This week, several startups have made announcements launching new features and partnerships. Here’s the latest on company updates.
VarageSale announces Safety Pledge
After high-profile cases like the murder of Tim Bosma, it’s understandable that most people are wary about using online classifieds.
To combat this, VarageSale published a safety pledge to prioritize the safety of its members. This includes committing to certain features and processes, such as having all members manually pre-screened by a real person, a dedicated 24-hour safety hotline, and every VarageSale community having a dedicated team moderating it for quality.
“Our members value knowing who they’re dealing with on our platform. Our business model of having real people moderating closed local groups for buying and selling is what sets us apart,” said Tami Zuckerman, co-founder of VarageSale. “We have an internal team and volunteer admins who are looking after their buy/sell communities daily. The feeling of community and non-anonymity associated with VarageSale is unique and different to other classifieds or buy/sell apps and we will continue investing in features and tools helping us achieve this.”
The company also promises to investigate suspicious activity and examine any reported frauds and scams within 24 hours.
Jibestream partners with Mist
Cupertino-based Mist — which provides wireless infrastructure for enterprises — has partnered with Toronto-based Jibestream, which offers a mapping engine and indoor navigation for enterprises.
Jibestream was among seven other companies that Mist partnered with to create its Mist BlueTooth Low Energy (BLE) Alliance to drive the adoption and evolution of high-accuracy indoor location services. The companies will collaborate to provide thought leadership around BLE and ensure the seamless interoperability of various BLE components with Mist’s wireless platform.
Jibestream’s SDKs and APIs allow for easy integration with other systems and applications. Mist said that, by combining its infrastructure with Jibestream, it can create a high-accuracy, low-latency indoor wayfinding and proximity messaging that is cost-effective to deploy and simple to manage.
SweetIQ launches next generation of its listings network
Montreal-based SweetIQ, which helps digital marketing teams understand the performance of their physical stores online, has launched the next generation of its listings network.
Dubbed The Smart Network, the platform has the capability to list businesses in over 80 search and discovery sites.
“Sites that consumers use to find products and services nearby like Yelp or Facebook are highly active ecosystems. Their value lies in the crowdsourced information users provide in real time,” said Brad Wing, VP of platform and partnerships of SweetIQ. “The SweetIQ Network has been built with this knowledge at its core and as a result, creates listings that are active, living pages which are verified directly on each site. The data can be updated in real time and is never frozen or held hostage.”
The company said that the traditional approach of pushing listings to the same set of directories as everyone else — with no content differentiation — is an outdated approach. With this approach, location information is syndicated to a predefined number of directories without organic claiming, resulting in frozen data, a stagnant listings process, and no sustained local marketing performance.
SweetIQ’s Smart Network gives businesses access to conversion insights from Yelp, Google, Facebook, Bing, Foursquare, as well as a myriad of offline data sources help businesses tie searches to in-store sales. It also provides quarterly reviews of directory performance.
AmpMe now allows users to sync Bluetooth speakers
Montreal-based AmpMe, which allows users to play music in perfect sync across multiple devices to create one sound system, announced the ability to sync multiple Bluetooth speakers from different manufacturers together.
“We’ve built a sound system for the 99 percent — gone are the days of spending a fortune to create the kind of sound we all deserve,” said AmpMe CEO Martin-Luc Archambault. “Launching the ability to sync any type of Bluetooth speaker together is the most democratizing step we’ve taken in our journey to build the world’s most portable, high quality sound system. We started with mobile devices like phones and tablets, so expanding the capability to any Bluetooth setup is the next frontier. We’re enabling music listening in a social manner and style that’s never been achieved before.”
The app is compatible with YouTube, SoundCloud, or a personal music library.