Lowe’s Invests In 42,000 iPhones To Improve Your Shopping Experience

Chris Velazco is a mobile enthusiast and writer who studied English and Marketing at Rutgers University. Once upon a time, he was the news intern for MobileCrunch, and in between posts, he worked in wireless sales at Best Buy. After graduating, he returned to the new TechCrunch to as a full-time mobile writer. He counts advertising, running, musical theater,... ? Learn More

Take it from a former retail drone: trying to give customers a good shopping experience can be tough when you have to jostle with other employees for open computers. In-store networks are slow, and more often than not, the computers are even slower. It’s enough of a process that a once free-flowing conversation can dry up into an awkward silence while the computer struggles to find the widget in question.

Thankfully, hardware retailer Lowe’s has decided to do something about that lackluster experience: they have (among other things) purchased 42,000 iPhones to make their employees walking, talking sources of home improvement information.

The purchase is partially in response to a similar move made by their orange rival Home Depot. Last year, Home Depot spent $60 million on a fleet of Motorola mobile devices that were meant to keep employees with customers and out of the computer line. Lowe’s has similar hopes for their iPhones: they will allow employees to perform on-the-go product lookups, check stock, and pull up instructional videos for customers. Each Lowe’s location is slated to receive 25 iPhones, but the rollout schedule has yet to be announced.

Lowe’s wants to expand the capabilities of their in-store iPhones, assuming this first rollout goes well. The iPhones presumably lock out certain features to reduce the amount of employee shirking that’s possible, so mundane features on the short list include mobile calling and email. Lowe’s also hopes to add the ability to ring up purchases directly from the phone a la Square.

According to Lowe’s CIO Mike Brown, the plan is to “[play] catch-up with the customer psyche,” which shines a bit of light on the company’s choice of mobile device.

The iPhone is, for better or worse, a status device — the “cool” alternative to Home Depot’s own Motorola handhelds. The company’s recent move to replace CRT displays with flat panels and installing WiFi in stores also point to a new strategy for them. It looks like Lowe’s is trying to fight a war of positioning: they want to assume the role of the modern, forward-thinking hardware store. Whether or not it’ll pan out has yet to be seen, but they at least deserve some credit for trying to keep the retail run-down to a minimum.

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News360 Aggregates & Personalizes the News Reading Experience

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: News360

Quick Pitch: A news personalization and aggregation service.

Genius Idea: Launching on seven different platforms in its first year and integrating information from several social networks, including Google+, into its personalization engine.

The idea of a personalized news reader is almost a cliche at this point — AOL Editions, Zite, Flipboard and News.Me are just a few startup services with their own takes. News360 joined the crowd last October with a product solely focused on news aggregation, rather than personalization. While it used (and still uses) a unique semantic algorithm to decide what the most meaningful stories are in broad categories like Business, World, Food and Fashion, it was not strikingly different from a user perspective.

What stood out about its approach was that it quickly released versions compatible with the iPhone, iPad, Windows Phone 7, Blackberry Playbook, Andorid and the web.

“Our thinking is that we want to give inside the experience wherever you are,” says News360 CEO Roman Karachinsky. “People have different use cases whether reading on their phones, desktops or laptops, but we want to be on every device that they have — let them have their interest graph, have their saved articles, on any platforms that they want to use.”

The app has extended the same “be everywhere” attitude towards a personalization feature that launched in August. It pulls in user behavior and interest from Twitter, Facebook, Evernote and Google Reader in order to help determine a reader’s interests. Where some other apps rely on behavior you demonstrate while using them, News360 takes information from the profiles you connect — your bio, where you comment, like, star, share and save — in order to construct and populate categories.

News360 told Mashable it will add Google+ behavior cues to its options for personalize user news feeds Friday — which is impressive, considering Google+ just released it’s first APIs last week.

“We don’t want to collect 1,000 articles before you make the decision,” Karachinsky says, “which is why we try to look at as many profiles as you can right off the bat.”

By aiming broad, in both its spectrum of devices and its range of information, News360 has attracted more than 750,000 downloads. While the startup won’t get specific about how many of those are active users, a spokespeson did say active users grew 27% May to June; 21% June to July; and 135% July to August. About 4.5 million articles are read using the app each month.

That’s traction. But is it enough to unseat established startups like Flipboard and big names like AOL that are entering the space? Using multiple news aggregators at once somewhat defeats the purpose of using one in the first place.

Will News360 be the one you choose? Let us know in the comments.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, fotosipsak

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

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Monetate Gives Control Of Consumer Experience Back To Marketers With New Testing And Targeting Tools

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Earlier this month, Monetate, the platform that provides marketers with testing and targeting services for their websites, announced that it had closed a $15 million series B funding round, led by OpenView Venture Partners, which added to the $5.1 million series A round the company raised back in December from First Round Capital and FLOODGATE. With over $20 million in the bank, Monetate has been developing a new platform that gives marketers greater control over messaging and promotions on their websites as well as testing, targeting, and personalization tools.

As we reported a few weeks ago, the coolest part about Monetate’s platform is that it can be installed using a single line of code. The startup’s newest version of its cloud-based platform enables marketers to integrate customized content and features between the eCommerce server and the site visitor’s browser.

“One of the unfulfilled promises from the early days of eCommerce was that marketers would be able to deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time”, says Monetate CEO David Brussin. “With Monetate, we have inserted a new level of agility into the eCommerce marketing experience, providing marketers with the ability to make educated campaign decisions that will directly contribute to increased conversion”.

What’s more, as marketers and marketing teams are so often on the go, Monetate 11 allows its customers to test, target, and personalize their websites on the iPad, giving users that extra layer of mobile functionality. Another bonus: All current Monetate users will be automatically upgraded to the new version of its platform.

Monetate 11, like its predecessors, aims to cut out the IT middleman by giving control of creating and measuring marketing campaigns and serving customized user experiences back to marketers. They simply enter the “who, what, when, why” of the campaign into the Monetate dashboard, and the platform takes care of the rest, offering users the ability to take advantage of campaign cloning, tagging, and filtering.

Marketers will also be able to do automatic A/B testing against a control group, tracking the results in realtime, so that marketers can quickly see the impact their new campaigns will have. Users will also have the added benefit of new targeting options, including geotargeting to tailor messages and promotions to a visitor’s specific location, weather-based targeting, and behavioral targeting.

Monetate customers will also now be able to test and deploy their own HTML and JavaScript, target recommendations based on complex business rules, and access all the data they need about traffic segments and purchasing patterns to make informed decisions about the promotions, messages, and other content they deliver to consumers through its analytics and reporting features.

Monetate is really a no-brainer for eTailers and eCommerce marketers. It’s a great solution, and along with an infusion of new capital, the startup’s new version may very well have legs. After all, its platform has already attracted brands like Petco, Urban Outfitters, Sports Authority, QVC, Casual Male, Dick’s Sporting Goods, to use its targeting and testing services on their eCommerce platforms — and Brussin told us that the company has added hundreds of millions in collective revenue to these businesses, removing the need for businesses to hire specialized teams and decrease bounce rates and shopping cart abandonment.

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Android Users Finally Get Full Qik Premium Experience

Chris Velazco is a mobile enthusiast and writer who studied English and Marketing at Rutgers University. Once upon a time, he was the news intern for MobileCrunch, and in between posts, he worked in wireless sales at Best Buy. After graduating, he returned to the new TechCrunch to as a full-time mobile writer. He counts advertising, running, musical theater,... ? Learn More

Android-toting Qik fans will have reason to smile today: the Skype-owned company has announced that their Premium service for Android devices has finally been fleshed out with new functionality and services for the discerning mobile videophile.

For $4.99/month, Qik Premium users are now treated to unlimited storage of video content on Qik.com, where basic users are limited to a scant 25. Video management from a PC is also in play with a desktop app that allows for wireless syncing. Owners of 3D capable smartphones are now in luck too, as Qik Premium now supports the sharing of recorded 3D content, in addition to HD quality video.

These new features are in addition to Qik Premium’s original toolkit, which already includes unlimited video mail and the ability to take pictures while recording video. Priority support is also available to Premium members, which means all of your app-related gripes will get their much-deserved attention. All said, Qik Premium is shaping up to be a compelling little package for videographers on the go.

Qik’s Premium service isn’t exactly new news (their premium efforts first went live in the Ovi Store, of all places), but the addition of nifty new capabilities are always welcome. Support for Premium service has been folded into the Qik application, so current users are only a quick update away.

Qik was founded in 2006 to enable mobile phone users to share live video with their friends, family and communities on the web and on their phones. The first...

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