Erply Introduces NFC Enabled Magnetic Card Reader
Erply, one of the most promising start-ups from Estonia, provide software for small and medium-sized retailers who have physical stores. We have not covered the company for almost a year and meanwhile it has been quitely growing. From 2,000 business customers in March 2010, the company grew to 20,000 retailers who daily process over $2.5 million in transactions, according to the Wall Street Journal. Today Erply announced the launch of a magnetic credit card reader that is also NFC-enabled and is fully integrated with its existing cloud-based software. The device is priced at $50 and Erply will also charge 1.9% transaction fee, which is smaller than what its biggest competitor in the US, Square, charge their customers (2.75% per swipe).
iPad Apps Sell At A Higher Price
Distimo, an app store analytics company, has released their data for April regarding the Apple App Store. This is of interest as it is the first time since they report on the iPad App sales and how they do compared to iPhone sales. Also, the number of iPad applications in the App Store has increased dramatically in the last two weeks of April. On April 12th there were 2654 iPad apps while two weeks later, on April 26th there were 3437 apps resulting in a 30% increase.
The most important information from the report, however, is that on average iPad apps sell at a higher price than iPhone applications. On average, an application for the iPhone in the App Store costs $3.82 while an application for the iPad costs $4.67. iPad apps sell at almost 22,2% higher prices than iPhone apps. This of course could still be a result of the fact that there aren't all that many iPad apps even though we're talking about thousands of them. At the moment there are over 184 000 iPhone apps available.
iPad Solution iPOS Adds Mobility To Erply
Erply has come up with an innovative way to harness the mobility of the iPad. Erply is an Estonian company, who just last month raised 2 million dollars in funding and is trying to create an appealing solution to the sales, inventory and CRM challenges of retail SMEs.
Some time ago, Erply announced iPOS, which is essentially the ERPLY solution running on the iPad. They have a demo landing page up for the service, but it is enough to intrigue me into writing a story about it. I think this is one of the best B2B solutions/ideas out there for iPad.
