Regular Springwise readers no doubt remember Blyk, the Finnish free mobile operator that targets 16- to 24-year-olds with its ad-funded service. We covered Blyk's British rollout on several occasions over the past year or so, and now one of our spotters has come across a similar concept that recently launched in the Philippines.
ümobile is an invitation-only mobile service and community that targets 15- to 35-year-old Filipinos with what it says is the first ad-funded mobile network in Asia, offering a range of telephony services including calls, texts, MMS, internet surfing and downloads. Beginning in June, when the service was launched by Connectivity Unlimited Resource Enterprise (CURE)—part of Philippine telco Smart—potential users were invited to apply for membership through a series of invite codes that were given away virally (and free) by already-accepted members or through online social networks. Young consumers with codes could then fill out ümobile's membership application, which includes a range of personal information as well as lifestyle questions such as preferences in movies and music and whether or not they go to a gym, for example. Also required is a willingness to accept ads, of course.
Based on their answers, Filipinos who were approved by Aug. 31 were given their ümobile SIM cards for free—delivered at no charge—along with a free PHP 100 load every month for the next six months. Just how many ads users will be sent each day isn't yet clear, but viewing them earns further rewards in the form of free loads or discounts and freebies. A portion of the revenues generated by a brand’s campaigns is given back to subscribers, who can then purchase ümobile services or pursue product offers.
Is there any market free love can't conquer? Seems unlikely. Mobile operators: where will you spread some love of your own...?
Website: www.umobile.com.ph
Contact: customerservice@umobile.com.ph
Spotted by: Matthew Cua
The financial services industry isn't exactly known for giving things away for free, but a California-based firm is breaking the mould and offering free stock trading for investors.
Zecco is an online financial portal and community through which investors can make 10 free stock trades every month when they maintain an asset balance of just USD 2,500. The cost otherwise is only USD 4.50 per trade, and there is no minimum balance required to open or maintain an account. Further enriching the experience for users, meanwhile, is ZeccoShare, a social network for investors that Zecco launched last fall. Members of ZeccoShare can create profiles, contribute to blogs and forums and join investing groups. They can also share their portfolios (minus the dollar amounts), their trades and their performance for discussion with other members. Portfolio data, holdings and trade information are aggregated across all ZeccoShare member profiles, allowing members to scan listings of most-held and most-traded stocks, create specific groups of like-minded investors (such as “socially responsible investing” or “women on investing”) and more.
Making Zecco's free love possible is the fact that the cost of executing a trade has become very small, it says; in addition, it does charge for options trading, and it earns revenue from such other means as premium tools and online ads. Since its launch in late 2006, Zecco has gained over 90,000 trading customers; notable backers include shareholders Morten Lund of LundKenner (an early investor in Skype) and Dutch telecom pioneer Marcel Boekhoorn.
Free love has already proven highly effective with students, festival attendees and mobile-phone users, among others. Now it's investors' turn—one to emulate around the globe?
Update from Springwise reader Trent Smith: "Wells Fargo has been offering free trading for close to 2 years. They offer 100 free trades for a minimum $1000 investment."
Website: www.zecco.com
Contact: editor@zecco.com
Spotted by: Roel van der Meer & Daniel Ogertschnig
Offline and online, consumers are ever more adept at presenting their public image or, as Tom Peters put it, crafting The Brand Called You. While they can carefully control the clothes they wear, the brands they use, the photos they upload to Flickr and the witty repartees they Twitter, it's more difficult to judge whether the image they're trying to project is really what others see.
Friends, family and online pals aren't objective enough, so who can they turn to for an honest image appraisal? German consumers can now upload a few pictures to checkyourimage.com, and have impartial strangers evaluate their appearance, solving dilemmas like: "My wife says I look boring, I think I look professional and modern." "My boss says I come across as cool and distant. I think I look reliable and friendly." "Does my long, red hair look good on me, or would I look better with a short, blond cut?" The website points out that just as brands routinely use focus groups to test a product's image and appeal, anyone can benefit from an honest appraisal by a crowd of strangers.
checkyourimage.com offers a variety of test options. Every month, it offers one free trial question. Users can upload their photo and have 30 people answer a question. This month, it's "Do I look naive?", and next month they can enlist strangers to answer the all-important "Do I look intelligent?" Those willing to pay for the service can choose from a Basic Check (EUR 25 for 50 image testers answering 10 standard questions), an Optimal Check (EUR 49 for 50 testers answering 20 questions that the customer selects from a database), and a Business Check (EUR 490 for 1,000 testers answering questions defined by the customer).
Once the pre-selected number of testers have responded, clients can log on to checkyourimage.com for a full report. To ensure a good mix of ages and well-balanced male/female ratio, the company asks its (German) testers for personal details when they sign up. And since the results are only visible to clients, the appraisals are private and don't turn into "hot or not" contests, which would likely be the case in a more open and transparent set-up. checkyourimage.com is currently German-only, but the concept is ripe for international expansion!
Website: www.checkyourimage.com
Contact: info@checkyourimage.de
Spotted by: Susanna Haynie
Encouraging people to organize their own wine tasting parties, 4xProeven (Tastingx4) combines a board game with a four-pack of wine.
The concept is simple: four small (0.375 litre) bottles of red wine are packaged in a carton that folds out to a board. Four blank stickers are included to hide the bottles' labels. A leaflet explains the basic elements of wine tasting: look, smell, taste and compare. It also describes the four single grape varieties included in the game. Players shuffle the bottles and start tasting. By comparing a wine's taste to the four descriptions, the objective is to guess which is Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir and Shiraz. Just launched in The Netherlands, 4xProeven is currently sold online for EUR 24.95 and by a small number of wine shops, and the company is planning to launch internationally soon.
While wine tasting games certainly aren't new, they generally include game elements only, not the wine itself. And here's where we think 4xProeven missed a great opportunity (or maybe they're working on it). Instead of including unbranded wines, partner with a well-known label and turn the game into a smart and simple way to tryvertise, getting customers to sample a variety of reds or whites while connecting with the brand. We're sure Springwise has a few readers at E&J Gallo and Jacob's Creek. Time to give this one a spin? ;-)
Website: www.4xproeven.nl
Contact: info@esegui.nl
Visitors to many of Europe's cities can now get elaborate walking tours for free, thanks to Sandeman's New Europe Tours.
Available in London, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Paris and Madrid, each tour begins at a central meeting place and lasts two to four hours as it provides an overview of the city's sights. In London, for example, two free tours are available—one focusing on the Old City of London, and the other concentrating on Royal London. In Berlin, meanwhile New Europe Tours offers both walking and bicycle tours for free. Tours are often available in multiple languages, and Sandeman's New Europe also publishes a free line of English language New Europe magazines, as well as offering hostel booking on its site. The company got started in Berlin in 2004, and has been expanding ever since. As the euro continues to be painfully expensive for tourists from outside the EU, New Europe Tours are no doubt more popular than ever. Recession-proof tourism, anyone...?
While participants on the tours don't have to pay to attend, tips are expected—roughly EUR 10 a head is reportedly standard, which could be viewed as pay what you want rather than strictly free. Besides providing guides with decent income from tips, the tours also advertise the company's range of private and paid tours, including the Red Berlin Tour, the New Paris Tour of Versailles and pub crawls. Indeed, a full 46 percent of visitors who take the company's free Berlin tour end up taking one of the paid tours as well, the company states. Which, of course, is yet another testament to the (marketing) power of free love. Make it fun, make it informative, but most of all, make it free! Consumers will return your love with interest. ;-)
(Related: Blind guides take sighted on sensorial tours of Lisbon.)
Website: www.neweuropetours.eu
Contact: info@neweuropetours.eu
Spotted by: Maarten Munster
A few months ago, we featured a startup focused on helping people find classes taught by local teachers through an online marketplace. TeachStreet got off to a flying start in Seattle, where it won praise from both learners and teachers. Chris Lewis, a Seattle-area tennis coach: "TeachStreet drives my business. Last week I had 12 new students e-mail me asking to take lessons. I don't even do anything else to advertise my business anymore, yet my schedule is always full."
Time to roll out in a second city: TeachStreet launched in Portland, Oregon yesterday. The site now features more than 55,000 teachers, trainers, tutors, instructors, coaches and classes in the Pacific Northwest, 25,000 of which are in the Portland area. Besides offering existing instructors an alternative to advertising on Craigslist and bulletin boards, TeachStreet aims to unearth hidden teaching talent. Convinced that everyone is an expert in something—"You have a hidden talent for beer-brewing, pie-baking or parenting and wouldn't mind showing off your mad skills by inviting folks out to your backyard, your kitchen, or local coffee shop"—TeachStreet encourages everyday experts to list a class, either as a jumping off point for a new career or side business, or as a way to meet new friends with shared interests.
Which reminds us of status skills, a trend defined by our sister-site trendwatching.com, which explains how a growing number of consumers are gleaning status from mastering skills. TeachStreet is prompting them to transfer those skills to others in a semi-professional manner. Sounds like an instant boost in status! ;-)
Website: www.teachstreet.com
Contact: www.teachstreet.com/contact-us
A couple of years ago we wrote about Yummy Mummy Careers, a Canadian classified ad site designed for moms seeking jobs.* Inspired by that story, an Australian entrepreneur—Kate Sykes—launched a similar site in her own country.
Though it's named for working mothers, CareerMums actually includes in its target audience all skilled parents seeking work. With a national online jobs board and candidate board, the site aims to connect skilled parents with flexible employers offering full-time, part-time, job share and contract style roles. Using CareerMums is free for job seekers, who can set up job alerts, post their profiles for prospective employers, register and search for jobs. The site offers a range of resources to assist job-seekers in transitioning back into the workplace after parental leave, including survey data, a flexible work proposal toolkit, and tips on dealing with recruiters. CareerMums also works with employers to adopt flexible work practices and retain working parents, offering several plug-in HR toolkits toward that end.
Will family-friendly workplaces ever become the norm? We sure hope so. In the meantime, sites like this can be replicated around the globe!
Website: www.careermums.com.au
Contact: info@careermums.com.au
* Yummy Mummy Careers added networking services to their website and now operates under a new name: connectmoms.com.
Pedal-powered taxis and free love have both been around for years, but it wasn't until just recently that one of our spotters saw them combined. Specifically, Dublin-based Ecocabs now offers free eco-taxi rides throughout the streets of the city.
Ecocabs are pedal-powered (but battery-assisted, when necessary) tricycles that can accommodate three people for emissions-free transit through congested urban areas. Launched in April, they offer short-distance travel within the Dublin city centre from 10 am to 7 pm, seven days a week. Rides on the vehicles are free, of course, through the power of sponsorship. Vehicles are wrapped with brand-specific colours and imagery, and drivers can also hand out leaflets, wear branded clothing or target particular areas of the city. (Ecocabs are also available to act as a dedicated or on-demand shuttle service for customers, clients and employees, as well as at product launches, photo-shoots, trade-fairs, public sporting events, etc.) Current sponsors of the vehicles include 7Up, Yoplait and KPMG.
Ecocabs have also been seen offering free rides on the streets of Toronto, and full-fare versions exist in numerous other cities. In Ireland, meanwhile, Ecocab is seeking franchise operators in Cork and Belfast. Time to start serving up some pedal-powered free love of your own....? (Related: Whispering billboards, talkative cab drivers and Cargo bikes for greener business deliveries in congested cities.)
Website: www.ecocabs.ie
Contact: comments@ecocabs.ie
Spotted by: Keetsa via RK
