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There are few things in my life that seem less exciting than razors, but a new startup called The Dollar Shave Club thinks it’s time for a little disruption. And some of the big names in the venture world, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Andreessen Horowitz, are backing its vision.
Dollar Shave Club is relaunching today and announcing that it’s the latest company to emerge from Science, Inc., the incubator whose partners include former MySpace CEO Mike Jones and Color co-founder Peter Pham. The basic model is simple — at pricing that starts at $1 per month (plus $2 for shipping and handling), customers get a monthly shipment of razors delivered to their home.
Founder and CEO Michael Durbin argues that the high-end of the market has gotten ridiculously overpriced, with “a vibrating handle, a back-scratcher, and all of that stuff.” On the low-end, he says that people with “well-developed self images” don’t want to walk into a K-Mart or Wal-Mart to buy a pack of cheap razors. (I buy disposable razors at my local Walgreens, but I’m a tech journalist, so my self-image is screwed up in all kinds of ways.) When it comes to price, it’s hard to beat $1 a month, and when it comes to convenience, it’s hard to beat a delivery to your doorstep.
Strangely, Dolar Shave Club isn’t the first startup to offer razor deliveries — the memorably named Manpacks is offering a monthly package that includes razors as well as other necessities like underwear. Durbin argues that Manpacks is looking at things “a little too broadly,” because it’s hard to predict exactly what you’ll need from month to month. Shaving, on the other hand, is “one of the most regular things we do. It’s a no brainer.”
Dollar Shave Club has raised more than $1 million in a Series A led by Kleiner and Forerunner Ventures, with participation from Andreesen Horowitz, Shasta Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Shervin Pishevar, Dennis Phelps, and David Honig.
So what makes this a venture-backed business with big potential, rather than a novelty? Well, there’s the size of the personal grooming market, which Jones estimates at $2.6 billion (in the press release). Durbin says he can take a significant portion of that market by building a memorable brand. The company’s first promotional video is a good example of the “very irreverent, smart, fun, very Internet” identity that Durbin wants to create. You can watch the video below. I kind of love it — it is, after all, titled, “Our Blades Are F***ing Great.”
Durbin also hopes to create a stronger relationship with consumers as Dollar Shave Club expands the product line. It’s already adding new types of blades with the relaunch — the 4X blade for $6 a month and The Executive for $9 — and when it gets into shaving cream, the company will actually ask people to vote on the formulas on its website.
“I want people to see us as one of the first online-only power brands in the category,” he says.
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The onward march for Android and Apple continues apace, and leaves a big question mark for how other platforms can hope to compete, at least in the U.S. market: New figures out from Jumptap indicate that in the month of January, the two combined made up 91 percent of all smartphone traffic on its U.S. mobile ad network — representing a new high for the two most-dominant mobile phone platforms.
But while Apple has seen a huge jump in smartphone users following the launch of the iPhone 4S last year, Jumptap’s figures indicate that in tablets it has a strong competitor in the form of the Kindle Fire, which now accounts for 33 percent of all tablet traffic on the network.
While these numbers do not exactly speak to how many Kindle Fire devices there are in use compared to iPads (we have a bit more on that subject here), it does point to the fact that people are using their Amazon devices for a whole lot of ad-based services.
Jumptap’s numbers indicate that while Apple (at 32.2 percent) and Google (at 58.8 percent) are dominating across its U.S. ad network of 95 million monthly users, the weak appear to be getting weaker: RIM’s BlackBerry platform is at a “new low” of 6.7 percent share of impressions, while Symbian accounted for 1.4 percent of impressions, and Windows Mobile for even less: 0.5 percent.
Jumptap’s prediction is that despite gains that Microsoft may make as a result of Nokia’s new line of Windows Phones, collectively the bottom three will not have more than 10 percent of impressions at any point this year. Still, that is actually leaving room for some growth…
In tablets, Amazon is proving to be a strong competitor, at least in the area of usage. In January, it accounted for 33 percent of all tablet traffic, and as you can see from the table below, that share has risen quickly over the last three months, outpacing even the growth of tablet traffic itself. Apple’s share, meanwhile, is at its lowest in four months, at 48 percent. Ditto the collective force of all of the other tablet makers.
This is a key point, because it indicates that those who are buying the Kindle Fire are also buying into the whole service-led proposition behind it: content is something that Apple has, up to now, been able to say that it does better than any other Android tablet maker, but Amazon’s mix of its appstore apps, plus offerings of streamed content and more besides appears to be giving that idea a run for its money. That also indicates to developers that this is a potentially strong platform to develop for.
What remains to be seen is whether Apple has another “new launch” effect in the coming months, as a result of its news on Wednesday. It’s expected that Apple will reveal a new iPad and in the process could see the same effect on the tablet market that the introduction of the iPhone 4S had on its market share in smartphones last quarter — when, by most accounts, its share jumped quite significantly compared to those of other device makers.
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The issue of information privacy around free services like some mobile apps and social networks has often been met with a rebuttal from the other side of the argument: if the service is free, you the user are the product, and so you shouldn’t be surprised when your information is “sold” as part of that business model, the so-called “hidden cost” of free.
That can seem like an uncomfortable arrangement, however, so now some academics at Cambridge University in England are coming up with a way of fixing that, and are revealing some striking research about data collection in apps as part of their effort.
If you are among those concerned by how your information is shared, app stores are a ripe target. Focusing on the Android Market, the researchers devised an API to analyze free and paid apps in the store. Combing through more than 250,000 of them, they found that 73 percent of the apps were free, and that of those, 80 percent relied on targeted advertising as their main business model.
Within those apps using targeted ads, the Cambridge researchers found that 70 percent of them are collecting data that is not relevant to the apps themselves.
Free applications are far more popular in terms of downloads, they note: only 20 percent of paid apps get more than 100 downloads and only 0.2 percent of paid apps have more than 10,000 downloads, while 20 percent of free apps get 10,000 or more downloads. Still, not even paid apps are immune to superfluous data collection, it seems: 40 percent of them are collecting information that isn’t actually needed for the app to work.
Some examples: within the comics category, 35 percent of free applications requested access to a user’s location; in other cases, games collected a user’s phone number and contacts. Other “sensitive” data collected by apps that is not actually needed for the app itself to work included access to a user’s messages (e-mail/sms), contacts, calendar, phone number and IMEI.
The issue with blocking everything that is not needed, though, is that it would impact how developers could build a business on free apps. That’s where the Cambridge researchers a proposing a solution: separate app information from ad information, and make sure that the ad networks get only what they need to work, and nothing more. Their term for this is “decoupling”.
“Then the apps wouldn't use ads as an excuse to collect information,” explains Dr. Ilias Leontiadis, one of the researchers. “An app would collect just what it actually needs.” Taking the idea further, personal information that was not necessary for an ad to display would get automatically blocked.
The problem with the current model, he says, is that developers are responsible for the collection of everything, including location, demographics and the rest, which they subsequently forward to the advertising networks. “You don't know if the data is for the app or the advertiser, and you don't know how it would be used.”
Leotiadis says a service that separates the information could take the form of a filter that comes in an app itself, or potentially could be incorporated into a mobile platform to work by default: Leontiadis says he would prefer to see a platform provider offer this by default. In any case, he doesn’t think it would be realistic to ask developers to manage this themselves: “There are over 52,000 developers in the market but only eight big ad networks,” he says. “It's easier to control those networks than those developers.”
Notably, Cambridge’s investigation focused only on the Android Market. Leontiadis tells me that is because of how Google has set up permissions requests for users: these come up every time a user downloads an app — problem being that people tend to click OK without really looking at what they are agreeing to, he noted. Apple, in contrast, manages these independent of each download, and so would be more difficult to track.
[Image: kalbusta on Flickr]
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As you may know, we’re co-curating the London Web Summit on March 19, in The Brewery Venue, in London’s East End, already the single biggest cluster of tech startups in London. I’ll be working with Paddy Cosgrave and chairing the start up competition, which you can apply to enter here.
Niklas Zennstrom, one of Europe's top tech entrepreneurs and investor, has now confirmed he will be speaking and joins Google's Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora as one of a number of keynotes, including Shervin Pishevar, Lars Hinrichs, Jason Goldberg, Morten Lund, Ben Parr and Reshma Sohoni, among others.
LWS will demo 20 startups at the event with the winning startup sharing a prize package worth over £35,000 thanks to Orrick (£15k Legal Services), KPMG (£15k Advisory Services), HP (£4k hardware) and there is more to come.
There are now also four ways for early stage startups get over 60% off the ticket price. We’ll also have an exhibition area. We’re looking at over 500 attendees already signed up and over 100 investors.
But if you want to come free, here’s a way to do it:
We have 12 pairs (that’s 24 tickets total) for London Web Summit to give away.
The giveaway starts now and will end this Thursday 6pM CET. To enter, all you have to do is follow the steps below.
1) Become a fan of The London Web Summit on Facebook
2) Then do JUST ONE of the following:
- Retweet this post on Twitter (including the conference hashtag: #LWS )
- Or leave us a comment below telling us why you want to come, (and tick the box to post it to your Facebook stream).
The contest starts now and ends this Thursday, 6pm CET.
Make sure you only Tweet the message once, or you will be disqualified. We'll choose the winner at random and contact them by this weekend. Anyone in the world is eligible. Please note this giveaway only includes two tickets to the ceremony and after party, and does not include airfare or hotel.
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On the eve of what may well be the launch of a brand new iPad from Apple comes some new analysis from Forrester Research on the current competitive landscape in tablets — or lack thereof, as the case seems to be.
In short: despite the rush of tablets that have come out in the past year, many built on Google’s Android OS, Apple has managed to continue to run away with the competition, and how has 73 percent of the tablet market. No Android tablet maker, it notes, has more than a 5 percent share against it.
There is a caveat to Forrester’s research, however.
Forrester carried out its market research last September, before Amazon had started to sell its Kindle Fire tablet, and before Barnes & Noble had released its own tablet to compete against that. These devices have proven to be forces in the market, and are already having an impact on sales of another device in the food chain, e-readers. (More on that below.)
Both Amazon and Barnes & Noble also use Android — albeit versions that have been customized and are no longer on Google’s upgrade track (and service track) as a result.
In Forrester’s analysis, Samsung has a 5 percent share; Motorola 4 percent and Acer a 3 percent share. HP’s TouchPad, now discontinued, had a 6 percent share, but that was during that series of crazy fire sales when everyone suddenly rushed to buy one.
So how would those numbers look with the $199 Kindle Fire in the mix? Unfortunately we still don’t know exactly: the last numbers that the company released were during its last quarterly results at the end of January, but even these were not concrete. Amazon said that sales of its Kindle products, including the e-readers, had grown 177 percent over the last year and that the Kindle Fire was the bestselling among them.
But others have parsed those numbers and have come up with their own sales estimates.
Mobile analyst Chetan Sharma tells me that he believes that Amazon sold around four million Kindle Fire tablets in 2011. That would put it behind his estimates for Samsung, at six million, for the full year.
But in the holiday quarter alone (the only quarter when the Kindle Fire was actually shipping to customers), Sharma believes Amazon would have come in second place to Apple, which reported that it sold 15.43 million iPad tablets. Others have guessed that Amazon sold more like six million Kindle Fire tablets.
Sharma’s estimates are also bolstered by would-be customer sentiment: Forrester, in its research, did ask what tablet those who did not own one intended to buy, and in that Kindle also placed second after the iPad — although in general the proportions are more generous to non-iPad tablets than those attributed to actual market share:
If you trust Forrester’s guess on these things, the role that companies like Amazon will play in the tablet market will continue to grow because of two reasons: price and content.
Although many Android tablets, such as Samsung’s Galaxy line or Motorola’s Xoom, have been launched with media services in an attempt to punch at the same weight as Apple, it seems that the offerings are not good enough to justify the prices, which have been on par with Apple’s iPad.
Amazon has made content a focus of its tablet, too, but at a much lower price point. That’s made the whole product significantly more attractive. Quoted in Bloomberg, Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps notes: "Tablets are about services. That is where Amazon has succeeded where others have failed."
E-reader effect. Amazon’s Kindle Fire might not yet be denting Apple’s share by too much, but one area where it seems to be having more of an impact is on e-readers. Some research from DigiTimes estimates that shipments of pure-play e-reading devices will be down to only two million units this quarter, compared with nine million in the same quarter a year ago. It says this is down to the “substitution” effect of people opting for products like the Kindle Fire instead.
That kind of cannibalization, to be honest, seems only to spell good news for Apple, as it means that more people are looking for devices that are bigger than smartphones, yet still portable, but are loaded up with more features than an e-reader: that’s a market where Apple has consistently set the bar.
It’s still a market that is wide open for change: Forrester believes that by 2016, only about one-third of U.S. adults will own an iPad, and that’s before even considering what might happen in other markets.
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