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).
Behaviors Don't Lie - RapidBlue Maps Your Retail Patterns
RapidBue Solutions has earlier been working with proximity marketing solutions that use Bluetooth to offer a wide range of content directly to consumers' mobile phones at point-of-sales, events, and exhibitions. Now the company has finalized a new product offering and is starting to expand more widely into the Nordic countries.
Retailers, exhibition and event organizers, and shopping malls, for example, always need better ways to understand their customers, and in essence, learn about their consumers' real movements in the physical space. RapidBlue is now aiming to enable them to better market to their customers and track the effectiveness of the marketing actions and layouts based on real consumer behavioral data. The solution works in any area over any time period, and tracks when, where and how the customers move.
Accumulate and Payex Enable Retail Payments With Mobile Phones
The Swedish mobile payment and security solution provider Accumulate has announced (in Swedish) expanding their technology further into physical point-of-sale (POS) payments with mobile. Accumulate is partnering with PayEx, a Swedish-based payment system provider, to allow retail customers pay their purchases with mobile phones.
A Finnish Success Story Nobody Knows Of
Relex is a Finnish success story that not too many people know about. The most obvious reason for this is that Relex is not one of the sexy social media services that don't have a business model, but a company providing software for more efficient and automated demand forecasting and inventory managment. The company didn't get any external risk capital from Angels or VCs except some goverment funding and have gottten a flying start with that.
This yet again comes to show that Finland seems to be very strong in software. Historically this is very obvious by looking at the exit market. Out of all the exits between 2000 and 2006 in Finland over 50% has been in Software, whereas Sweden has been the strongest Nordic market in Internet Services, even though that was mostly due to Skype's €2200 million exit. After taking Skype out of the equation, software exits in Sweden count for about 35% of all the exits in the country during the time given time frame (Exit-study by Creandum, 2008).
