Startup connects brands with influential Instagram users

Online photo sharing services like Instagram and Pinterest can be remarkably effective branding tools. While neither platform officially employs ads, the social media teams of marketing-savvy companies often build relationships with well-followed users, either paying them to post photos of their products, or giving them stuff in trade for doing it.

Mercedes, for example, recently loaned a CLA to five top Instagrammers who took photos of the 4-door coupe during a five-day road trip. At the end, the one with the most “likes” got to keep the car.

But identifying and cultivating relationships with social media darlings individually puts an additional burden on most companies’ already stretched marketing resources. Brandnew IO wants to lend a hand. The Berlin-based startup, founded earlier this year, connects brands with influential users on Instagram and Pinterest and pays those users to share the brands’ images.

Brandnew IO works with influential Instagram users to promote brand content.

It’s not just pimping out popular feeds, though. These “publishers”—people with an average of 300,000 followers—obviously have a vested interest in not annoying and losing fans. As such, they’re under no obligation to promote content that doesn’t mesh with the ethos of their feeds.

So far Brandnew IO has about 180 publishers, people who tend to be photographers, aspiring celebrities, and bloggers who post images focused on subject areas such as fashion, beauty, and cars. Their collective reach, Brandnew IO founder and CEO Francis Trapp told me via Skype, is a massive 55 million followers.

Similar to a CPM model, Brandnew IO charges client companies per 1,000 users, with niche campaigns—ones that reach people who only upload photos of car rims, for example—going for a premium. Targeting a broader market, such as folks who like to upload photos of fashion or beauty, costs less.

Brandnew IO also provides advertisers with analytics that help them gauge the effectiveness of their campaigns.

While Trapp says Brandnew IO is required to label the images publishers post as advertisements, he believes sponsored content posted by users is more effective than banner ads.

“When you look at the photos we publish throughout our campaigns, they appear in the Instagram user photo feed and [are] completely merged with the surrounding photos so it’s 100 percent native,” Trapp says. “As a result, the KPIs and conversion rates and engagement rates are a lot higher, for example, than Facebook ads and Facebook sponsored posts in the news feed.”

Instagram and Pinterest themselves are both keen on monetizing their platforms with ads. Last week at a fashion event in London, Instagram co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom said it has plans to launch ads within the next year. A few days later Pinterest CEO Ben Silberman said in an email to users the photo-pinning company will be playing around with promoting a handful of pins in search results and category feeds.

Silberman promised that promoted pins will not involve “flashy banners or pop-up ads.” Systrom’s remarks hinted that its approach might also be one in which users aren’t pushed overt ads, but rather shown products within the context of their feed, prompting them to like and comment on the post.

Such a tack would make sense considering the way companies have tended to connect with fans on these platforms so far. Followers follow because they have an emotional connection with a brand and the absence of jarring ads puts the onus on companies to share engaging content so as to woo users and win more hearts, not to mention pins and comments.

As for Brandnew IO, Trapp says he plans to grow his six-person team to 10 or 15 by the end of the year. The company just closed a six-digit round of seed funding, which it will use to acquire more advertisers and publishers as well as connect with additional photo sharing communities.

Christina is a contributor to media outlets such as Forbes.com, Inc.com, PCWorld.com, Auto Trader and The Minneapolis Star Tribune. She writes about a myriad of topics including technology, the automotive industry and health and fitness. Her talents outside of writing include photography, getting people to talk (although that certainly helps with writing) and gardening.
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Online payments startup Stripe lands in the UK

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Startup PernixData virtualizes server-based flash

PernixData, a startup founded by VMware veterans, says its software can turn server-based flash storage into a resource shared across a standard VMware cluster of as many as 32 systems.

Making that cache available across a whole cluster will let enterprises scale out their storage capacity with consistently fast access to data, according to co-founder and CEO Poojan Kumar, who previously managed VMware's data products. PernixData's product, called PernixData FVP (Flash Virtualization Platform), works without modifications to the hypervisor or applications and is designed to coexist with SANs (storage area networks), he said.

Putting flash storage directly into servers is a growing solution to the need for faster access to data, but the technology's been limited to individual servers, so virtualized environments can't fully take advantage of it, according to PernixData. Clusters of virtualized servers typically share data over a SAN, which can raise performance problems, Kumar said. Multiple network hops and contention over a shared SAN link can all slow down access to the data that applications need.

PernixData's software can turn flash cards on all the servers in a virtualized cluster into a shared cache, which serves as a tier of storage above a SAN for the most-used data. It's a software-only product and can use on-server flash that customers already have deployed. Announced on Tuesday, PernixData FVP is available immediately for US$7,500 per host for an enterprise package. It's initially for VMware environments, though ultimately it will work with multiple hypervisors, including KVM and Microsoft's Hyper-V, Kumar said.

The software is designed to allow fast access to data while virtualizing server resources. The virtual machines on a given server mostly will get their data from the cache right on that system. But even when they need to tap into another server on the cluster, that will be faster than going out to a SAN, the company said: Delays can be measured in microseconds rather than milliseconds. And PernixData works with all features of VMware, such as movements of VMs using VMotion, making management easier, Kumar said.

Another advantage to PernixData's approach is that administrators can control which VMs can use which flash resources, giving preference to the jobs that most need the performance. It does this by taking advantage of both the VM and the storage being on the cluster, so that kind of control isn't possible with flash that's on a SAN, Kumar said.

Christopher Greater Area Rural Health Planning Corp. (CRHPC), which operates 13 clinics in southern Illinois, sees PernixData's software as key to implementing VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) for its doctors and other employees.

VDI should cut maintenance and energy costs while helping ensure security and giving workers more flexibility, said Jason Rolla, chief technology officer. For example, doctors frequently move between their offices and examination rooms, he said. "Technically, they could carry their office everywhere they went," Rolla said.

CRHPC has an almost four-year-old Dell EqualLogic storage array in its headquarters data center that's connected to its servers via iSCSI. But when it tried to set up VDI using just the array for storage, application response times were much longer than the 3 milliseconds that CRHPC was aiming for, Rolla said.

Tests with 10 virtual desktops showed that using the cache with PernixData will cut down on response time by about three-quarters, and CRHPC now plans to implement the software in its full VDI rollout, Rolla said.

PernixData should be useful for databases and big data analytics, as well as VDI, said Gartner analyst Chris Wolf. Virtualized storage products from some other vendors, including VMware, have been hard to sell because they were too expensive for what they did, he said.

"As long as the product holds up to what it appears to do on paper, Pernix is going to put a lot of price pressure on some of the more industry heavyweights here," Wolf said.

Stephen Lawson covers mobile, storage and networking technologies for The IDG News Service. Follow Stephen on Twitter at @sdlawsonmedia. Stephen's e-mail address is stephen_lawson@idg.com

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