4 (.Me) Startups To Watch in 2016
2016 promises to be an exciting year for the next generation of tech startups looking to become the next Google, Facebook or Tesla Motors. IoT, programmatic advertising, financial technology platforms such as PayPal.Me and next generation video are just some of the trends we’ll see being used by entrepreneurs in the new year.
What entrepreneurs should we watch out for? With VentureBeat and other publications already publishing their lists, here are the top 4 startups to watch out for in 2016, that are using the unique .Me domain name to stand out in a crowded market:
Frankly.Me Will Get You To Post ‘Velfies’
Video is the trend to watch in 2016, says social media platform HootSuite’s Kendall Walters. But why, isn’t YouTube big enough? According to a Cisco report, by 2019 over 80 percent of all internet traffic will be video with nearly a million minutes of video shared every second.
Not bad.
It’s actually great news for Franky.Me, a relatively new startup that wants to be the Twitter of video. Frankly.Me is looking to find a new space for its product between Instagram and Snapchat. While Instagram is still focused on images, Snapchat is focused on messaging more than creating a social network.
The founders see their opportunity two truths they believe in:
The first is that creator platforms such as Instagram and Medium thrive because of the tools users can take advantage of are very well built.
Secondly, social networks such as Facebook or WhatsApp exist because of their social graphs – the users that are all present on the platform.
Frankly.Me’s founders believe that because the social space is in a state of flux, where established social graphs such as Facebook’s are looking their relevance and making room for new players such as Snapchat, they can use the opportunity to grow their user base.
Their plan for 2016? Selling users on the ideas of ‘velfies’ as a new content format: a video selfie! Facebook might even be catching on, with the launch of its video avatars!
Frankly.Me launched in beta at the beginning of 2015 when it also secured a $500,000 investment from Matrix Partners, an investment company from Silicon Valley that believed the team could execute in growing their platform globally.
At the same time, the founders said that Franky.Me would focus on its core India market for the next 15 to 18 months, where they saw 1000s of new users sign up every day in the beta. Noted Indian celebrities and politicians, mostly based in New Delhi, have been using the platform for Q&A, a unique challenge in a country with more than 20 officially recognised languages.
Q&A and two-way ‘velfie’ conversations are how Frankly.Me wants to differentiate itself from platforms such as Twitter and YouTube. While Twitter will never be video-only, YouTube either won’t be able to focus on conversations as the primary way of content distribution on their platform. The space between these two social media giants is an opportunity that Franky.Me, 12-months into focusing on its core market, can take advantage of during 2016.
If Cisco’s numbers prove right, the opportunity for Frankly.Me and other video platforms is just the beginning!
ConcertWith.Me Will Know Concerts You’re Going To in 2016
While streaming from concerts might as well be one of the biggest trends in festival and concerts, according to an article in Forbes magazine, music fans will still flock to live gigs!
Another type of product makes sense when to decide to go to a live show – and that’s ConcertWith.Me. Part of the 14th batch of the well-known startup accelerator 500 Startups, ConcertWith.Me is all about ‘automated concert promotions’. Instead of looking for concerts in different magazines or calendars, you define the genre you love and your location, while ConcertWith.Me does the rest.
Music technology will be hot in 2016, especially if we go back to the topic of streaming. While at first it seems that a streaming service and a service such as ConcertWith.Me will appeal to different (live vs. online) going audiences, they might be complementary.
As Live Media Group CEO Brad Sexton told Forbes, live streaming might allow people to finally put their phones down and enjoy the show instead of recording pieces of the performance ‘in order to remember it’.
In this music-technology-powered future of 2016, users will use ConcertWith.Me to find a performance they want to go to and then be able to enjoy it knowing that there will be a recording afterwords.
ConcertWith.Me will in 2016 fill a gap in the market because users just don’t have the time to go on Songkick or read news on Pitchfork!
Raise.Me Will Help Your Kid Get Into College Faster
Education isn’t always free (although free courses and resources across the Internet help a lot) especially if you have to pay your way through college. Thankfully, a startup that we’ve written about – Raise.Me – is helping students to get into the college of their choice by being able to earn micro-scholarships while completing courses in high school. As one high school student told FOX: ‘If I get an A in a course, I might get a thousand dollars for college. If I get a B, a couple of hundred dollars.’
While different startups are creating new platforms for people to learn outside of traditional education systems, college will still be one of the key ways of young people educating themselves on a path to their new career.
While you might know that Stanford University has a 5 percent acceptance rate, did you know that 85% of all colleges in the US report an increase in applications in 2013 and 2014? For students that want to get into college, that means more competition!
In 2013 alone, 80 percent of students submitted 3 or more applications to different colleges while over 30 percent sent more than seven applications total. As Synocate’s Alex Martel noted in a blog post last year, their organisation saw students diversifying their risk by applying to even more than seven schools.
One key tip that Martel and his team give students is to apply as early as possible since there is far less competition during the ‘Early Decision’ period. This admission is binding to a school and occurs before ‘Regular Decision’, with just over 8 percent of students using the early opportunity. Unlike the blended average regular acceptance rate of 30% across the top 50 colleges in the US, the average acceptance rate for ‘Early Decision’ is 64 percent!
How does this make Raise.Me a startup to watch in 2016 you ask? Well, Raise.Me’s system of micro-scholarships gives students the opportunity to earn enough money during their high school education to go to the college of their choice. However, to do so, they need to decide on which program to follow and which colleges they want to work toward on Raise.Me’s platform, which is supported by organisations such as Facebook.
By deciding early on, students can take advantage of the ‘Early Decision’ system as well as Raise.Me’s micro-scholarships. More competition means that there are even more students that will apply to use Raise.Me to make it easier for themselves to get into college. It seems that in 2016. Raise.Me user base will only grow!
Ele.Me Will Get Dominate Food Delivery in China
Last but… largest – is Ele.Me, a company that has become China’s largest food ordering service which makes it an obvious technology company to watch in 2016, although a lot of people would probably not call them a ‘startup’. However, Ele.Me is still searching for the right ‘recipe’ for their success while spending a lot of capital which makes it quite “startupish”.
Ele.Me had two big rounds in 2015, first raising $630 million in August to cover more than 260 cities in China and then securing an additional round of financing at the end of the year from Alibaba!
On its way to success, even if they decide to expand to markets close to China, Ele.Me will probably end up focusing on locally produced. According to FoodIndustry.Asia, 86 percent of Chinese consumers want locally produced food and aren’t attracted to foreign foods. The same is true for Korea, where only 7 percent of consumers are interested in foreign produced foods.
FoodTech is as hot in the world as Ele.Me’s deliveries are when they arrive at your door. Growing in the world’s largest market where it seems that e-commerce projects can’t stop gaining new customers as the population shifts from offline to online services, Ele.Me is fast becoming one of China’s most well-known Internet companies, backed by two of the currently largest – Tencent and Alibaba!
We’ve covered 4 promising .Me startups that will shape 2016… Do you know of a fifth? Comment and let us know!
