Create engagement with qualified customer communication.
Ana is an Account Executive in the Success department at Quipu. It means that her principal function is to be in contact with consumers, namely the bookkeepers, in order to reach their demands and expectations regarding the service Quipu offers. Ana gives them the necessary tools to cover all their needs and solve their problems. For example, if a client has the opportunity to improve his use of the software, but isn’t aware of it, Ana is responsible to help him make the most out of Quipu. Her final goal is to generate engagement with clients to establish a long term relationship.
In stadiums meant for physical sports are thousands of fans gathered to see their idols play more virtual kinds of games. Foto: Bago Games
In 2016 reports showed that over one billion people are aware of eSports the industry brought in around one billion dollars the same year. Both analysts and experts see 2017 as a year this growth continues, and that in a fast pace, as this will be the year eSports goes mainstream.
Pol Ruiz is the co-founder and CEO of Playfulbet, one of the biggest social betting platforms in Europe with over seven million users. They were one of the first startups that saw the eSports wave coming:
I have to say that eSports have evolved a lot since we started Playfulbet four years ago. At the time we were the only ones offering betting on eSports (though not with real money). Today all the betting sites lets you bet on eSports and it’s growing rapidly month over month.
Pol Ruiz, CEO and co-founder of Playfulbet.
Talking about sports, the only thing growing faster than eSports itself, is betting on eSports. According to the market analyst SuperData the eSports market will be worth 1.8 billion by the end of 2018. The sum is small compared to the betting market says Pol:
What many analysts doesn’t take account for is the betting industry around eSports which is also growing exponentially, and is anticipated to generate around $20 billion in turnover by 2020.
Stadiums used for traditional sports, are filling up with energetic audiences hungry for eSports live tournaments. It’s important to note that there are several key differences between the normal sports fan and the eSports enthusiasts.
The things that are special with eSports fans is that they support, interact and are much active than normal sports fans. They identify themselves with the game in a bigger degree than with other sports fans, and this makes the eSports sector both so interesting and valuable.
Pol and his team at Playfulbet are monitoring both sports sectors, and see trends emerging.
The industry is exploding, and especially after many traditional football and basketball teams got associated with the online sports games, and even formed professional eSports teams.
Mainstream means money
Until now eSports has been associated with one particular kind of demography, but that is changing rapidly, according to Pol:
As traditional TV and mass media companies are entering, this is becoming a mainstream thing. In Spain there’s TV channels dedicated to eSports and Mediapro is covering the LVP (the national eSports league in Spain).
He continues:
As most experts predict, the eSports sector will continue to grow fast the next couple of years, particularly with the entry of mainstream brands and additional famous profiles from the traditional sports world.
To strengthen their focus on eSports, Pol and Playfulbet is adding more gaming streams to the platform:
we’re integrating streaming of eSport matches so you can follow the games you’ve been betting on without leaving the platform, and you can also chat with your community watching the same games. But there’s still much more to be done for the eSports community using the platform.
Playfulbet moved over the offering bets on eSports fairly early because of one main reason:
We added eSports mostly because no one else did it, so for us it was a competitive advantage. We’re still not more focused on eSports with respect to other sports, but we’re working on offering even more content and functionality in this niche.
There’s a new startup in town, and we’re lucky to say it’s an itnig company.
Factorial wants to make the HR role both easier and less time consuming through their cloud-based HR platform.
Factorial has already started on-boarding several Barcelona companies to their platform.
Many small and medium businesses don’t have a budget for a full-time HR person, so managing employees, their contracts, pay slips, time off, benefits, insurance and much more, is left to the CEO, the office manager or someone else.
All of these tasks, and more, are automated through Factorial, explains CTO and co-founder Pau Ramon Revilla.
Our customer interviews shows that HR managers use 80 percent of their time on cumbersome chores, and only 20 percent on building culture and boosting productivity. We want to flip those numbers.
Bringing the Zenefits model to Europe (and the world..)
Even though there’s several HR management platforms in Europe, they are not designed for the needs of small and medium businesses (payroll, benefits, time-management, etc.) that Factorial offers, says CEO and co-founder Jordi Romero:
The initial seed idea was to bring the Zenefits model to Europe.
Zenefits was born from newly introduced regulations that forced American companies to provide certain benefits for their employees, but European markets work very differently, and this is where Factorial comes in. They’re currently exploring what to offer in the different markets, and they’ll start in a few European countries, according to CEO Romero.
Usually all companies reinvent their own way of dealing with HR processes, using forms and excel sheets, which is very time consuming. We’ll change that.
Moving fast
Only three months ago Jordi and Pau didn’t have a product, but they’ve been building non-stop and have recently started on-boarding companies into their platform, according to CTO Ramon:
We’re testing what’s basically our MVP with 5–6 companies in Barcelona now, and so far the feedback has been good.
They’re currently raising their first round of funding, and will be using the next 6 months to build an international product, and then establish partnerships for benefits around Europe.
“The initial seed idea was to bring the Zenefits model to Europe” — Jordi Romero
Both Romero and Ramon are coming from executive positions in SaaS company Redbooth, where they worked as VP of business development and CTO.
We’re bringing a lot of valuable knowledge and experience from Redbooth on how to run a SaaS company, the metrics, how to convert users in to actual customers, and much more.
Targeting startups
Factorial is meant for all small and medium businesses, but the first months their targeting startups, says CEO and co-founder Romero.
The co-founders in talks with the itnig design and business development team.
Tech startups usually have higher salaries, and are more creative in ways to compensate their employees. At the same time, they’re often very depending on efficiency and productivity, so it’s a very good fit for Factorial.
Factorial is one of six companies currently being built in itnig’s venture builder in Poble Nou, and all the other startups in the ecosystem are using Factorial.
We’re looking for great developers to help us build Factorial. As the CTO of Redbooth I’ve learned a lot about how to grow a team, create a good culture and to foster productivity and creativity. I’m looking forward to applying this knowledge in Factorial.
The Catalan organization CECOT representing over 6000 entrepreneurs, awarded itnig startup Parkimeter with the award for best new company.
Once every year CECOT hosts what they call “the night of the entrepreneur” in Barcelona. Here they award different kind of local entrepreneurs, and this year it was co-founders of Parkimeter, Jordi Badal and Ferran Gatius turn to get honored.
The startup that allow you to reserve, pay and find parking spots for your car, was created in 2013, and has been experiencing massive growth in both users and parking facilities the last years.
Soon 500 places to park
As of today, the company offers their users over 380 different locations to park their cars.
Parkimeter’s plan is to reach 500 parking facilities by 2017 in over 80 cities in Spain.
Parkimeter has parking facilities all over Spain.
And it seems like the service was needed, as the startup has parked over 50.000 cars the last three years. To make the parking experience even better, Parkimeter will in a matter of weeks release the new app so you easily can book your parking through your phone.
Even though the area around Barcelona is the one with most parking facilities at the moment, Parkimeter plans for expansion. They raised a seed round this June and plans to start their expansion to the rest of Europe by next year.
“How parking has been changed through technology, is similar to how the travel sector was disrupted 15 years ago,” say co-founder of Parkimeter Jordi Badal.
Smart sustainable cities
Parkimeter recently spoke at the SmartCity conference InFocus 2016, held in the Chinese city of Yinchuan this September.
This year’s CECOT event was also focused on building smart and sustainable cities, that are able to offer services that bring improvements to the lives of its citizens.
The Parkimeter team in their headquarters in Barcelona.
At the CECOT conference smart cities like New York and Dubai presented their plans for the future along with Barcelona represented by Parkimeter which introduced their initiatives to facilitate parking according to people’s needs, optimizing traffic, reducing the visual impact and aligning itself with the policies of mobility each city has.
But Parkimeter does only care about the environment, they also care about your wallet, as Parkimeter’s facilities is up to 50 percent cheaper than normal street parking.
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This post was written by Sindre Hopland, media manager at itnig.
Even though Playfulbet’s product is e-sports and sports betting games, our success in capturing thousands of users and followers has not been left up to chance.
Behind Playfulbet there’s a young team that first and foremost love what they do, as we get to work with our biggest passion — games. And it feels even better to share these insights when our devotion is bearing fruit, as our social media following have been growing exponentially the last few years.
We recently reached a couple of milestones in our social channels, as we reached 300.000 followers on Twitter and 400.000 followers on Facebook.
As mentioned earlier, nothing is left up to chance, and at times we’ve been overwhelmed by the massive growth from some of our campaigns, especially as Playfulbet has been expanding internationally.
LOVE
We love our followers, and have great respect for everyone that follow our social media channels. And here lies some of the key-elements to our growth, we have a big emphasis on entertaining our audience every single day.
It’s important to see you social media as an extension of your product, as our social channel is an extension of Playfulbet’s betting platform.
We focus on communicating with our audience, and not just broadcasting a message. In this we use all kinds of media tools like pictures, video, GIF’s, surveys and contests that can steal a smile or a reaction from our followers.
If you have a product to leverage through the platform, use it for what it’s worth. We give away our virtual money (Coins) that users can take advantage of on the platform to win prizes.
The precious feedback
To maintain a high interaction rate in your social channels is key to keep growing. As we are a sports betting platform we base a lot of our content on actual sports news. In that way we’re staying relevant to our followers, and not only entertaining. I think this is one of toughest nuts to crack — stay relevant.
If you’re interacting with your audience every day, you’ll be sure to get feedback, which is very valuable. It’s important that you follow up on all your feedback, as your brand will be more credible, and your followers will be more faithful if they feel they’re being heard.
Jorge Badenes, content manager at Playfulbet — an itnig startup.
Having depurated non-toxic social networks where the user feels comfortable also serves as a real time barometer of what’s going on in your company. At Playfulbet the users may ask for support about prizes they’ve won or they aspire to win, they report cheaters and people who don’t play clean by using multi-accounts, which are forbidden, or they simply alert us about canceled or suspended matches they want their coins back from. All of this is super helpful for our team, and makes our platform better.
Right now we’re engaging our followers all across Europe and in Southern America, giving away hundreds of prizes every month, while creating entertaining content. Follow us for some inspiration on how you can do the same, because our team rocks!
Playfulbet, the adventure continues..
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This post was written by Jorge Badenes, content manager at itnig startup Playfulbet.
