Blinq Enhances Your Favorite Messaging Applications With Extra Information

(AsiaTimes.ga/Tech) A new mobile application called Blinq is launching today into public beta to add a layer of contextual information to your favorite mobile messaging applications. Founder Yossi Ghinsberg, who’s better known for his adventures in the Amazon (not Amazon.com, but the actual unchartered wilderness), described Blinq as “more of a hack than an app,” saying that people are tired of trying yet another mobile application. Blinq offers something different, he says.

Instead of delivering a full mobile app experience you launch by tapping an icon, Blinq is designed to augment the apps you already use. Your normal behavior doesn’t have to change.

Once installed, Blinq appears as a small white dot that pops up inside mobile messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Hangouts, Skype, and SMS, for example, alerting you to new information about the person you’re communicating with. This additional information is pulled from a variety of other networks, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and more.

Blinq shows you status updates, photos and other recent activities, but its algorithms focus on highlighting the more important content. That is, if your friend recently posted two updates, one about what they had for lunch that day and another, more heavily liked update about a major life event, Blinq would only alert you to the latter.

The idea for the app, explains Ghinsberg, stems from his longtime interest in the concept of digital identities. He found that information about people was scattered around the web, and it was hard to access it when you needed it.

“We’re looking at the integrated, whole person instead of the fragmentation that’s caused because of the different platforms, the different channels and the different networks,” he says.

After teaming up with a technical co-founder Gal Bracha in 2013, the two first experimented with a larger solution, but realized soon that what they had built was too complicated and required that people change their habits. That didn’t work.

Right as they were accepted into the 500 Startups accelerator program, the team pivoted to build Blinq instead.

“We took the big idea, and reduced it,” says Ghinsberg. “Blinq is just a small white dot.”

While the app itself is consumer-facing, the concept could also work in business use cases where it could serve as something like a lightweight CRM tool. In that case, it wouldn’t be all that different from something like Rapportive or FullContact’s solution for Gmail. Those add-ons also aggregate content from a variety of networks in order to include personal and business information alongside social updates in Gmail’s sidebar.

Blinq just does this for mobile messaging apps.

The app that’s live today on Google Play is more of an MVP, meant more to test the how the market responds to the idea, the founder notes. That means the app may be buggy, and Blinq’s servers might be slow at times. But if successful, Ghinsberg says that the concept could be ported to other services beyond messaging.

Since its debut a couple of days ago, the company’s servers have imported over 250,000 contacts, and overnight, added half a million more followed by another million just last night. The team hasn’t publicized the app yet, but it has a few thousand downloads already.

The plan is to port the Blinq experience to iOS in the future, but there, the app will likely have to make some changes. Today on Android, the app works at the notification level, and is more deeply integrated. iOS, by its nature, will require more of a standalone experience, though Ghinsberg says he has some ideas about how to work around that.

Blinq has raised just under half a million in an advisory round from angel investors and 500 Startups, but will be looking to raise a million more starting next month.

Getting My Brain Back

#GNN Tech - I can’t do it anymore. This has been a summer of social media. I’ve used it endlessly, made plans on it, chatted, read it religiously, and watched countless friends and friends of friends go on vacation.

I’ve played a game of whack-a-mole with LinkedIn invitations and I’ve streamlined my automatic Tweeting systems. I’ve watched the world buzz by 120 characters at a time. I’ve seen hundreds of beautiful photos of beaches and old castles and bars and beers and whiskeys and sandwiches and endless cats and I don’t want to see any more. I’m done.

I’m taking my brain back.

I’ve noticed a few things happening over the past few years. First, I noticed that I primarily use social media at night, in bed, staring at the iPad while my lady wife snores beside me. When I couldn’t sleep at 4am I turned on Twitter and sent messages to people I didn’t see during the day. I read Reddit more often than I read actual books and I didn’t mind it at all. Why? Because this endless stream of social garbage is apparently far more interesting than a carefully thought-out non-fiction thesis or tersely-plotted novel, let alone the kind attention of my soulmate.

We all know how social media works: it tickles the pleasure centers of the brain, encouraging us to return day after day to get that slight endorphin rush that comes with clicking a new link. For me that endorphin rush started with email and now there’s so much more data, so many more sources for distraction.

And I know why social media is a good thing. It keeps me in touch with people I’ve known for decades. It allows me to spread the word about my projects. It’s spurred revolutions of all kinds. When it’s good, it’s great. When it’s bad, it’s exhausting. I thought I could take it all in, control my consumption, but now I can’t. I’m ready to declare social bankruptcy.

So I did a few things. I deleted Facebook and Reddit from my phone and iPad. I’ve also deleted LinkedIn. I kept Twitter because it’s more like a chatroom and I kept Facebook Messenger for chatting with my long list of Facebook friends. I still have Swarm, but that will probably go next.

I might use Facebook now that Yelp is garbage for restaurant recommendations but everything else – Path, Color, Yo, Krablr – are gone. And it’s been great.

Anecdotally five or six of my peers have already followed suit. It’s been a weird summer. I remember years when everyone was into gin all summer or everyone was on the Atkins Diet. This year everyone is into social media fasts.

One friend told me that after a nice week out in the woods he checked his Facebook feed on his phone at a gas station. His heart rate went up and he felt the blood in his head pounding. He deleted the app then and there. We don’t notice how social media ruins us until it’s gone.

Maybe I’ll reinstall some of these apps. Or maybe these social media makers will fix it so I only see the things I want to see. Or maybe they don’t care because for every social media celibate there are a million people who will Facebook all day long. But, I would argue, we’re not going to give these bastards our attention much longer.

Teens are already revolting against Facebook and Google+ is a ghost town. Twitter is valueless when it comes to direct sales and is worthless as an advertising platform. In short, everything that was supposed to be good about social media – the connectedness, the reach, the ease-of-use, the fun – has been replaced by an endorphin rush.

So I’m taking my brain back. Facebook doesn’t pay me enough for my attention. LinkedIn hasn’t gotten me a single job. All the also-ran social networks offer little in the way of true value. In the end, I need to give my attention to my kids, my writing, and my reading.

I don’t need to see your cat or your Candy Crush score. Come over and we’ll grab beers and you can tell me about your favorite movie. It will be far more rewarding and maybe, just maybe, I’ll convince you to unfriend social media.

With YC Backing, PersistIQ Hopes To Remove Excel From The Outbound Sales Process

#GNN - As with many companies, the two founders of PersistIQ, a YC-backed startup had a problem they saw needed fixing and they decided to build a product to take care of it. In this case, they found themselves coordinating their cold-call drip marketing campaigns in an Excel spreadsheet and they thought there had to be a better way.

That’s how their new company PersistIQ was born — they hope to provide an automated solution focused solely on coordinating and automating outbound drip sales campaigns.

Outbound sales refers to the process of finding customers yourself. This might be simply cold calling or emailing from lists you have bought or other sources that could be founts of potential business for your company. You’re doing the hard work of contacting people, and tracking those who respond, those who don’t and when to respond again.

Co-founder Pouyan Salehi says inbound marketing is clearly all the rage these days, but trying to get the customer to come to you by generating content to attract them to your site takes a lot of hard work. Once you get them there, you can assign each one a score based on their actions such as reading a blog post, downloading a white paper or visiting a pricing page. Ultimately, the best scores will be tossed to sales where again, you have to coordinate contact with them and get them to respond.

Regardless of how you get the lead though, the challenge for every salesperson is getting to a first reply and that takes persistence and a little bit of help from technology. Salehi says sales statistics show that it often takes up to 7 interactions with a potential client before you get a response and most sales people don’t have that kind of patience. He says research suggests most give up after just two contacts without a positive response. Hard to blame them, but it would be a lot easier if you had a tool to do the reminding, follow ups and resending and then see the response in your inbox. That’s where PersistIQ comes in.

As Salehi says, “Once we get leads into our systems, there’s an immediate pain point we face. I need to be doing outbound sales, but I’m  not sure where to start, and the follow up part takes so long.”

Salehi  and his partner were simply trying to solve this pain point. While there are products like CRM tools, marketing automation platforms and other tools from companies like Salesforce.com, Marketo, Hubspot and many others that also provide a more automated way to track this kind of process, many busy salespeople ignore these because the tools are part of a much larger package. Salehi says instead of dealing with the complexity and trying to find it inside a larger tool (if they even know it’s there), they rely on the old-fashioned Excel spreadsheet, which as you can imagine can be pretty labor-intensive to keep updated.

It gets to the point where the tracking tool, the administrative part of the job, begins to take over the sales part and PersistIQ wants to simplify that process by providing a tool to import a list of potential clients, eliminate duplicates and document leads who have been contacted already automatically, allow you to segment the list, and then create campaigns.

If the person doesn’t respond at point in the process, you can send another ping a set number of days later automatically. If they do respond, the response lands in your inbox where you’re probably doing a  lot of your work anyway and you can contact the lead in the usual fashion.

For now, the company is concentrating on email, but Salehi says he can see adding other tools for phone and social media leads down the road. And there is direct integration with Salesforce today, which automatically records each attempt to contact the lead in PersistIQ.

For now, the two-person company is being nurtured by Y Combinator and hopes to go into Beta in the fall and get some seed funding and continue their journey. You can go to the website today and sign up if you wish.

IMAGE BY FLICKR USER JEFF DRONGOWSKI UNDER CC BY 2.0 LICENSE (IMAGE HAS BEEN MODIFIED)