Spotted: Uber Testing Its Disruptive Car Service In Chicago

Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... ? Learn More

Uber appears to be continuing its national expansion today, with the soft-launch of the disruptive car service in Chicago. Pandora’s CTO Tom Conrad just Tweeted about using the new service in the Windy City.

In case you aren’t familiar with Uber, the service allows you to order a black car to come to your location on the mobile app, You can actually track your car as it comes to your location as the app tracks the car via GPS. Payments are handled automatically by charging the card you have on file (no swiping necessary), and it costs at least 50% more than a taxi.

The service has a loyal following in San Francisco, debuted in New York and Seattle recently and appears to also be eying Boston and D.C. as potential markets.

It’s unclear if pricing will be different in Chicago, compared to other cities. Uber says that during this test, the service will have limited supply of cars and low availability. As we saw with Seattle, Uber pricing is less because of the general cost of living in the city compared to New York and San Francisco. The company is also testing reduced pricing in San Francisco.

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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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