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Colorado tech startups are cranking out some cool new products for the fall, including innovations for business, new ways of tackling pay-per-click campaigns, and, yes, robots. There's some magic for every taste. We checked out three particularly nifty new products.
1. A Google AdWords hacking solution from veteran internet marketers, Trada
As a core account manager at Trada, Severin Thornton has immersed himself in paid search campaigns, often for clients who aren't particularly comfortable with the complex terrain. Trada's latest product, PPCPath, was born of six years of experience.
[ibimage==30019==Medium==none==self==ibimage_align-left]“PPCPath is a SaaS that helps small- and medium-size businesses effectively manage and optimize their AdWords campaigns,” Thornton said. “We created PPCPath because we knew that small business advertisers interested in improving their pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns often don’t have access to these higher-end levels of expertise and services.”
Designing PPCPath to be novice-friendly took thinking and doing. “In less than a minute,” Thornton said, “PPCPath's software analyzes 50+ campaign health indicators to find the elements in an AdWords campaign that will produce a better ROI. Developing these features was a feat to say the least. We are proud that we’ve developed a tool that was truly going to provide value to an advertiser.”
Feedback has been roundly positive, and Thornton is eager for more of it. “We wanted to make it as easy as possible for a PPC novice to learn how to improve their campaign,” he said. “Translating our enterprise offerings to SMB Advertisers has been really rewarding. We’re excited to have created this tool for this underserved market.”
2. Hosted VoIP Salesforce integration from FluentStream
As long as you're working on CRM integration for businesses, why not catch the big fish, especially when your customers are already asking about it? The local telecom startup FluentStream, known for bringing some pizzazz to the commercial telephony business, knew which CRM to pick.
[ibimage==30018==Medium==none==self==ibimage_align-right]“Businesses that are heavily reliant on phone communications are always looking for ways to improve efficiency and data accuracy,” said Josh Ellis, the company's Director of Marketing and Customer Development. “With Salesforce being the leader in the CRM space for sales organizations, it was clear that integrating our Hosted VoIP phone system would be a tool to accomplish this. Our development roadmap is also heavily influenced by our customer base, and we had multiple customers requesting an integration between Salesforce and our Hosted VoIP phone solution.”
Integrating with Salesforce was an obvious choice, and FluentStream had the Web Sockets to do it. But the process was not without its challenges, which required rigorous testing and analysis. “Our entire platform is driven by a very robust API, which allows us to easily integrate with other software,” said Ellis. Nonetheless, “anyone who has worked with Salesforce’s platform will understand the learning curve involved.
"We use Salesforce internally, which made the testing and analysis quick and easy. It didn’t take long for us to realize that the integration we developed was extremely useful and worked like it should. Our agile development practices made it easy for the team to provide feedback - bugs were quickly resolved, and changes easily implemented by our development team.”
According to the numbers so far, Ellis said, customers are impressed.
3. A build-your-own-robot kit by Modular Robotics
[ibimage==30020==Medium==none==self==ibimage_align-right]If you feel that your childhood lacked cool enough toys – DIY robots, for instance – Modular Robotics is a Colorado startup with its finger on your pulse. Cubelets, an earlier product, allowed children as young as four to build their own robots. (No high-level tech knowledge is required, obviously.) When it hatched the concept for MOSS, it aimed to create something similar for older kids and adults, something that could provide entertaining complexity for buyers who wanted to take on a light coding project.
“Three years later,” said CEO Eric Schweikardt, “we have an advanced robotics system that is easily accessible for novices, yet rich in depth for experienced builders.”
“For us,” said Schweikardt, “design is more than a pretty package. It is a complete understanding of form and function working together to create a beautiful result.” It was the design aspect that proved the most significant challenge for his team.
“Part of what makes MOSS such a joy to play with is the immense amount of design work that went into it,” Schweikardt said. “Fitting all the functionality of a complete robot system into such a small package, while keeping it affordable, represented a great challenge. This hurdle was solved through elegant industrial design. Throughout the three-year development process, each piece of the system was designed to allow for multiple uses. A single brace can serve as a structural support, part of a steering mechanism for a remote control car, or foot for a kinematic crawling robot. This multitude of uses and internal symmetry within the system gives MOSS a feeling of infinite possibilities.”
After rigorous UX and safety testing, Modular Robotics has created a product that isn't just a great gift for a kid, but that can reignite the wonders of creating something new in those at any skill level.
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