ModCart (2004-Present)

Wireless In-Store Advertising Medium (Patent #7356357)

After a career of advertising service, and 'work-for-hire' business models, I was eager to spend some time investing in, and developing products of my own. One of the companies I co-founded in response was Modstream.

At Modstream my business partner, Fred Macdonald, and I conceived a rational new approach to in-store advertising. We then researched, designed, and acquired funding for this first product, and negotiated a joint venture with the country's largest retail equipment manufacturer.

The premise is that as advertsing has shifted to requiring a higher degree of relevance, "where" advertising is displayed is just as, if not more, important that what's being said.

ModCart was our answer to that condition- a wireless device that receives live text messaging from retailers and advertisers which is displayed between shoppers' hands, while they are walking store aisles.

Recently patented (view patent), ModCart has been recognized as a significant improvement over some of the "TV Screen-in-Aisle" approaches which require shoppers to stop what they're doing (shopping) to watch TV- something consumers have found distasteful. Whereas Modcart travels with consumers through the store.

In researching the category we discovered a few companies that had tried on-cart approaches. But virtually each of these companies critically failed in a couple key areas: in their eagerness to load the devices with functionality, they created overly complicated systems that are cumbersome to operate,

are bulky and ugly, require user interaction before providing value, are - critically -very delicate (their devices are essentially laptops... on shopping carts... that are meant to slam into each other every day... uh huh), that further can't go outside to, say, your car in the parking lot, and -the power consumption of such overly engineered systems require that their batteries be recharged every day, sometimes more often - something that cannot happen in a real-world store environment. Lastly their support systems cost in the hundreds of thousands to install - per store - and over $800 per cart on top of that.

ModCart is passive, and provides "glance-able" content. Push the cart and receive valuable messaging. On a personal note, my aim was to ensure that users could ignore ModCart if they so desired. I would hate it if my shopping cart annoyingly tried to get my attention when I just wanted to run through the store. Or if it were bulky and awkward. As we have deployed the system, this passivity has turned out to be a critical factor for consumers. Because ModCart is so simple, it is strong- fewer parts to break, more room for structural strengthening and weatherproofing - to wit, ModCart can live happily in the parking lot . Where competitors have to recharge batteries every day, ModCart's batteries last for 5 years without ever needing recharging.

Finally, ModCart costs a small fraction of what it's competition charges.

In our first full-store installations retailers reported a whopping 36% sales lift in the items advertised on the devices. We have since hired an executive team to grow the business, and the team has raised VC capital to do so.

www.modstream.com