TigerPrises.com is an independent weblog covering Estonian technology landscape – interesting companies, demos, technologies, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists etc. The aim is to promote entrepreneurial spirit and innovation. The weblog was selected among 11 of the best sources in Europe to cover start-ups.
Tigerprises wrote an interesting article about Cupoco.
Below you can read the English version of the interview of Cupoco with Internet World Business. We got such great feedback, so we decided to translate the German version into English:
Cupoco is starting a mobile couponing platform today, which will attract smartphone users especially. internetworld.de spoke with Till Issler, managing director of the German-Estonian startup GeoVoucher, about the app, the chances of couponing and the thrill of mobile.
Can you briefly explain what Cupoco is about?
Till Issler: Cupoco is a coupon platform and provides attractive local deals to the mobile phone of the user. The offers – so-called Cupocos – ranging from limited discounts, 2-for-1 offers to vouchers and group offers. Since Cupoco iw available via the mobile phone, you have it with you all the time and you are always up to date.
How does the service work?
Issler: I give you an example: A young woman is in town and wants to go there to buy shoes. She starts Cupoco on her cell phone and selects the category of shoes. The Cupoco-App locates her and shows her all the available Cupocos in her environment. Then she can choose a suitable offer and go to the respective shop. When she is paying she shows the coupon on the phone and saves money.
How is the location detection?
Issler: Just as the user wants: automatic via GPS and cell information of the network operator or the user chooses his current position.
How can companies use your platform?
Issler: A contractor registered with us. Our team verifies him and unlocks the Cupoco Wizard within 48 hours. With the wizard, he can then create in a few minutes a own mobile campaign. With it he can create, for example, multilingual coupons with pictures and any discounts and also the conditions can be freely defined. A onces created coupon can then be saved as a template in our system and be used as a template for new campaigns.
How can you manage your mobile campaigns?
Issler: Basically, it works just as with a campaign management tools in online marketing. The employer or agency can use it to create and manage mobile campaigns. With a dashboard, you can track the success of the campaign in real time. There you can see which Cupocos has been redeemed already.
Is the benefit for companies especially in getting new customers?
Issler: Firstly, yes. On the other, you can avoid peakes with specific activites. An example: everybody want to change back to summer tires. The workshops have problem that they have too many customers at once. If they now offer a coupon that the customer gets a discount between 10 and 12 clock, they can straighten their customer requests.
You find lots of online coupon portals today. Is the business model out of date already?
Issler: Most online coupon portals are offering only online coupons. Only a few of them have coupons of local stores. But this is the point where it gets interesting in my view. Especially with mobile coupons we are pioneers in Germany. In the U.S. it is already a mega-hype.
Can the model be transferred to the German market?
Issler: The Americans are definitly more used to use coupons than the Germans. There is already coupons in the newspapers for longer times. They were also “trained” for some time. We are convinced that mobile coupons are changing the voucher culture in Germany positive.
What is the business model of Cupoco?
Issler: At the moment we focus to establish Cupoco as a service. For the user Cupoco is and will be free. The operator may use Cupoco free during a testing period and get to know it without any risk. Since the mobile coupon market is still at the beginning, we have not decided on a “when” and “how much” for mobile advertisement yet. Now it is time to make the next steps with our business partners and users together an create an exciting product that gives both sides a clear added value. We are looking forward to it.
Thanks a lot to David Henning from Internet World Business for this interview!
Cupoco is participating in the “Show Your App Award” at the M-Days in Munich.
Just click at the link above or send an email to:
app@m-days.comShort overview of Cupoco:
The mobile industry is at home. On January 28th and 29th 2010 the 5th M-Days once again present detailed insights into trends and developments in the areas of Mobile Web, Mobile Marketing, Mobile Entertainment, Mobile Commerce, Location Based Services and Mobile Media. These topics are the focus of the crossmedial involvement in the classical marketing mix and the interconnectedness of the media. Over 400 visitors are expected to arrive at the expert congress. Just like before, in 2010 an accessible exhibition accompanies the congress in the BMW Welt Munic. On the exhibition area of over 1400 m² is presented an optimal information and communication platform for the mobile, brands and media industry. The workshops of the exhibitors can be visited independently of the congress participation. (source: m-days.com)
We will have a short presentation of our mobile couponing system Cupoco there! On 29.01.2010 at 2pm is a startup slot on the main stage. This is a great chance for us to gain more visibility and promote our product.
This idea came up while cleaning our apartment.
I lived in several flat shares in the past and it’s really interesting how different people clean up. The amazing thing is, that you can derive from how people are cleaning how they work at their job.
Questions which i think you can answer after cleaning an apartment together:
Now you may ask yourself why?
Because cleaning is not something one likes to do. But it has to be done. And it’s much faster if you do it in a team. Carry away objects, distribute work (vacuuming and wet mopping e.g.) or just getting things done without complaining.
Some people need instructions how to proceed. What is important and what is waste of time? And how do i clean different things?
Before I get too philosophical – think about this assumption and write your opinion.
Great news from Cupoco!
Since this week we have a technical partner for 1D and 2D-code scanners. It’s a company in the north of germany with nearly 18 years of experience in this field.
From now on Cupoco can provide a solution for scanning QR codes, DataMatrix codes and barcodes directly from the mobile phone.
For people who are not so familiar with this topic, a brief explanation of the problem of scanning codes from mobile phones. Commercially available scanners that you can find in supermarkets for example can’t scan 1D and 2D-codes from the mobile phone. This technology doesn’t recognize anything on the screen. That’s why we need special scanners for that.
This technology will be a standard in future, which we assume. In the US for example, some companies use it already for redeeming vouchers with the mobile phone.
Now we can offer a 360 degree mobile couponing solution even for companies with a lot of customers for which entering numercial codes is not a adequate solution.
Every morning i spend an hour for research in interesting trends in the mobile and internet market. For that i subcribed to several blogs, news sites and twitter channels.
If there are coming up breaking news, twitter is really the best media. In the last days nearly everybody was twittering about the real time web.
The developments in this area are really impressive. Almost every day new products are announced.
So what is the realtime web?
In one sentence: “The users receive information immediately after it is published by its author.”
The best example for that is the twitter post after the emergency landing in the Hudson river. Only seconds after this occures, the web community could see the first picture and a short explanation of what happend. Faster than the traditional medias ever will be.
The main reason for the boom of the real time web is the fast growing of mobile internet users worldwide. Bitkom wrote that more than two thirds of the world population has a mobile phone and the usage of data services is rising incredible fast.
The applications are so easy to use, that everbody with mobile internet access can take part in the realtime web. There are countless apps for twitter, facebook, flickr and so on to take part in this game.
In the last days, there were several announcements which will have extensive influence on the real time web. Two of them are googles real-time-search and googles goggles.
In the videos bellow you can get an impression of them:
You’ll get so many information in realtime whenever you want. In the same way you can push the real time web by twittering, uploading images and so on. On new feature which you can use in future, is real time video streaming. Usteam published an iPhone app for live video streaming. Your followers can see live what you are doing and where you are.
This opens up new business models. Imagine this feature will be integrated in google earth for example. You browse there and you’ll see live videos. Or you go to a club and publish a live stream of the event on facebook and your friends can easily decide if they want to join you or not.
What do you think about this topic?
Google is trying mobile couponing as well.
They announced this feature in late November. You will see available mobile coupons if you search with your mobile phone at google.
The design is really simple and almost exclusively text based. You don’t have additional pictures to get an impression of the product.
To redeem a coupon the customer has to show the coupon with a code to the merchant.
It’s a really interesting topic, since google wrote a blogpost yesterday about sending qr codes to local businesses in the US.
The shops can place a sticker with a qr code on their door: “We’re a favorite place on google”. The customer can take a picture of that with his mobile phone and receives immediately information about the shop.
It’s incredible how fast google is connecting the virtual world with the real world. But that’s the trend of the internet giants. Amazon is doing that as well. They have apparently the plan to open shops in London.
We can be excited!
Today it’s St Nicholas Day and we had our own special experience. So what happened?
Our personal St Nicholas Thomas from Flamr took us by surprise with a “chocolate cake with ginger taste” this morning.
We were really happy about that and Marc started to eat it. At that time Thomas had already eaten one third of it. Marc didn’t like it very much and said: “Till you can’t eat a lot of that, you will be stuffed so quick!”
I put a huge piece on my plate and tried a bit with a spoon. It tasted horrible! Such a strange consistency…
…but then I realized what’s going wrong here 
It wasn’t a cake…it was dough! Dough to make gingerbread! 800g!
You can easily bake 50 round pieces with a diameter of 7cm. And our poor Thomas had now this dough in his stomach. Dough for about 20 pieces…but he still feels fine.
We put the dough in the oven and there is now a really tasty scent in the air!
But how could that happen?
Because we are in Tallinn at the moment and don’t speak the language here… so we buy what we see 
It was written on the packaging: Piparkoogitaigen. In German its Pfefferkuchenteig. But Thomas is not from Germany, and he could not even imagine that it could be that.
We really laughed a lot today about that amazing story and enjoyed our gingerbread!
Bellow you see the product he bought.
Have a nice St Nicholas Day!
