The new way to book live music!

26

September

2016

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Imagine, you are looking for an artist to perform, at your wedding, your office party, to spice up your huis-warming, for in your café or restaurant or for your best friends birthday. Where do you go? We used to have to google artists, call around, use the phone book or use a third party booking agents.. which always charge way to much. And this all is just way too complicated.

Why not make it easier?

Plugify has disrupted the music booking industry in the Netherlands. Plugify was set up to make the search for artists a lot easier. The success of Plugify is already evident, in just one day it reached €200.000 through Crowdfunding and in five weeks it reached it’s goal of € 745.690!

How does it work?

Think of Airbnb and Booking.com, how simple it is to book an apartment or hotel? Plugify is the Airbnb for booking artists! Within 4 simple steps you can book the artists of your dream on the Plugify Platform.  The first step is to find the artists and get a taste of their style. On Plugify there are already more than 380 artists, from DJ’s to pianists to coverbands to quarttets. Moreover, in every price range you can find unique talents. There are multiple filters such as price, length of performance, repertoire and mood and within seconds you can find the artists to your preference! Every artist has to post a video and picture of what there set looks like so the customer can get a taste of what the artist is about. Step 2, Check availability. Within three days the artist will reply and let you know whether they are available. Step 3. Accept the artists offer. The Plugify artists also allows direct and secured payment. The price of the a performance is immediately transparent. So no more envelopes of cash on the evening itself or invoices afterwards. Moreover, once you paid it’s a done deal, so no more costs after the performance such as parking costs or transfer costs. The motto of Plugify is what you see is what you get!

Step 4: Enjoy the music and rate the artists. Once the artists has performed the booker gets a request to review the artist. This only takes 2 to 5 minutes and not only does the artist benefit from this but the Plugify Community as well. Why? Because the better the reviews, the higher the artists are in the ranking. This also serves as an incentive for artists to book through Plugify as the more they play, the more reviews, the higher they get in the rankings and the more they get booked. It’s a vicious cycle and creates high switching costs for artists.

What’s in it for Plugify? Plugify earns 12 % commission from the booking. However, as a further incentive for its artists the commission decreases to solely 8% the more the artists get booked! This way, Plugify promotes the artist to get booked through Plugify and discourages the artist to “go around” Plugify.

But what if the artist needs technique and apparatus and this is not available at the wished location? Plugify has thought of that as well. You can rent the right and appropriate technique on Plugify without a third person and the technique rental company has direct contact with the artist so no more hassle for the customer!

The Plugify platform is a community for both artists and bookers and is a win-win situation. The more artists join the platform, the more bookers will come to the platform and the more artists will be booked.  The value of Plugify is in it’s users. Plugify enjoys scale as it’s competitors aren’t as far along and hesitant in reacting. This increases the bargaining power for Plugify and widens their competitive moat.

Plugify still has a long road ahead of them but they are on the right track. Let the music flow!

 

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Can Tinder be considered a disruptive innovation?

21

September

2016

5/5 (2)

Remember the stories of how your parents, or even your grandparents met? People used to meet each other through different people, in the supermarket, at work, or even through blind dates! These traditional romantic stories have gone away and technology has crept into the romantic lives of people.  With the invention of social media it is difficult to imagine anyone going on a blind dates again.

The adoption of technology has changed the way we connect and converse with others in our society and dating is no exception. Due to mobile phones we are always contactable. Furthermore, as a result of social media we get to know people even before we have met them and dating apps gives us an abundance of choice in suitable partner. Technology has disrupted the dating scene!

Is Tinder an innovative disruptor?

Take Tinder. Tinder has become extremely successful due to that an incumbent provider decided to disrupt itself rather than get disrupted by others. Tinder is a dating application for mobile phones. It was set up in 2012 by the incubator Hatch Labs which owns dating site like Match.com, Chemistry.com, Peoplemdia and OKCupid. By 2014, it had generated one billion matches, 800 million swipes and 10 million matches per day as well as 300 marriage proposals. Moreover, it had over 28% of the $2.1 billion dating service market and stole the majority of the user’s from incumbent providers!

What makes Tinder different from the rest?

Tinder provides a different experience to online dating sites as it provides instant gratification. It’s easy, affordable and fun to use due to Tinders innovation of the swipe. You sign on with Facebook, so forget about the lengthy dating profile questionnaires, and within minutes your judging singles in your area swiping right if you like the look of them and swiping left if you don’t. If you both swipe, right it’s a match. Tinder combines social, mobility and analytics in a way that creates a captivating user experience.  Since the rise of Tinder online dating has increased to 60% on mobile devices versus 40% using desktops. Having said all this, in my opinion Tinder is a genuine disruptive innovator!

With the rise of more applications like Tinder, Happn and Hinge the dating scene will probably never be the same.

References:

(2016). Tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com. Retrieved 21 September 2016, from https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/screen-shot-2015-01-16-at-9-32-53-am.png?w=680&h=406

BBC News – The dating game. (2016). BBC News. Retrieved 21 September 2016, from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-2e3f0042-75f6-4bd1-b4fe-9056540c65f8

Stampler, L. (2014). Inside Tinder: Meet the Guys Who Turned Dating Into an AddictionTIME.com. Retrieved 21 September 2016, from http://time.com/4837/tinder-meet-the-guys-who-turned-dating-into-an-addiction/

Tinder mobile app statistics and revenue – App Industry Insights. (2015). Business of Apps. Retrieved 21 September 2016, from http://www.businessofapps.com/tinder-mobile-app-statistics-and-revenue/

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Bye Bye Cash, Hello Cashless Society

20

September

2016

4/5 (1)

Bye Bye Cash, Hello Cashless Society

 

Remember those times when you had a wallet? A wallet full of coins and banknotes. In today’s world, people don’t carry cash around anymore and cardholders and digital wallets have replaced traditional wallets. Cash is slowly disappearing. With the near death of personal cheque’s, increases in debit and credit card use and innovations such as Paypal, Square, Apple Pay and Bitcoin, the cashless society is well within our reach.

Today, Square lets any business accept debit or credit cards, Tikkie allows consumers to send payment requests, like a dinner bill, via Whatsapp and even for a candy bar you can use a card or phone. Almost all banking is now done through mobile devices. In the Netherlands card payments have been growing by about 10,7% annually over the past years (betaalvereniging , 2016) and the Bank of Korea is even planning for cashless society by 2020. The question thus arises, will cash become obsolete?

Electronic payments means faster, convenient and more efficient purchases. The Federal Reserve estimates that in 2016 there will be $616.9 billion in cashless transactions. In 2010, this was $60 billion. (Desjardins, 2016)

Governments support the shift for a cashless society. By having a paper trail for all transactions, crime, money laundering and tax evasion can be prevented and traced. Furthermore, a cashless society could empower central banking to have more ammunition in smoothing out the way people save and spend their money. By eliminated the prospect of cash savings, monetary policy options like negative interest rates would be far more effective when implemented.

All the money would be stored under the same banking system, instead of under a consumer’s pillow. Moreover, prudent savers could be taxed with negative rates to encourage consumer spending

Companies also love this idea of a cashless society since electronic payments are faster and much cheaper. And as far as multinationals are concerned, the sooner there’s a single global currency the better.

The cashless society is certainly getting closer from a technological point of view. For example, PayPal already has 188 million accounts, making it larger than most national banks. These days, more people own cell phones than computers hence phone companies could be the banks of the future, and for consumers their wallets. Furthermore, in the future all phones will be GPS equipped so products like holiday insurance could be sold directly on a pay-as-you-go basis, simply because the insurance company would know where you are in real-time and calculate risks and payments accordingly (“Future of Banks, Mobile Banking, Insurance,Finance”, 2016). As for security reasons, there are methods to ensure encrypted financial data. Due to this technological explosion, there are a lot of benefits and opportunities for new entrants and will lead to a strategy innovation of incumbent companies to keep up with the cashless society.

 However, physical money has been with us for thousands of years. Cash is untraceable, easy to carry, widely accepted and reliable. If there is a power blackout, there is always cash. There are obviously some concerns, cases of electronic fraud have more than doubled in the past decade and the electronic system is considered as a threat to privacy.

 Nobody can predict what the future will bring us, but it’s a fair bet that change will happen!

 

References

(2016). Betaal Vereniging. Retrieved 20 September 2016, from https://www.betaalvereniging.nl/nieuws/sterke-groei-elektronisch-betalen-2015/

Canteneur, P. (2016). Atelier. Retrieved 20 September 2016, from http://www.atelier.net/en/trends/articles/mobile-payments-surge-digital-wallet-adoption-forecast-2016_438960

Desjardins, J. (2016). The Shift to a Cashless Society is SnowballingVisual Capitalist. Retrieved 20 September 2016, from http://www.visualcapitalist.com/shift-cashless-society-snowballing/

Eveleth, R. (2016). The truth about the death of cashBbc.com. Retrieved 20 September 2016, from http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150724-the-truth-about-the-death-of-cash

Future of Banks, Mobile Banking, Insurance,Finance. (2016). Globalchange.com. Retrieved 20 September 2016, from http://www.globalchange.com/Future-of-Banks-Mobile-Banking-InsuranceFinance/

Gonser, T. (2016). 5 Things That Will Disappear In 5 YearsTechCrunch. Retrieved 20 September 2016, from https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/03/5-things-that-will-disappear-in-5-years/

PayPal: active registered accounts 2016 | Statistic. (2016). Statista. Retrieved 20 September 2016, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/218493/paypals-total-active-registered-accounts-from-2010/

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