ExchangeWire Research's head of analysis Rebecca Muir draws up a definitive list of which companies will make waves in the ad tech and martech sectors, as well as the market dynamics that will lead to their increasing influence in 2015, focusing on: Ecommerce; Transparency; Big Data, and mobile.  

Following on from ExchangeWire Research’s recent article Where the Money will Flow in 2015?, which summarised ad tech and martech predictions for 2015, this article draws from the numerous lists of the top companies to watch out for in the next 12 months, and provides a summary of the most popular mentions and why companies in these sectors are set to boom in 2015.

Ecommerce

Ecommerce refers to the trading of products or services using computer networks, such as the Internet. According to Retail Researche-commerce is the fastest growing retail market in Europe, with sales in the UK, Germany, France, Sweden, The Netherlands, Italy, Poland and Spain expected to reach a combined total of £111.2bn in 2014 (€155.3 bn or $212.8 bn). Therefore, it is no wonder that many entrepreneurs are setting their sights on being the next big thing in e-commerce. Here’s a breakdown of a few companies which could potentially revolutionise the way we shop online and offline.

Yoyo - justyoyo.com

Founded in 2013, raised $5m

Yoyo is creating a better customer experience via an app that simplifies payment and loyalty transactions. Consumers download the Yoyo mobile app on their smartphone, which allows them to forget about cash, credit cards, loyalty cards and paper vouchers when making purchases. For the retailer, Yoyo provides a marketing platform that delivers insights and tools to target customers with relevant rewards and offers.

Blippar - blippar.com

Founded 2011, funding undisclosed.

Blippar invites brands to Engage with their consumers for longer by attracting, retaining and engaging with consumers through an immersive experience. Through one app, Blippar becomes the lens through which the real world can be spontaneously 'unlocked' and converted into content-rich, interactive experiences such as exclusive content, playing a game, buying a product or finding a location.

Spring - spring.io

Founded 2014, raised, $7.5m

Spring helps development teams everywhere build simple, portable, fast and flexible JVM-based systems and applications. Spring has multiple “projects” From configuration to security, web apps to big data – whatever the infrastructure needs of your application may be, there is a Spring Project to help you build it. Spring is open-source, built for modern applications and comes with a vast array of supporting documentation making it much more accessible than more traditional rivals.

Stripe - stripe.com

Founded 2010, $190m raised

Stripe is a developer-friendly way to accept payments online and in mobile apps. Stripe integrates via online merchants’ Checkout, which means Stripe takes care of building forms, validating input, and securing your customers' card data. As with Spring, because Stripe was built for the web, it comes with a suite of APIs making integration quick and easy.

Poynt - getpoynt.com

Founded 2013, funding undisclosed

Poynt was founded on the belief that all merchants should have access to innovative technology without compromising on security or user experience. Poynt sets out to fix broken commerce infrastructure by bringing developers, distributors and merchants together on an open platform running on top of a smart, multi-purpose device.

The Poynt Smart Terminal is a future-proof device that accepts magnetic stripe, EMV (also known as chip cards), NFC, Bluetooth and QR code payment technologies.

What all these companies have in common is that they embrace the opportunity which has arisen from consumers’ changing behaviour, shifting from traditional payment methods and shopping patterns. They have created innovative ways for consumers to streamline their commerce practices in a safe, secure business focussed manner.

Big Data

Big data has come a long way since we first started hearing the phrase regularly in 2011. The focus today is on creating insight from big data which leads to action and improvement in performance.

Datasift - datasift.com

Founded 2010, raised $77.9m

DataSift was founded by Nick Halstead to help organisations improve their understanding and use of social media. DataSift is focused on producing state-of-the-art, data-filtering technology and driving innovation in big data.

The DataSift platform helps companies manage Social Media and capitalise on the insights to be found within the data. Data comes in the form of the customer voice, competitor activities and the preferences of the marketplace. A single API and unified data format across the world’s social networks, news and other data sources brings efficiencies and strengthens the validity of findings.

Tamr - tamr.com

Founded 2013, raised $16m

Tamr was designed to tackle the challenge of connecting and enriching diverse data at scale, quickly and cost effectively. Tamr makes data source connectivity and enrichment fast, cost-effective, scalable and accessible to the entire enterprise.

Advanced algorithms automatically perform most of the work—often accomplishing over 90% of the task without human intervention. When human intervention is necessary, Tamr generates questions for data experts, aggregates responses and feeds them back into the system. This feedback enables Tamr to continuously improve its accuracy and speed.

Users can explore all the connected sources in the data inventory, and identify knowledgeable experts in the expert directory. RESTful APIs make it easy to tie Tamr into an existing data infrastructure, instantly increasing its value as all of the connected and enriched sources are made available to analytical tools and users.

Sociomantic from Dunnhumby - sociomantic.com

Founded 2009, acquired by dunnhumby 2014

Sociomantic is about smarter, easier, more effective display advertising. The company helps the world’s largest online marketers drive incremental sales at scale, delivering real-time results with full transparency. What makes Sociomantic interesting in 2015 is the powerful opportunity which has been created through the dunnhumby acquisition which means that Sociomantic’s cutting-edge digital technology is now paired with dunnhumby’s insight on more than 660 million shoppers around the world which positions the company well to lead the revolution in personalised advertising.

DataRPM - datarpm.com

Founded 2012, raised $5.9m

DataRPM is the fastest, easiest, and most affordable solution for smart machine analytics. Smart data modelling automatically models your data, so you can explore it sooner.

Just talk to your data, and get visually intuitive answers - instantly! Just pick your data sources and our smart data modelling automatically models the data for you. DataRPM creates smart data lakes from your data sources, identifies entities and relationships, and suggests the right data models without human intervention.

The really innovative thing about DataRPM is that you can ask your data a question using natural language and discover new answers in a fraction of the time that it used to take.

Privacy and Fraud

Early indications from ExchangeWire Research’s recent pre-launch survey show that privacy and fighting fraud are high priority for marketers in 2015. This is supported by recent findings from eMarketer. So it’s no surprise that companies which specialise in privacy and fraud protection have come to our attention.

Digital Shadows - digitalshadows.com

Founded 2011, funding undiscolsed

Social media, cloud services and mobile devices are revolutionising the way organisations do business. But with this comes the risk of unwelcome online exposure.

Perimeter walls that once protected an organisation’s sensitive data cannot cope with the ever-expanding trail of information exposed on the Internet by its employees, suppliers and partners.

This is the digital shadow: unintentionally-exposed personal, technical or organisational information that leaves your business vulnerable. Information that is confidential, sensitive or proprietary.  Information that helps hostile groups find weak points and launch targeted cyber attacks.

Information that can seriously damage your brand. Information that can put your key employees at risk. Digital Shadow’s cyber security services are founded on a proprietary data analysis system that continually monitors tens of millions of data sources to create an up-to-the-minute "hacker's eye view" of an organisation and the risks which need to be mitigated. Employing advanced natural language processing, the Digital Shadow system scans over 80 million open information sources across the visible and dark web in 26 languages in near-real-time.

Trustev - trustev.com

Founded 2013, raised $3.8m

Trustev is a leader in anti-fraud “data fingerprinting” that stops fraud and allows real customers to buy. Trustev scans online transactions in real time and use this data fingerprinting to decide if they are genuine or not. By pattern-matching hundreds of datapoints, Trustev can lower e-commerce fraud to near-zero levels and boost sales, by making sure merchants don't accidentally turn away real customers. Install Trustev on your site and the software will analyse your visitors. When someone checks out, a "digital fingerprint" is created and Trustev will tell you whether that person is real or a fraudster.

Trustev is also the only anti-fraud platform with Smart Blacklisting™ technology. Fraudsters rapidly change some of their attributes to avoid detection, but it is hard to change all of them. Smart Blacklisting compares new transaction fingerprints with older, fraudulent ones, so if a sufficient number of datapoint patterns overlap to form a partial match, the full, newer fingerprint can be ‘re-blacklisted’ as fraudulent too. Because Trustev protects many retailers who are transacting billions of dollars, the platform is continually improving by observing the latest fraud trends and fingerprints. The benefits of this continual optimisation flows through to their customers, to reduce fraud to near-zero levels.

Cyber Dust - cyberdust.com

Founded 2014, undisclosed funding

Cyber Dust is a free service and pledges that it always will be. It allows users to send fully encrypted messages which self destruct and never reach a hard drive. Cyber Dust also provides other security services such as notifying users when a screenshot is taken. Still in its infancy, Cyber Dust reflects users increasing concerns over privacy and hacking.

Intelworks - intelworks.com

Founded 2014, raised $175k

Intelworks provides cyber threat intelligence technology allowing organisations to take control of the reality of cyber threats and power IT security defences accordingly. Intelworks allows users to consolidate, analyse, integrate and collaborate on intelligence from multiple sources. Intelworks’ Beta program launches next month. Intelworks aims to update the cyber threat intelligence industry by moving beyond historical threat analysis in order to be able to counter the constant innovation of adversaries and allow organisations to continually expand their IT environment without increasing the level of risk they expose themselves to.

Mobile

SwiftKey - swiftkey.com/en

Founded 2008, raised $21.6m

SwiftKey's mission is to build technology that makes it easy for everyone to create and communicate on mobile. Best known for smart SwiftKey Keyboard apps which learn from users’ behaviour to make typing on touchscreens faster and easier. SwiftKey Keyboard for Android is Google Play's most popular keyboard app, topping the global best-seller list in 2012 and 2013.

SwiftKey Keyboard for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch had more than a million downloads in its first day of launching on the App Store, hitting No 1 in the US and UK free charts. It follows the earlier success of Note, a note-taking application for iPhone and iPad. SwiftKey learns your writing style to suggest your next word. Enter a whole word with a single tap, instead of typing letter by letter.

Xiaomi - mi.com

Founded 2010, raised $1.4bn

The world's third-largest smartphone distributor behind Samsung and Apple, selling over 60 million smartphones in 2014. Xiaomi employs a strategy that is very unlike other smartphone makers such as Samsung and Apple. Lei Jun, Xiaomi CEO, said that the company prices the phone almost at bill-of-material prices.

To profit from the narrow margin, Xiaomi sells a model for up to 18 months instead of the short 6 months used by Samsung to profit from the fall in the costs of components that occurs over time.

To further reduce overhead costs, Xiaomi does not own a single physical store and instead sells exclusively from its own online store. It also did away with traditional advertising and relies on social networking services as well as its own customers to help advertise its products. Since the companies started selling smartphones in 2011, they have steadily gained market share and expanded the territories they operate in, now serving Turkey and Hungary, there are rumours that the company will continue it’s march into western Europe.

DWNLD - dwnld.me

Founded 2014, raised $2m

Based on the idea that creating a mobile app should be just as easy as using a mobile app DWNLD have set out to enable anyone to transform their web content into a sleek, personalised native app and submit it to the app stores within minutes. DWNLD offers users the choice between importing their own online content or using DWNLD’s CMS to create content exclusively for the app you’re creating.

There are a number of themes to choose from and users can customise the appearance of the app too. DWNLD then submits your app to the app stores. Offering integrations with various content sources, media players and social feeds the options for app creation are vast with DWNLD. All code-free meaning DWNLD can be used by non-technical folks as well as developers.

Adjust - adjust.com

Founded 2012, raised $11.9m

For too long the mobile industry has, at best, provided ‘rubbish in rubbish out’ data feedback to advertisers. Adjust recognised this and set about building a better way. Adjust’s solutions are based on a deep understanding of not only what is needed for an advertiser or agency to make an informed decision but also the technical requirements needed to deliver a robust analysis - all in real time.

Offering attribution, analytics and store stats Adjust promises to track marketing performance - across all sources, match users to campaigns and understand how they engage with a brand’s app and generate value. Using a combination of statistical matching, privacy-compliant device IDs, and store APIs, Adjust can immediately attribute incoming users to the sources they came from. As with many of the companies mentioned in this article the Adjust SDK is fully open source.

This makes it easy to integrate and provides complete transparency to its inner workings. By avoiding precompiled dependencies, it also has a smaller footprint than any compiled SDK.

Qriously - qriously.com

Founded 2010, raised $5.1m

Qriously’s mission is to create a more meaningful mobile advertising experience for both consumer and advertiser. Qriously define their product offering as Opinion Targeting essentially, they serve question based ads which allows brands to find consumers who need to see their ads? AdVox allows consumers, for the first time, to self-target by answering questions that solicit their opinions.

Once the link between consumer intent and relevant mobile ad is made, AdVox re-targets consumers across brand safe mobile apps to affect brand attributes, all the while respecting consumer privacy.

With access to over 500 million people, the scale of research projects which can be undertaken with Qriously is truly massive. The Qriously platform is real-time which means no waiting for data. Posing the questions on mobile devices means answers can be mapped to location. For instance, which parts of a city suffer from the most noise pollution.

What’s needed for a revolution?

The companies highlighted in this article have the potential to revolutionise their industries. Each of these companies are tackling a challenge faced by either marketers, developers or consumers. In order for this revolution to take place organisations will need executive support as some of the changes heading to market require significant changes to infrastructure. The industry will look to these companies to provide education and early adopters will need to provide shining examples of success.