Ravel Labs’s Social Media App Makes Connection Fun and Easy

Gary Schofield

With more than two decades of experience working with startups in Silicon Valley, Gary Schofield has led and turned-around several companies to achieve successful exits, including mobile banking company Mobile Money Ventures, which was sold to Intuit Inc., as well as mobile advertising company Amobee Media, which was sold to Singtel for $321 million. Currently, Gary Schofield is the CEO and founder of Ravel Labs.

Previously known as UnRavel, Ravel Labs has created a mobile social-trivia game to help people get to know their friends and the people around them better. For a generation that tends to work long hours, spend a lot of time on their phones, and struggle to connect with people socially, the Ravel Labs app creates a fun opportunity to connect without the difficulty and pressure of some of the online dating apps that are currently on the market.

A player can create a profile with up to 30 levels. The levels contain photos that can be unlocked by guessing the correct answers to questions the player chooses. Then players can explore other users’ profiles, trying to guess their answers to learn more about them and see more photos. When two users “unravel” each other, they can chat within the app in real time.

Amobee Sees Marketing Success with Mike’s Hard Lemonade

Amobee
Image: amobee.com

Gary Schofield has been involved in several Silicon Valley startups over the past 20 years and is currently the founder and CEO of Ravel Labs. During his time as CEO of Amobee Media, Gary Schofield helped gain and maintain major investors for the company, including Accel Partners and Sequoia, before he successfully sold the company to Singtel for $321 million.

Amobee is a global mobile advertising company that helps fortune 500 clients create compelling advertising campaigns across all mobile devices.

Startups and Semiconductors: A Brief History of Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley
Image: netvalley.com

Business executive Gary Schofield has worked for over two decades in the communications industry with a focus on online and mobile markets. With extensive operational and management experience, Gary Schofield has been instrumental in the development of numerous successful tech company startups in and around Silicon Valley, including Ravel Labs.

Electronics and technology hotspot Silicon Valley is located in the northern portion of Santa Clara County in San Francisco’s Bay Area. The nickname was coined by journalist Don Hoefler in a 1971 series of articles in Electronic News, taking as inspiration the base material of semiconductor chips. The area has been known as a leader in the development of cutting-edge technology since the middle of the last century, when engineers and scientists came together in the midst of cultural renaissance and the crucible of Cold War competition.

The result was an atmosphere of open-mindedness and risk-taking, where failure was accepted as a natural part of innovation. Today, the Silicon Valley area receives more than half of all venture capital funding in the United States, as the development of life-changing technology continues.

Social Discovery Explained

Gary Schofield

A Silicon Valley entrepreneur with experience at a number of successful startup companies in the area, Gary Schofield is the founder and chief executive officer of Ravel Labs. As the head of the social discovery mobile app developer, Gary Schofield draws upon a background in the gaming sector to deliver a one-of-a-kind social discovery experience.

Characterized by the identification of information about things, people, or places, social discovery has emerged as one of the most prominent functions of mobile apps in recent years. Social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and Twitter facilitate social discovery in a wide variety of areas. Some of the most innovative new technologies involve maximizing the efficiency and relevancy of the social discovery process.

Unlike years past, when people received information on a given product from official sources in a top-down manner, social discovery enables users to access reviews, instructions, and tips from each other. Social discovery also plays a central role in dating and event apps, which have a tangible impact on people’s lives. As technology improves developers’ ability to match content with user interests, social discovery will continue to grow as a means of information sharing.

UnRavel App Provides a Fun Way to Meet and Date

UnRavel App
Image: iTunes

With over two decades in the tech, marketing, management, and sales fields, Gary Schofield has been at the helm of several startups and large companies, including Digital Chocolate, Mobile Money Ventures, and Amobee Media Systems, which he sold for $321 million. Currently, Gary Schofield is the CEO of tech startup UnRavel, a company he founded.

UnRavel is a social media app designed in part to address the millennial generation’s desire for connection within increasingly busy and tech-filled lives. Current popular apps for dating or meeting people are either too time-consuming or too disconnected, and UnRavel provides an alternative that’s fun and casual but adds a layer of depth. UnRavel provides a game-like platform on which participants use trivia questions about each other. This makes it easier to get to know friends better and quickly learn interesting facts about people the users might want to meet or date.

Users create a profile with a number of levels that each contain a different photo and a question about themselves. Matched users can see the question and guess the answer. If they get it right, the photo is revealed. When people are engaging with each other’s profiles, they can also chat within the app.

The startup is supported by top venture capital firms Redpoint and Benchmark.

Three Upcoming Sources of Startup Capital

Silicon Valley

 

The chief executive and founder of UnRavel, Gary Schofield has worked with startups in Silicon Valley for over two decades. Experienced in raising capital, Gary Schofield helped companies such as Amobee Media Systems and Mobile Money Ventures raise capital for operations.

Before, traditional sources of capital for your business were limited to the local bank, family, friends, and angel investors. Today, businesses have a wider pool of options to raise capital for growth. Here are some other options to consider:

1) Private company loans
More and more companies are getting into the business of funding startups. Staples, Inc. crossed the $1 million mark for funding small businesses in 2015 a little before Goldman Sachs announced it would begin disbursing loans to startups.

2) Grants and prizes
In a bid to win the hearts of small business owners, organizations are offering cash grants and prizes to businesses. In 2015, Miller Beer’s campaign dubbed Tap the Future gave away $100,000 to a lucky winner while Mission Main Street by Chase gave out $100,000 grants to businesses.

3) Smart leases
Rather than buying fixed assets, lease them to save on working capital. Work your lease agreement so as to ensure the money you are saving is enough to cover your business inventory.

What to Consider Before Getting Into a Business Partnership

Vodafone
Image: vodafone.com

Having worked with leading technology companies that include IBM and Oracle, Gary Schofield moved to Silicon Valley to work with startups in the mobile money and communications industries. As COO of Ambobee Media Systems, Gary Schofield helped the company forge strategic partnerships with big companies such as Cisco and Vodafone.

Partnerships are business structures where two or more parties do business together. All the partners contribute to all or specific aspects of the joint business in the form of money, labor, or property, and in return, they get a share of the profits generated.

Before setting up a partnership, it is absolutely vital that a number of issues are discussed to get to know more about each other and the way the business model will operate. These issues include: the contributions between the partners, duties of each partner, their roles in signing and authorizing binding business contracts, how profits and losses will be shared, and the procedure to follow in case of disputes, when adding or expelling a partner, and when dissolving the partnership.

What is agreed upon should be put down in a partnership agreement, which is legally binding before commencing business together.

Mobile Money Ventures – A Startup Success Story

Mobile Money Ventures
Image: linkedin,com

Having worked at both well-established and newly incorporated companies, Gary Schofield is a tech-industry executive with more than 20 years of experience. One such company was Mobile Money Ventures LLC, which Gary Schofield led through acquisition by a larger company.

Mobile Money Ventures LLC was started as a joint venture between Citi and SK Telecom. The endeavor sought to develop a mobile financial service that was more than a simple payment or invoicing system. Mobile Money Ventures services included stock trading, banking, budgeting, and payment services all in a secure environment. Mobile Money Ventures uses two factor authentication and 128-bit encryption to protect its user’s accounts and data, as 128-bit encryption is one of the most secure forms of encryption.

Mobile Money Ventures’ services are used worldwide, launching in the Chinese markets in 2009. Purchased by Intuit in 2011, the company now operates as a wholly owned subsidiary. As such, Mobile Money Ventures is used by 320 US banks and has more than 400,000 customers.

Amobee – Award-Winning Digital Advertising Strategies

Amobee
Image: amobee.com

Possessing more than two decades of experience, Gary Schofield has worked at tech-industry giants like IBM and Oracle and startups such as Unravel and Mobile Money Ventures. Gary Schofield also has served as CEO of Amobee.

Amobee is a digital marketing technology firm dedicated to developing data-based marketing solutions for brands and agencies. Amobee achieves this by using data from a variety of digital platforms to form a profile of the brand’s or the agency’s target audience. Amobee tracks the consumption habits and reactions of the target audience, thereby producing data that is highly relevant to clients’ marketing practices.

Amobee won the OMMA Gold and OMMA Member’s Choice awards in 2014. Begun in 2004, the OMMA awards recognize firms that push the boundaries of digital advertising. Amobee won OMMA awards for its work for Ford, in which the company created an interactive ad that allowed consumers to customize and load the truck. This campaign had between two to four times the branding effects of other campaigns.

Push Notifications in Marketing

Push Notifications
Image: blogs.oracle.com

With more than two decades of experience in the sales and marketing profession, Gary Schofield has watched mobile marketing evolve from just another aspect of reaching a consumer to the essential element of a marketing plan. With leadership experience at companies like Amobee, Digital Chocolate, Mobile Money Ventures, and UnRavel, Gary Schofield understands the importance of mobile marketing for influencing consumers.

One component of mobile marketing is push notifications. Push notifications allow an app to send the user information regardless of whether the user has that app open on a device. When the user taps the notification, he or she is directed to the app to get more detail.

Examples of push notifications include reminders of appointments or prescription refills, notifications of updates to the app in order to keep it functional, and emergency alerts notifying the user of home alarm system activity or suspected bank account fraud. Used as an advertising tool, push notifications aim to keep users engaged with their app in order to keep the app relevant and simultaneously their activity.