maybe because we were only a $110 million
transaction, we didn’t have as much leeway in how
things worked out for us,” our source said. But that
brings a mixed fate: “The core reason we’re all leaving
Woot is because we’ve lost the ability to do what’s
best for our brand and culture. The business will no doubt continue to grow because Woot can leverage
Amazon systems, but Woot will look more and more
like Amazon until it is unrecognizable.” Rydl’s letter: “In the summer of 2003, a little group of three started
kicking around ideas, hoping to let a little wholesale
company [to] move a ton of crap. None of us believed
the guy in a DeLorean who stood out front yelling
“THIS IS WHERE IT ALL BEGINS, YOU GUYS!!!” In
retrospect, we probably shouldn’t have called the cops on him. Our bad, guy. But anyway, that little project soon garnered
international acclaim and earned the love and
adoration of millions of fanatical customers, all of
them begging us for the crap no one else wanted.
Every day, I felt fortunate to be around the sort of
people who could turn straw into gold. But today, after lots of soul searching, I’ve decided to
take up new challenges. Tomorrow I leave Woot to
embark in a new direction. No destination is clear, no
course is plotted, but I remember the excitement of
starting something from scratch, and I can’t ignore
the urge to go create something new. With my parting words, I want to make it clear: each
of you should be proud of your contribution to
Woot.com. With the simplest business idea ever (and
no advertising dollars to spend) we attracted over 5
million customers, managed well over a billion dollars
in sales, and spawned an entirely new industry.. from SCRATCH. We grew from a team of 15 to over 200
people in multiple states, and we even earned the
attention of the biggest internet company in the world,
a company that decided that it would be safer to flat
out buy us instead of trying to compete. Few people
in this world have accomplished what we did – always remember to reflect on these wins and celebrate
them. In the world of retail, you guys are the freakin’
Justice League. Please know that I am so incredibly proud of each of
you and what we’ve all accomplished together. And
understand I didn’t arrive at this decision easily.
Nevertheless, I know my decision is right. I leave you
all in the capable hands of my hand-picked leadership
team – I am 100% certain that they are ready to take the lead. Although you may miss me with your hearts,
day-to-day you’ll never feel a thing. And please, keep
any tears off the product in the interest of optimizing
the customer experience. More seriously, I still consider my time at Woot to be
one of the best things I’ve done, and I’m proud to
have worked with all of you over the years. My love
for Woot runs deep and eternal. Keep doing great
things. After all, you’ve done so many
already…..what’s one more?

With #HonorYourMom, Samahope Wants To Fund Medical Treatments For Women In Need Around The World

This Sunday, there’s a lot you can do in honor of the
woman who raised you. There’s TheMomtract, a
project out of the ad agency Mother New York to give
your mother authority back over some part of your
life. There are flowers and promises to let fewer of her
calls go to voicemail. But the San Francisco-based startup Samahope
hopes that funds usually reserved for cross-state
chocolate delivery might be used to finance medical
treatments for women in need around the world. Its
#HonorYourMom project is soliciting donations for
medical treatments for women along with tweet-length anecdotes about participants’ own parents’
uniqueness. And while funding fistula repair surgery
may not have been part of some users’ plans this
year, the non-profit organization’s founders hope that
providing safe birth kits in a mom’s name won’t take
much convincing. Samahope CEO Leila Janah is the founder of
Samsource, a company that offers work opportunities
on enterprise data projects to poor individuals around
the world. Janah said that while she was on a State
Department trip to Sierra Leone for women tech
leaders recently, she quickly realized that Samasource was unlikely to work in a country with a
60 percent illiteracy rate. But she was also disturbed
upon realizing that a systematic failure to provide
basic medical care to many Sierra Leonean women
had resulted in people like Dr. Darius Maggi, a Texas-
based doctor in his 60s, spending their retirements fundraising for and performing surgeries for women
who had undergone traumatic childbirths. “I thought doctors should focus on providing medical
care,” Janah said,”and tech entrepreneurs could be
focused on creating tools to raise money for them.” Samahope’s day-to-day work to provide medical
treatments for disenfranchised women is being led by
co-founder Shivani Garg Patel, a McKinsey and
Microsoft alum. It is particularly focused on “last mile”
populations in rural areas where care can be difficult,
if not impossible, to find. (Maggi’s organization, the West Africa Fistula Foundation, has become one of
its first beneficiaries.) Users can help pay for medical
treatments in Sierra Leone, Zambia, Nepal, and
Mexico. Like microfinance organization Kiva.org,
partner organizations that work in those countries help
connect funds with individuals in need, and users can similarly connect their Facebook profiles and PayPal
accounts. Samahope says it uses charity researcher
GiveWell among others to assess prospective
partners and researches their budgets and
effectiveness. The World Health Organization estimates that two
billion people worldwide have no ability to access
basic surgical care. Much of the focus of Samahope-
funded operations is on fixable conditions that can be
treated with surgeries. Users can help pay for cleft
palate and burn surgeries resulting from close proximity to open flames used for cooking. Angel investors including Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen,
founder of the Silicon Valley Social Venture Fund,
and Scott Banister, founder of Cisco-acquired
IronPort Systems, have helped the organization raise
$100K to date. Patel says that 100 patients’
procedures have been funded by 250 users to date with monthly donations growing an average of 60
percent this year. Since #HonorYourMom launched
last week, they say that donations on the site have
more than doubled. The team has an ambitious goal of making scary-
sounding surgeries philanthropically funded, but
they’re not alone. Watsi, the first non-profit that Y
Combinator welcomed to one of its famed accelerator
program classes, operates in a similar space of
funding operations for people in need. The Red Cross continues to be a popular resource for giving in cases
of massive disaster-related medical needs (and one
many individuals think of first). And the explosive
growth of crowdfunding and donation sites, while
enabling more options, may have created a sense of
donor fatigue amongst people who are asked to give to different contacts’ causes daily. When asked about the competition for dollars, Janah
said that it provides validation that what they’re doing
is valuable and viable. “Given the number of people
who don’t have access to acute care, there is
definitely room for multiple players in this space,” she
said. “We should be competing to provide the best service. If you can provide access to health care, you
can solve a lot of other problems. Our challenge is to
show how powerful this investment in someone is.” There is an also an employment story underlying the
cause: by helping women in need get well, they can
get back to work. In the future, the site may try to
provide opportunities to fund education on the path to
jobs in medical fields. Training women and enabling
increased career opportunities creates a “ripple effect of opportunity” amongst their families and
communities, according to Half the Sky, a women’s
rights organization inspired by the work of The New
York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl
WuDunn. Samahope says it will plan to expand geographically
based on places where its medical partners can
deliver low-cost medical treatments with the highest
impact. It has its eye on South Asia and sub-Saharan
Africa, where more than two million women are
thought to live with untreated obstetric fistula. Screenings for cancer and other detectable conditions
are said to be fundable soon as well.

CamCard, A Card-Scanning App That’s Dominating Asian Markets, Reaches 50M Users

While there’s a perennial debate on the West Coast
about whether and when business cards might
become irrelevant, they continue to be at the center
of business customs in China and Japan. It’s just basic etiquette when meeting a new contact
to offer your card with two hands and a slight bow. That’s why it’s natural that a Chinese company — not
an American one — might be able to dominate this
market and behavior globally. LinkedIn’s Cardmunch
had scanned 2 million business cards a year after
their 2011 acquisition, and hasn’t released stats
since. But Shanghai’s CamCard boasts 10 million monthly
active users, with 50 million registered in total. About
half of them are outside of China. The company is part of a new wave of Chinese
startups that are either run by very internationalized
Chinese founders or foreigners that are able to build
and design consumer products and apps with global
appeal. Intsig, the company behind CamCard, originally
launched the app back in 2009 and has quietly grown
it since. They use a freemium model that caters to both
consumers and enterprises. On the consumer side,
there’s a free version of the app. And then there’s a
paid version, which costs about $2.99 in the West or
$11.99 in Asia. It feels like price discrimination but
Intsig justifies it by saying it’s more technically different to do optical character recognition for
Chinese and Japanese and because Asian
consumers may be willing to pay more for a business
card service. The paid version has a cloud syncing service that lets
people save cards across all of their different
devices. On the enterprise side, companies pay for extra
security features to make sure their client and
business partner lists stay safe. In China, the vast
majority of smartphones are Android devices and
Chinese consumers are much more concerned about
getting viruses. As for the parent company itself, Intsig has raised
roughly $10 million from investors including Matrix
Partners in China and other local investors. The
company’s CEO Michael Zhen had a long career at
Motorola, where he says he picked up the skills and
ideas necessary to start his own company. I’ve seen one other regional competitor, Japan’s
Sansan. They’re an older rival that is transitioning to a
smartphone-centric world through a card-scanning app
called Eight. Before that, they were actually leasing
scanners to local Japanese businesses.