London-based mobile shopping app SHAREIGHT has closed £662,050 through equity crowdfunding platform Seedrs, overfunding its original target by 190%.   (I am non-exec director and the first angel investor in the platform.)

The campaign attracted 334 investors across 12 countries who will now receive a share of 18.08% equity in the m-commerce start-up.

SHAREIGHT “takes the pain out of shopping on mobile” through its m-commerce interface which has been built solely for mobile to allow users to find and share retail products on their smartphone “more easily”.  You can download the app for both Android and IOS.

Listing over 8,000 retail brands, the app enables shoppers to find what they want “in just three taps” using its 500 image search terms, and also offers “easy comparison”; letting users save their favourite items from all the major stores in one place.

This was a remarkable achievement and shows just how powerful a well-executed equity crowdfunding campaign by a highly appealing business can be.

A few stats that give a sense of SHAREIGHT’s achievement:

• 95 investors came from eight different countries, with over £100,000 coming from outside the UK.
• Average investment size was £3,684.21, and the median was £300.
• The largest investment was £79,000, and the smallest was £10.

Google have just released an excellent research paper on the impact and effect of mobile searching.  They have identified the key 'what happens next' moments after someone searches on their mobile.

One of the key take-aways from this is that 55% of sales (whether online, in store or on the phone) happen within an hour of a mobile search occurring.  Google, naturally, will use that statistic to justify investment in super-targeted mobile advertising. 

The research also reveals that mobile searches are most often done at home or work in the afternoon and evening, mainly because it's "more convenient than firing up the home computer".  I wonder if, in the future, we will even identify our personal devices as mobiles as all the capabilities of tablets and smart-phones morph into one, compact super-computer. 

The full study is below and well worth a read.