Technology

Following the success of the live mobile game show HQ Trivia, a team of serial entrepreneurs have begun testing the market to see if another game show concept can work, too. Their new game show-inspired app, Gravy, is meant to be a riff on the &Price is Right& combined with a QVC-style shopping experience. That is, the &contestants& compete for discounts of 30 to 70 percent off the products advertised, with a portion of the proceeds going to charity. In addition, through a side game, users can guess when the product & whose quantities are unknown & will sell out and at what price. Those who guess closest win a cash prize.

The startup was created by Mark McGuire, Brian Wiegand, and Craig Andler & the founding team behind Jellyfish.com, an older social shopping network that was acquired by Microsoft back in 2007, to help create Bing Shopping. They&ve also paired up on other projects, including NameProtect (before Jellyfish), printable coupons resource Hopster, social network Nextt, and e-commerce subscription retail site, Alice.com. These have eitherexitedorshut downor both.

The teamefforts imply a clear passion for working with brands, but getting consumers to connect with brands in new ways is far more difficult, as their track record shows.

Thatwhy they&re now trying Gravy.

The hope is that the excitement around seeing the product unveiled nightly & and knowing you&ll get a big discount if you buy & will become an entirely new ad unit of sorts, while keeping players engaged in a game-show like experience.

&One of the challenges with millennials is their short attention spans, and they don&t respond well to interruptive advertising,& explains Wiegand, of why the team wanted to build this startup. &I don&t think anyonereally mastered how to monetize live video. So we came up with this opportunity to create this new ad unit where brands could tell their story, and & for seven or eight or nine minutes & create a live shopping event where millennials can tune in and hear that story but in a fun, gamified kind of manner,& he says.

Herehow Gravy works. Every night, at 8:30 PM ET in the Gravy iOS app, a live host will unveil the product users can buy. Currently, therea rotating selection of hosts who work on a per-show contract basis, usually local comedians & not brand reps.

Players are not told how many items are available, but ittypically anywhere from two to twenty.

Then the price starts to drop. If you buy early, you&ll have a chance to snag it at a slight discount. But the longer you wait, the higher the percentage off will become. However, you don&t know who else could snatch it up first and when. If you wait too long, the product will sell out.

Meanwhile, if you&re not interested in the product itself, you can guess when you expect it to sell out (meaning, at which price.) Those ten or so closest will receive a small cash prize & a split of maybe $200 or $300, with first place receiving the largest chunk.

At least 20 percent of sales are given away to charity & a nod, I suppose, to millennials& interest in do-gooder style companies. But ultimately, that decision that has more to do with the fact that Gravy doesn&t aim to be a retailer & itnot another deal-of-the-day destination like Woot!, despite the similarities around generating product excitement.

Instead, it expects brands to donate products and pay a fee for the &advertising opportunity& Gravy offers.

Brands will like Gravy because they get millennials& attention for seven minutes or more, Wiegand says. &They love the engagement. Ita highly engaged audience…I have a chance to buy the products, so I&m heavily engaged in thinking about that product. The recall, memorability, and all of the subsequent buzz & tweeting and all the social media that gets created because of that & is great,& he adds.

However, none of this is proven out yet & Gravy is just a couple of weeks old.

So far, around 50 percent of the products it has featured have actually been donated by brands, including 23andMe, 3D Doodler, Tapplock, and others. The rest have been subsidized by Gravy, including the bigger draws & like a DJI drone, for example.

Itnot yet charging for the ad opportunity, either, as ithoping to grow the audience first.

The company says thatalready underway. After alerting friends and family to the applaunch, the games are seeing 600+ players nightly, Wiegand claims, and is growing its audience 15 percent week-over-week. Around half of those who signed up to play are returning to watch around three shows per week, he says.

While the early numbers are promising if true, and itclear the team likes to work in the general space of connecting brands with consumers, Gravy still feels & like much of what the founders have created before & designed primarily with the needs of brands in mind, before that of consumers.

A &Price is Right&-style app would be a lot of fun, but this isn&t it & it&s, at the end of the day, an invitation to watch an ad and shop at a discount. Thatnot something consumers may want to do every day, long-term & even if you try to woo them with a small cash prize won through a guessing game.

And like Trivia HQ , which has dropped from a top 20 app to the 140(by App Store overall rank, the shine may eventually wear off for Gravy, too. Especially because itnot primarily a game & and millennials, as fickle and short attention-spanned as they may be (really the generation that binges entire TV seasons in a few days), will know it.

Wiegand isn&t concerned, though.

He says he gets bored with trivia apps in a few weeks, but Gravy is different.

&I always shop and I always like a deal. The deal industry and the shopping industry are so much larger than the trivia space,& Wiegand insists. &And the thrill of seeing a product that you like going down into the sixties and seventies percent off is unbelievably thrilling,& he enthuses. &We are able to feature things that have the best price on the planet of first-run products…it creates this heart-pounding, exhilarating and experience like, ‘Should I buy Oh my God, look at this price. I can&t turn it down,'& he says.

The company raised $2.1 million in seed funding from a range of investors, including the founders at the turn of the year. Around eighty percent was outside capital, led by New Capital. The under-20 person team is based in both Madison and Minneapolis.

Gravy is on the App Store here.

Mobility is one of the most rapidly advancing technologies going, and we&re searching for the rising stars of early-stage mobility startups to apply as a TC Top Pick for Disrupt San Francisco 2018 on September 5-7 at Moscone Center West. Ita competitive application process, but if TechCrunch editors designate your company as a Top Pick, you get to exhibit for free in Startup Alley — the show floor and heartbeat of every Disrupt event. Besides, who doesn&t love free

Mobile tech is on the cusp of a revolution, and we&re interested in startups focused on everything it entails — autonomous vehicles, sensors, drones, security — or something else altogether. Flying cars, anyone Exhibiting in Startup Alley will expose your startup to more than 10,000 attendees, including potential investors, customers, partners and more than 400 media outlets.

Herehow the TC Top Pick process works. First things first: apply now. Our expert team of editors will review each application and choose only five mobility startups as TC Top Picks. They also will select five startups for each of the following tech categories: AI, AR/VR, Blockchain, Biotech, Fintech, Gaming, Healthtech, Privacy/Security, Space, Retail or Robotics. A total 60 companies will exhibit in Startup Alley as a TC Top Pick.

If your mobility startup makes the cut, you receive a free Startup Alley Exhibitor Package, which includes a one-day exhibit space in Startup Alley, three founder passes good for all three days of the show, use of CrunchMatch — our investor-to-startup matching platform — and access to the event press list.

In addition to all the other potential media opportunities, TC Top Picks also get a three-minute interview on the Showcase Stage with a writer — and we&ll share the heck out of that video across our social media platforms. Thatpromotional gold right there, folks.

And who knows As a Startup Alley exhibitor, your company might even get selected as the Startup Battlefield Wildcard — if they do, you get to compete in Startup Battlefield for a shot at the $100,000 prize.

Disrupt San Francisco 2018 takes place on September 5-7. Don&t miss your opportunity to exhibit in Startup Alley for free. The TC Top Pick deadline is June 29, and we have special offers for early applicants. Does your startup have what it takes to be one of the five mobility TC Top Picks Apply today to find out.

As HTC gears up for a stateside launch of their Vive Focus standalone headset, the company announced a number of changes that they&re bringing to the device currently available in China.

The company has long fancied itself the &premium& brand of VR, but at its annual developer conference it was tasked with showing off features that showed the company had more to offer than middle-of-the-road products with premium prices.

Some of the most notable announcements were that the device would be gaining phone integration with HTC devices, beginning with the companynew U12+ smartphone, which will basically allow users to check out text messages and notifications without removing the headset. The feature seems to be a junior version of functionality available on the companyPC-based Vive headset, which can deliver similar notifications but can do so from any Android or iOS device while also allowing users to send messages as well on certain devices.

In addition to the phone stuff, HTC talked about a lot of new content partnerships, but also a hardware partnership with Seagate that will be making an odd little device add-on that doubles the Vive Focus battery life and adds additional memory as well. The company has spent a good deal of energy building out options for cash-laden VR fans to buy better experiences, whether this market is as ripe for a device powered by a smartphone chipset is a little dubious though.

HTCfirst virtual reality product, the Vive, arrived first to market with a splash of enthusiasm that made them the VR company du jour. But they have certainly had trouble maintaining that enthusiasm in Western markets as the field has gotten more crowded with competitors that are perhaps less sensitive to hardware margins than HTC. This month, Lenovo released the $399 Mirage Solo, a headset specced fairly comparably to the Vive Focus, but based on GoogleDaydream platform, while Oculus released a more basic, but still very capable, headset called Oculus Go for just $199.

The blue Vive Focus headset has yet to crack into consumer markets in the West, but as the company began shipping dev kits to developers in the past several weeks, itclear that an announcement is probably around the corner.