ChargeBox has launched a campaign on CrowdCube to help it stay ahead of the competition.

The company, which produces and installs smartphone and tablet charging stations in public and semi-public places, wants to boost its sales and marketing efforts, plus inject some money into development of the next-generation devices.

The company wants to make free charging of devices as prevalent as free Wi-Fi in cafes, restaurants, shopping centres and other places as consumers increasingly rely on their smartphones for everything in life.

ChargeBox was launched ten years ago, but other competitors have now popped up in the market, making it a hard industry to crack.

“Loved by end-users who frequently call ChargeBox a #lifesaver, we have provided over 5 million charges so far this year, and we have built (or have in production) over 2,000 machines,” the company explained.

“Our clients include well-known organisations who wish to provide the best customer experience to their visitors and encourage smartphone use, which is highly correlated with increased spending.”

The company has drummed up a fair amount of revenue from rentals, service contracts, short term event rental, a legacy vending business, and international license and software maintenance fees. It has two patents to protect its designed, but is now seeking the next big thing to differentiate its products.

To help take a bigger share of the market, ChargeBox will be spending the £500,000 it hopes to raise on Crowdcube on expanding the sales team, marketing and PR including events, exhibitions and the employment of PR consultants, R&D expenditure, IT development and to a lesser extent working capital.

ChargeBox is offering 7.2 per cent equity to investors and at the time of writing, was 40 per cent of the way through its funding cycle with 18 days to go until the campaign ends.

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If you’re not a huge fan of Uber, or don’t really like using Addison Lee every time you want to catch a cab, Kabbee allows you to compare the prices of taxis in your area, helping you make a more educated decision on which company to use.

The company has been running since 2011, but it now wants to expand outside of just London and airports to become a nationwide cab comparison engine.

It’s simply more than a comparison engine for consumers though – it’s also designed to help private taxi firms market themselves to their customers, without the big outlay of advertising.

“In London 62,000 cars are spread across 3000 fleets (http://bit.ly/1M9TFYs). In the rest of England & Wales, fragmentation is even more severe with 108,000 cars spread across 11,800 fleets,” Kabbee explained. “Fragmentation means small fleets are unable to invest in marketing and technology and thereby grow their business and coverage. Drivers sent on long journeys almost always return empty.”

It uses similar models to hotel booking and insurance industries, where the industries aren’t particularly suited to big advertising or marketing campaigns.

“Aggregation provides the opportunity for fleets to benefit from marketplace dynamics, drivers to reduce dead mileage and customers to get good service and value wherever they are,” the company said.

Kabbee’s technology brings together value for money for customers, while also meaning cab drivers can ick up their next job where they last had a drop off, helping drivers claw back that wasted mileage.

Kabbee is appealing for £1m funding from investors on Crowdcube, with which it plans to boost profits in London by redeveloping the iPhone app and launching an Android app, add new features to the entire platform, including the taxi company-facing part and build the demand for a cab comparison app nationwide.

It wil introduce new loyalty features and concentrate its marketing strategy on low spend, but high impact ideas.

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Pimoroni not only develops accessories for the Reaspberry Pi computer, but also sells a range of other ‘maker’ accessories through its online portal of goodies.

The company was launched alongside its Pibow case for the teeny tiny computer, followed by the Picade – an arcade machine for the Raspberry Pi which launched a campaign on Kickstarter a couple of years ago.

It then launched a Maker store, offering more than 1000 products for the Raspberry Pi, which to date, has had more than 53,000 orders.

The company is now seeking more funding to support its entire business and help it buid its portfolio of even more cool add-ons.

“The way we approach our products is a mixture of graphic design, electronics, software support, and user experience,” Pimoroni said. “Traditionally hobbyist electronics have been created by engineers, for engineers – we strive to make electronics accessible, attractive, low friction, and fun to use for everybody.

“We also manufacture our products in-house which allows us to experiment with ideas, be agile in our manufacturing, and truly understand the processes involved.”

It will be investing the money it raises to employ more engineers, because the company says it can’t currently turn products into reality quick enough at the moment. It will also be brining onboard content creators to help build its portfolio of tutorials, projects, and supporting video.

The final investment will be to launch worldwide. It will start by opening stores in Western Europe, increasing its potential customer base by 600 per cent.

Pimoroni is hoping to raise £315,000 via Crowdcube to jump start its growth plans, in exchange for four per cent equity. The campaign will run until the end of November and to date it has secured around 15 per cent of the money it needs to super-charge its strategy.

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Tigmus helps musicians get their music to the people they know love their music. Described by the company as the ‘AirBnB of the music world’, Tigmus helps artists discover their fans and then set up gigs in those areas, with the guarantee their concerts will sell out (well, hopefully).

Tigmus covers the whole artist journey. They can discover their fans, book gigs and sell their tickets from one pace, meaning no middlemen or confusion.

“The traditional live music industry is a largely offline world, built around promoters, booking agents and ticket vendors,” Tigmus said. “All of these agents eat into the profits of artists and venues.  In the age of online streaming and social media, Tigmus offers a new solution for venues, artists and fans.”

The website contains a searchable database of venues around the UK, so artists can find a decent venue where they want to play a gig. Musicians can integrate their social media metrics to uncover their fans, listen to what they’re saying and whether they’re likely to attend a gig and use this to organise entire tours if they wish.

So far, Tigmus has helped 49 concerts happen and has another 100 planned via the platform. More than 700 venues are now registered with the platform and 200 artists are ready to get organising their tours.

The company makes money on ticket sales of between 10 and 20 per cent. It is hoping to diversify its revenue streams by developing curated gigs and tours on behalf of record companies and artists, experimenting with paid tiers of membership, featured venues and artists and selling its own merchandise.

Tigmus is appealing for £300,000 worth of funding to get these new payment models off the ground and spread the word in venue and artist communities. It is offering a whopping 23 per cent of equity for investors on Crowdcube and there’s 21 days left in the campaign.

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The ioLight portable microscope is an affordable, fully-functioning microscope that can be connected to smartphones and tablets, making the gadget the perfect classroom tool for science departments.

Costing around £700, the ioLight is much cheaper than conventional microscopes that cost around £3,000. However, it doesn’t have a screen, but instead uses your mobile devices as a viewfinder.

The fact it’s so connected means the images and video can be shared quickly and easily though. They can be pasted into documents or shared with other instantly via email or other means.

The ioLight is much smaller than a conventional microscope. It will fit into a pocket or rucksack pocket and is powered by a battery, meaning students aren’t just limited to the classroom when it comes to exploring their surroundings in detail.

It also uses standard microscope lenses, so no extras are needed to start working with the ioLight and it even has a resolution of 1µm, which is comparable with laboratory microscopes.

“Laboratory microscopes produce beautiful images, but cost over £3,000 and are difficult to use. Cheap microscopes do not have enough resolution for professional use or teaching,” the company said.

“ioLight has invented a portable microscope, with a resolution of better than 1μm, which produces beautiful pictures of animal and plant cells and displays them directly onto your tablet or mobile phone.”

ioLight is hoping to raise £150,000 on Crowdcube by the end of tomorrow to fund putting the microscope into production. The company has been funded by the founders and a seed funding round, which raised £160,000 from a number of early stage investors.

When ioLight has raised the extra £150,000 it needs, the device will be out into production by component manufacturers in Asia and the UK. It will be assembled in Hampshire, making it a British-made product.

ioLight is offering investors 10 per cent equity and with only ten per cent still to go on the campaign, it would be a real shame if the company missed out on its goal.

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InYourStride is a participation training app that helps people get ready to partake in big events like the Virgin London Marathon and other charity races by setting goals and motivate to smash personal goals.

“Events face a problem in that a staggering 1 in 5 never make it to the start line,  in the main due to lack of motivation or inappropriate training programs,” the company said.

“The majority of runners download a free static training plan, which isn’t built around an individual’s race date, training availability or fitness level. They do not guide a participant to identify a target time or assist them in completing the race within that time safely.”

It also explained how participants normally have a busy lifestyle, which stops them sticking to a training schedule, pushing them off track. When participants do have the time, they cram in all their training at once, causing fatigue and even injuries.

InYourStride comprises an Adaptive Coaching Platform, which creates a custom training plan and enables users to move elements of their training schedule around if something comes u, for example, but without disrupting the plan.

This plan is adapted to each user’s needs according to their pace, how often they train and whether they have missed out on sessions.

InYourStride’s main route to market is through race organisers, charities and running brands and it has partnered with more than 30 organisations sinces its launch, including Sweatshop, Mizuno, Achieve Events and Newton Running.

The company is hoping to raise £100,000 on Crowdcube, with more than half of its goal already reached. It’s offering 13.64 per cent equity and a whole range of rewards for those who invest, including a lifetime subscription to InYourStride and one-to-one training sessions.

It says it will spend half the money on developing the next iteration of the app, with a subsctiption-based model. The remaining £50,000 will be spent on managing and growing its UK and American partners.

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The Togethera private social network developed by an ex-Facebook employee has raised more than £220,000 on Crowdcube.

Founded by Sokratis Papafloratos and Matt Dempsey, Togethera help families and friends stay in contact without revealing private information to brief acquaintances. It sits behind a confidentiality wall, meaning the content can’t be found on search engines or by people not in each group created by the user.

Unlike Facebook, it doesn’t include any advertising and information is never collected or sold to third parties.

“We weren’t interested in aggressively expanding from day one. Too many social networks have quickly boomed, raking in users but then quickly going bust once the hype disappeared,”Togethera co-founder Sokratis Papafloratos said.

“We wanted to focus on providing our first users with an ultra-simple, ultra-private network where they could keep in touch with close friends and family and share photos easily. We believe we’ve achieved that and we’re now experiencing the kind of demand we suspected would come if we got the app right.”

He continued that the company is not trying to compete with the big social players like Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest because it has been designed for use between family members and friends, providing a private space for the to share messages, photos and videos.

“These groups don’t want to be bombarded with adverts or posts from people they hardly know – they want to instantly see and comment on a photo of their granddaughter from the weekend BBQ or a happy birthday video-message from their best friend in Australia. Nothing else,” Papafloratos continued.

To date, Togethera has 50,000 worldwide members using the Android and iPhone app in 17 languages. A premium subscription is gaining traction after it was trialled with some members and now the company hopes to gain more users with monetisation via the premium version.

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Fed up of paying extra for scummy car seats for your hire car when you go on holiday? The CarGo seat isn’t only a booster seat, but it’s also a suitcase for children, meaning you can take it wherever you go without the pain of negotiating with car hire companies over suitable child safety.

The brightly coloured unit can be used as a roller suitcase for children when you’re heading through the airport and on the flight, with a 12L capacity for storing clothing and entertainment for the journey. Then when you get to your destination, it can be fixed easily and securely using the seatbelts with a comfortable, wipe able moulded seat.

The company said its car seat’s priority is safety, ensuring parents have complete peace of mind when it comes to travelling abroad. It has been tested by the Transport Research Lab UK and will be getting ECE Reg 44 accreditation when it launches commercially.

It liaised with focus groups to make sure the design was spot on for parents and the current design is the result of months of discussion.

The company said: “We believe that CarGo Seat has the opportunity to shake up the booster seat and travel market by bridging the gap between safety, comfort and functionality which will appeal to parents, with a fun and innovative product which will keep children engaged.”

CarGo added it has received a lot of interest from retailers and it will continue building these relationships before its commercial launch later this year.

The company is hoping to raise £140,000 investment on Crowdcube in return for 18.67 per cent equity. It wants to use the money it raises to launch a marketing campaign across a range of channels to reach as many people as possible.

“The main objectives of the campaign will be to establish an innovative family friendly brand, to build awareness and support among retailers as well as to promote the brand in customer markets to encourage sales. Key areas of focus include digital marketing, retail and point of purchase marketing, social media and PR,” CarGo said.

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Synap has launched its campaign on Crowdcube, helping students learn more effectively by using scientific insights and applying these to its platform to tailor learning.

“People today are expected to learn and retain vast quantities of information. Unfortunately, we’ve learnt that the overwhelming majority of students and professionals do not know how to learn effectively,” the company said.

“In our experience educational establishments stick to bombarding their students with information using ineffective, passive teaching methods. An abundance of research has been produced on how the brain learns – why has this research been disregarded?”

Synap explained that for people to learn, teaching must be active, challenging and require some effort. The company wants to apply these philosophies to boost the information entering students’ brains and help them retain the data.

The online platform encourages students to create their own multiple choice quizzes, practice them and share with their peers and the wider Synap community.

By encouraging students to create their own multiple choice quizzes, they must create their own prompts that help them remember the right answer and the wrong answers they include.

When the student creates the quiz, the platform’s algorithm works out when the student learnt the information and also, when they’re likely to have forgotten the content. It will then remind them to practice topics at the ideal time for retention.

Throughout the whole process, Synap will track a student’s studies, helping them identify their weak points and encouraging them to work more on the areas they’re lacking knowledge.

Synap is seeking £180,000 funding on Crowdcube and is offering up 12 per cent equity to those who invest. The company will use the money it raises to develop Synap’s website and iOS and Android apps portfolio. It will also launch a marketing campaign to increase awareness around the product.

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Entrepreneur magazine has released a list of the biggest crowdfunding trends of 2015 and we thought it would be a great opportunity to give our take on the trends.

Niche-specific Platforms

Although generic platforms like Indiegogo and Kickstarter may be dominating the crowdfunding scene because they have had a lot of publicity and make it easy for the general public to buy wacky products they would otherwise not even consider buying, new niche-specific platforms are starting to explode in popularity.

Whether focusing on the medical community, local projects or providing legal support like CrowdJustice, these platforms focusing on just one speciality are gaining momentum.

Specialists and Celeb Support

Specialist advisors and even celebrities in the case of Seedrs are becoming crowdfunding platforms’ newest recruits.

Advisors are able to help companies build pitches and even find backers if a company running a campaign is struggling. In fact, some individuals are going one step further and have built up a whole company of advisors to help out on the campaign trail.

Although recruiting Andy Murray may not have the same impact on a company’s actual campaign, it certainly attracted some attention to the crowdfunding platform.

Platform Investment

Just last week, two major UK crowdfunding platforms announced they had received funding from investors to further their business.

Seedrs announced it raised £10m, which will be used to boost its marketing efforts around the world, while Crowdcube announced its raised £6m.

It’s not just small companies or startups that need an extra boost from funding, but platforms need it too, in order to grow into new territories and to be able to offer a wider range of services.

Crowdfunding Before Investment

If a company is seeking VC investment, it’s likely they’ll try out a crowdfunding campaign first. Not because they particularly need the cash straight away, but because they need to prove to investors they are willing to go out and find an audience for their product.

Obviously, any capital they do raise will come in handy, but even failed crowdfunding campaigns have been known to go on and get significant capital from private investors once their product has been proven to have some interest.

Read Entrepreneur‘s take on the biggest crowdfunding trends of 2015.

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