Bruce Campbell, President and Portfolio Manager at StoneCastle Investment Management was on BNN’s “Market Call” yesterday to talk about the Calgary-based company that wants to bridge the gap between the real and online worlds for shoppers.
Campbell compares Slyce to the wildly popular smartphone-based music identification service Shazam. The portfolio manager says Slyce is the Shazam for “everything else”. Using the app, he explains a consumer can scan a pair of shoes and immediately find the retailer that is offering the best price and availability on them. He says Slyce has a chance to insert itself into a potentially lucrative space between the consumer and retailer.
“They have a four-step revenue model where they are getting paid on a number of different avenues,” he says.
Slyce, which went public through a reverse merger with Oculus Ventures this past summer, is the second notable firm out of Calgary-based Business Instincts Group, which also spawned Urthecast. The company raised $12-million for its image-based search technology. Slyce recently announced two acquisitions; the (US) $3.5-million pickup of app developer Drivetrain Agency was the most recent. A week earlier, the company forked over $5-million for BuyCode, the company that developed the Pounce image-recognition-based shopping app.
“Through integrating the technologies, we can offer our retail partners an almost seamless discovery-to-purchase process for their customers — whereby consumers can go from seeing an item in the real world to purchasing that item from the retailer’s inventory in literally a few clicks,” said CEO Mark Elfenbein of the BuyCode acquisition.
At press time, shares of Slyce were up 5.6% to $0.75.
