Viggle, Smartgift and Pagevamp at February Brooklyn Tech Meetup

The latest Brooklyn Tech Meetup at dd:Outpost featured a clever way to give a gift-experience to online giving, a solution to make easier websites and a second-screen effort to tie rewards to TV watching.

The event, organized by Jason Jacobs and Jason Struhl, brought about forty people out Tuesday night in Dumbo to network and hear from fellow entrepreneurs.

Monika Kochhar, Founder & CEO, Smartgift

Smartgift is one of those technologies that comes off as so obviously of value that it’s hard to believe it didn’t already exist. It’s a B2B company that has created a way for ecommerce companies to make a more gift-like experience for its customers .

“Gifting is supposed to be warm and fuzzy. You need the personalization,” Kochhar said. The company offers personalized animations for the digital delivery of gifts.

• The service launched last year at Fashion Digital LA, but Smartgift was and is built in Dumbo.
• Smartgift creates an animated gift giving experience for its brands, showing recipients an animated box and the gift floating up out of it, complete with a personalized card.
• Critically, the system gives the recipient the opportunity to switch out her gift for something else if she wants, even letting them pay more for something pricier. Kochhar said that 14 percent of recipients do end up spending some of their own money.
• The system also facilitates the thank you note from the recipient.
• Online retailers get both the data and relationship with the the giver and recipient. Formerly, they only got half of it.
• Recipients can time their gifts. Brands can fully customize the experience the recipient sees.

Vincent Sanchez-Gomez, Cofounder, Pagevamp

Built by Wharton students, our sister site Technically Philly has been following Pagevamp since its beginning.

Pagevamp is a subscription service that automatically generates a webpage from a wide selection of templates from the content on a business’s Facebook page. Take note every restaurant in the world, especially those of you posting PDFs of your menu. We’re watching. 

• The founders started their own creative agency in college and then realized they could make starting websites even easier for small businesses.
• Photographers are the only client group they can enable ecommerce for right now, but the service now enables them to sell prints.
• They are working on a system to enable businesses to leave certain chunks of content on their Facebook page but off their webpage. Right now, they do it for clients manually, but it’s in the works.
• Basic is $6/month, but you can’t use your own URL. Full service is $16 with the URL included.
• Sanchez-Gomez acknowledged that Facebook could destroy their whole business in a moment with a big switch in their API, but right now the service appears to be complementing Facebook usage, as businesses engage more with their page, upload more content and spur more engagement.

Peter Martin, VP of Software Development, Viggle

The Flatiron District’s Viggle is a system for rewarding people for watching more TV, giving them benefits for letting the system know what show they are watching. The system verifies the show by taking a sample of the sound. It gives users ways to earn points for engagement, watching ads, taking part in activities, etc.

• The team is working on new products, like a system for watching shows online or on mobile.
• They have also launched products that allow users to compete with each, such as around fandom or something like fantasy sports.
• They are looking at ways to bring social more strongly into social, such as letting friends compare what they are watching.