Todd Barrish Joins the Squad
LaunchSquad announced some pretty exciting news today: we’ve added Todd Barrish as the managing director of our growing NY office. Here’s our official announcement with more background on Todd and his accomplishments – and here’s some commentary from PR industry blog PR Newser.
Todd brings a ton of talent, passion and NY-market experience to our East Coast team. Over the past 3+ years, we’ve become increasingly inspired by what’s happening in NY as we’ve seen a growing and increasingly savvy ecosystem of entrepreneurs, investors and technology emerge. Working with innovative companies like Next New Networks, EPIX, UsableNet, Efficiency 2.0 and others has also opened our eyes to all the possibilities.
I had the opportunity to spend this past summer in NY, and saw first-hand the excitement and energy of the growing technology scene. Todd gives us scale and leadership to help make LaunchSquad the premier tech PR team in NY.
We’re not done though. We’ll soon be making other news about our plans and vision for LaunchSquad on the East Coast. Stay tuned.
East Meets West in SF
The entire New York office flew out west to San Francisco last week for our annual holiday gathering and celebration. For a few, it was a first trip to our Mission Street headquarters.
As the New Yorkers trickled into the office Monday and Tuesday bringing with them record cold temperatures, a scavenger hunt was planned for Wednesday afternoon. Teams were broken up accordingly: a veteran, a back-up, a newbie, a techie, a New Yorker and a nerd. They were set loose in San Francisco with a $50 bill, an iPhone and a set of clues. Here’s a sampling:
- Find a famous San Franciscan
- “Here’s to you Joe Dimaggio”
- Find a journalist
- Find a current employee of Twitter, Google or Facebook
- Find a relative of a LaunchSquad employee
- This bar is built on the remains of an old ship dating back to the Gold Rush
- Find a Whole Foods employee
- Eat some Jin Dui
- Visit a LaunchSquad client
Despite almost getting thrown out of Twitter’s new corporate offices and arrested at City Hall, Team #1 and its players Jason Mandell, Melissa Biles, Tory Whitney, Miko Mercer, Brigid Zapp and Lindsey Zouien made their way to the final pitstop, LaunchSquad watering hole, Kate O’Briens, to celebrate their victory, where event chairman Brett Weiner analyzed their iPhone photos for verification.
Thursday was the most serious of the days as we met off-site for our annual company meeting, which included presentations such as, “The State of the Squad,” the future of the company and PR, “Positivity,” and ended with an awards ceremony. The most coveted prize turned out to be the Sodastream.
Friday night’s final festivities sent us all to the Foreign Cinema’s Laszlo Bar where we noshed on oysters, tuna tare tare and mini prosciutto sandwiches as we viewed our annual company movie and toasted to the holidays as a team one last time before we bid adieu. Just another great week at LaunchSquad!
Cliqset to Power Real-Time Discussion for Tonight’s Boxee Beta Event
In the last few months, LaunchSquad client Cliqset has been building great momentum. In October, the company released its latest Beta, featuring real-time conversation and activity streams. Mashable even declared it as “FriendFeed done right.” Tonight, Cliqset will debut their real-time discussion app for the livestream of the Boxee Beta Unveiling event. It’s the first application on Boxee that lets people converse in real-time while watching a live event.
Over the past year, Mac, AppleTV, PC, and Linux users have been flocking to Boxee’s media center software for its TV viewing experience, social media capabilities, and large catalog of online multimedia content. Boxee is currently in Alpha but tonight they’ll debut their Beta software (featuring a redesigned look and feel), and preview the Boxee Box (no computer required!). So if you can’t make it to Brooklyn, Cliqset on Boxee is a great alternative to get you connected and engaged with the event and the Boxee community.
The Cliqset application will allow Boxee users to interact with each other in real-time as they as watch the event unfold. If you’ve already downloaded Boxee, go to the Boxee home page tonight at 7:00 p.m. ET and click on the Boxee Beta Unveiling in the Recommendations section. You’ll now be able to talk with fellow Boxee fans in a simple and clean interface. Mashable has a nice write up on this, and you can read more about it on the Cliqset and Boxee blogs.
So, tune-in tonight at 7:00 p.m. ET and join the conversation. I’ll be watching. To discuss, find LaunchSquad and me (Jen Gazin) on Cliqset.
Mobile Banking Reaching the Masses Thanks to Clairmail
One significant technology trend this year has been mobile banking’s big move from a niche to mainstream financial services story. It’s been featured in the Economist, BusinessWeek, Advertising Age, and several other leading publications (as well as by our own Miko Mercer last month) as a technology poised to begin effecting all sectors of society – from the unbanked individual to the billion-dollar corporation. Our longtime client ClairMail is at the forefront of this trend, with nearly 50 financial institutions as customers and a brand new software platform integrating three traditionally disparate methods of mobile communication – text alerts, mobile web, and a Smart Client application.
Aside from their excellent corporate momentum — they’ve posted 200 percent growth in revenue the past two quarters and a 700 percent growth in yearly transactions — ClairMail has also announced some exciting partnerships recently. At this year’s BAI Retail, they announced a new partnership with Visa, providing the credit card giant with the platform needed to expand its Visa Alerts program. ClairMail-fueled Visa Alerts will provide Visa cardholders with the ability to check credit balances and receive proactive, conversational notifications of fraudulent or questionable transactions in real-time. Essentially, you’ll be able to approve you and your date’s five-star dinner from your mobile before the waiter even returns with the receipt.
With all this in mind, it’s no wonder that ClairMail was just selected to the Bank Technology News’ (BTN) Innovator list for 2009. BTN cites ClairMail’s “increasing customer success (…) at a time when former competitors have faltered, or at least seem to be standing still.” BTN further points out that “Banks gain from using ClairMail’s triple play convergence technologies since it simplifies installations and minimizes update requirements, thus lowering support costs for financial institutions.”
It has been a terrific four years that we have already worked with ClairMail, and we’re looking forward to helping the company continue to drive the rapid growth of mobile banking into 2010 and beyond.