Company description
The Problem: Every day, businesses strive to reach potential customers with real-time deals, events, and information. But existing platforms only reach a fraction of the customers capable of acting on these opportunities because:
(1) People don't "friend" every business they pass. Even if they did, AND they stared at their feed all day, they're unlikely to see an actionable post when they're actually near the business to act on it.
(2) Business “finders” like Foursquare and Yelp only get a fraction of businesses to regularly contribute real-time content.
The Solution: Tagwhat automatically extracts actionable content from the Web and social media by analyzing individual posts from businesses in real-time. Tagwhat delivers this actionable content to nearby customers in the context of time and location. No friending or searching required.
Tagwhat's proprietary algorithms and software perform this data mining quickly and simultaneously all over the world to deliver the most comprehensive database of hyperlocal content that exists today. The result gives users access to more real-time deals, events, and things to do than any other service in the world.
For Tagwhat users, you never miss what's happening nearby again.
For local businesses, your deals and events are instantly delivered to a huge population of untapped customers who would be very unlikely to come across your business without Tagwhat. No new portals to learn, or extra time spent. Just post to your favorite social networks like you do now and Tagwhat does the rest.
Tagwhat is currently generating modest revenue and its mobile apps have been downloaded nearly 100,000 times.
Team
Dave Elchoness CEO and co-founder
Dave is an attorney and former executive for Qwest Communications’. After overseeing Qwest’s international IT team, he became an evangelist and expert on social media and location-based services sharing his knowledge with periodicals, companies, and audiences all over the world. Dave brought together Don and Angus to form the team that would become among the first mobile augmented reality developers anywhere. Tagwhat is the evolution of this journey. Dave is a graduate of Rutgers University and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where he served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of International Economic Law.
Angus Shee CTO and co-founder
Angus is a former Northrop Grumman Fellow engineer and award-winning product design expert. He has designed next-generation electronics for the most sophisticated defense industry radar systems on Earth. His innovative product designs helped launch an entire breed of radically advanced radar systems and earned him the prestigious Presidential Leadership Award for Innovation and Technology. Angus is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University.
Don Cramer CIO and co-founder
Don is a world-class mobile developer and database/server infrastructure guru. He has deployed high-performing systems ranging from single server to multi-server deployments for scalability and high availability as well as data redundancy. His expertise lies in the management and distribution of high volume web application and database traffic. Don’s experience is powered by the quick mastery of any modern software language and the unique capability of implementing the optimally-suited solution for the problem at hand.
Business model
Tagwhat's content acquisition methodology allows it to deliver the largest feed of real-time hyperlocal content that exists today to the right people at the right place and time. Local businesses have their deals and events instantly delivered to a huge population of untapped customers who would be very unlikely to come across the business without Tagwhat. No new portals to learn, or extra time spent. Businesses just post to their favorite social networks like they do now and Tagwhat does the rest.
In a few clicks, businesses will be able to pay a few dollars for promoted positioning of their posts within the Tagwhat feed and see the immediate impact in customer views.
Full product and company details are outlined in Tagwhat private documents for authorized Vator judges. Please access those documents.
Competitive advantage
Real-time data mining. Leveraging existing platforms that businesses are already using. No new portal.
Scalable content acquisition - global reach with one set of algorithms.
Aggregated data mining of multiple 3rd party content feeds.
Investors