Reimagine Marketing: Startups
Our conversations on agility with Joshua Decker and Chris Smith, the CEOs of Tagboard and STQRY, two emerging technology and Microsoft Ventures startups:
TAGBOARD – CEO Joshua Decker
What problem are you solving?
Tagboard’s innovative platform — built to aggregate hashtagged content in real-time — solves the signal to noise problem in social media. We offer powerful tools for organizations of all sizes, and empower our customers to discover, curate, and display relevant user generated content from across multiple source networks, such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and others. Our clients can easily display content on their websites, in the apps, and on screens of all sizes.
What is your solution?
Today, Tagboard is an enterprise SaaS business with great customer traction — clients like Microsoft, Audi, Starbucks, Adidas, Samsung Alaska Airlines, the San Francisco Giants, the Boston Bruins, the NCAA, and hundreds of others (from SME to enterprise). We’re already the world’s best hashtag search engine, and we aim to be the world’s largest distribution platform for social media, making public dialogue accessible for every screen, in every location. We offers solutions for integration and display for every customer and fan touch point.
How do you keep your business agile?
We started with the understanding that nothing is sacred, and the only constant is change. Our platform was built with agility in mind, enabling us to adapt quickly to market trends and needs. More importantly, we’ve worked hard to create a culture of innovation, where we balance passion for customer success and commitment to our vision.
STQRY – CEO Chris Smith
What problem are you solving?
The ability for people to engage with the world around them; to get a better understanding of things that they discover; to explore with objects, companies, and products that fascinate them; and to provide users with relevant information pertaining to these elements. Many organisations currently struggle to proactively deliver pertinent information to the user – our dynamic platform provides the tools to engage the end user through powerful contextual storytelling.
What is your solution?
A platform that enables businesses and organizations to curate and distribute information contextually, intelligently, and “locationally aware.”
The solution is about providing users with the right information at the right time. We have developed an SDK that gives any new or existing mobile application the power to provide personalised and timely experiences to users that includes prediction information. Based on past interactions and behaviours, past interests, and the user’s current location, the system works to understand who the user is and what information they should be delivered. Current location information is further supported by our indoor maps which feature the ability to understand and track a user’s indoor location to within one meter. This SDK is available for iPhone, Android, and Windows platforms.
How do you keep your business agile?
With all of the incredible data that we are collecting, it is critical for our business to be agile. We do this in a number of different ways.
We work in a lean and agile development environment. We utilize Microsoft Azure to iterate and adapt our technologies quickly and easily, such as our machine learning. We also have very strict agile development practices, through running of such processes as short development sprints, daily stand-ups, and scrums.
We also keep our business agile by constantly reviewing our strategies and adjusting to the market based on how our customers are responding. We constantly seek groundbreaking solutions based on the needs of users.
