Thursday, April 19, 2007

MOVO could do more then just market product

Anytime I am involved with a company, part of me would always like to see the company offer something "good" back to the community. There is always a humanitarian aspect to entrepreneurship, and here is one aspect I did not see when I co-founded Movo Mobile.

With the current events on everyone's mind - we look at the tragedy of the murders happening on high school and college campuses. The most recent ofcourse being Virginia Tech. And we all ask ourselves - "could have we prevented the tragedy". I think it is clear, that it wasn't obvious that this kid was going to become a mass-murderer - but one area that we can always improve on is communication.

Enter Movo. Movo (http://www.movomobile.com) has been working with universities over the past year to improve communication (mostly marketing) between the college and the students using SMS on cell phones. Although the original intent was to share information about classes, upcoming events and administrative alerts - clearly it can also become the next emergency broadcast system.

If Virginia Tech had the ability to send a SMS message to all their students. after the morning murders - would this have effected the murders later that day? Email was sent, but very few students were at their computers.

I am not questioning so much how the past was handled - but I am addressing how the future can be managed, and perhaps we can help prevent these types of tragedies through technology and innovative products like Movo.

I am proud to see one of the companies we started could play a role in saving lives - its nice to provide a service that extends beyond dollars and cents.

Read the Herald Tribune Article

Visit Movo Mobile

Thursday, April 05, 2007

Fast Pitch! brings Social Networking to Businesses

It's hard to believe that a small company in Sarasota, Florida could potentially be the next gorilla in one of the most dynamic markets on the web today - Social Networking.

For the first time companies like FaceBook and mySpace are adding substance to the hype of the Internet, and creating powerful communities of people who share content and build connections based on social highlights. mySpace was sold to News Corp for just under a billion, and the valuation of FaceBook exceeds 1B (turned down Yahoo's bid to buy them for 1.4B). Oh, by the way - this isn't a bubble either. These companies are driving serious revenue, serious growth and have the most valuable user base on the web today. Not only do they know who their users are, they know what they like, don't like, and more importantly what they want to buy.

Now, turn the page - moving from college to work, and focus on business. Enter Fast Pitch!. Fast Pitch has a community of users as well, but focused on building relationships based on business (however, their is always a social element). Business Networking has been around since the first dollar was exchanged, but more importantly networking is the life-blood of any business or professional's career. What a novel idea - network and market your business online, and bring people together based on simple criteria (e.g. where they went to college, what they are looking to buy, what city do they live in). Proof is in the stats - Fast Pitch! is ranked one of the top 4,000 websites in traffic in the United States, and 15,000 in the world.

After all, this is what the Internet was meant to be - a network of people, not computers.

So why is the future of Fast Pitch! so bright? They have a rapidly growing user base, customers that pay for the service (which is not easy to do - FaceBook and mySpace are free), and more importantly a network of business professionals that are actively buying and selling products and services, building relationships and adding content to Fast Pitch! every second of every day .... world wide.

One to watch.

www.fastpitchnetworking.com