Build Me This Travel Planning App, Please!

Summer travel is about to begin. I am deep in the throes of planning our Sicily trip in May. In doing so, however, I miss not having access to an app that could make life dramatically easier and cut hours from my workflow.

Let me describe what my travel planning workflow looks like.

Step 1: We decide on the general area and the dates.

Step 2: We assess how much time we need to budget to do justice to each place we visit.

Step 3: We book the long haul flights.
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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Jason Wallis, CTO of Mozu (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Your point is well-taken that retailers need mobile sites and mobile presence. There are a lot of people who have platforms for mobile sites. What is special about what you do?

Jason Wallis: What is special and different is that the platform has one common data backend. The front-end is optimized for mobile and desktop. As a merchandiser or marketer who’s working to provide content, promotions, or any of the things it takes to provide the site experience, instead of having to do that in multiple systems, they can do it one time with Mozu. It’s synchronized out to all those places where consumers are instantly with no additional work or overhead required by the retailers. It’s just incredibly efficient at delivering consistent experiences and content across all the platforms that consumers are now using to interact with retailers.

Sramana Mitra: Whom do you consider as your closest direct competitor? >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Matt Oppenheimer, CEO of Remitly (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Is there a demographic categorization where you’re winning more? Is there an income bracket or are you seeing it more in an age group? What I’m trying to get at is which part of the population is adopting this kind of mobile money transfer?

Matt Oppenheimer: There isn’t just one segment of age or income level. If you think about folks who live in the US, almost everyone has smartphones now. I would have initially thought it would just be the younger demographic using the service, but it’s a wide range of ages. It’s not just one segment that’s shifting to digital. Everyone is using those smartphones and trusting them.

Sramana Mitra: What are the trends that you see in your work that are worth discussing?

Matt Oppenheimer: People often forget that the iPhone was invented in 2007. Right when the iPhone and Android were invented, our customers were not always the first adopter. What’s happening now is customers not only have smartphones on the send side but they’re increasingly trusting those smartphones for >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Matt Oppenheimer, CEO of Remitly (Part 1)

International money transfer is on its way to becoming a contactless workflow. It’s still early in terms of adoption, but the handwriting is on the wall.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s have you introduce yourself as well as Remitly to our audience.

Matt Oppenheimer: I’m the Founder and CEO of Remitly.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about Remitly.

Matt Oppenheimer: Remitly is a mobile phone alternative to the offline cash-based system of sending money internationally. We started about five years ago. We send over a billion in annual transactions which makes us the largest independent digital money transmitter in the US. We’re growing very rapidly. We grew about 400% year on year last year.

Sramana Mitra: The old player in the space is Western Union except they’re not mobile. Is that how you categorize the space? Can you give us a overview of the space? >>>

Build Me This Travelogue App, Please!

As you know, I love to write.

And among other things, I love to write travelogues.

These days, the procedure of writing a travelogue has changed dramatically. We no longer write just text accounts. We post pictures from our smart phones to Facebook and write commentary alongside those images. These posts to our Facebook timelines are distributed to friends, family, and followers organically.  They comment, they engage, and we respond with further details, often with humor, sometimes with new photos.

On my last trip to Eastern Europe, I experimented with the medium, and had a wonderful time sharing my travel experiences with a large number of readers. However, one of my friends had to go offline during that period, and missed the whole account. She asked to read my travelogue, but I had no way of sharing it with her. The entire body of work had become buried in my timeline, with no way of accessing three weeks of travel-specific posts.
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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Josh Koppel, Founder of ScrollMotion (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Why do I need to have a real estate agent with me? If I’m doing this on Trulia, for example, the listing should have all this information available right there. I can figure out the five properties that I’m interested in.

Josh Koppel: I completely agree with that. I think the same thing with the car. I agree that a lot of people are learning about what they want online. I think that people are mostly wanting to have a physical experience with something that is a big purchase like a car or a home.

Sramana Mitra: Eventually. Earlier to buy a house, you’d drive around all summer long. Every weekend, you’re going around with your agents to look at properties. I don’t think that’s necessary.

Josh Koppel: I completely agree with that, but I still think that at the end, the final experience is going to be one that has some human interaction. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Josh Koppel, Founder of ScrollMotion (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The next question I have is that your assumption, it sounds like, this is going to be used by a human sales representative interacting with another human potential buyer around an iPad. Is that a correct observation?

Josh Koppel: That’s correct, yes. We think that that’s the most effective type of sell. When you think about all the other types of content, everything is vying for your attention. We think that a face-to-face interaction is the most successful.

Sramana Mitra: Not all products warrant, price point wise, that kind of sales. I don’t see why the experience that you’re describing cannot be done over a phone conversation as well.

Josh Koppel: It can. I’m leaning into the type of selling that we do. You’re right. There’s a ton of other ways in which you can have a conversation. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Josh Koppel, Founder of ScrollMotion (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: If you would like to present any other use case or scenario, we could do that.

Josh Koppel: The last one is something that we recently just did for GM. GM has just launched a car called the Bolt. It’s a hugely exciting project because it’s the first $30,000 fully electric car. GM basically beat Tesla to the marketplace, which is a huge deal for GM. The problem is that it’s coming out in seven months. The four models they have are touring around the auto show. We were able to take assets that their agency had built to do a 3D VR of the interior of the car.

Now at the car show, people can not only look at the car but they can actually look inside it without really going inside it. This is a thing that was built in weeks, which is very rare for creating highly interactive content. It has just been a hugely successful thing for GM. It’s a brand new arrow in their quiver. That’s really what this is for. This is for having meaningful conversations with customers where you could use the iPad as the sales assistant. >>>