… Ecommerce, Internet Security, Economics, and Entrepreneurship

Category: Social Networking

The Problem: Sexting and Predators

It is hard for me to believe, but today is the nine year anniversary of buySAFE’s birthdate.  Time sure does fly by when you are having a good time. 

When I left buySAFE a few months ago, I promised to keep you up to date on my next entrepreneurial adventure.  In the spirit of start-up birthdays, I thought I would share with you a few interesting details about my next venture.

Sexting is rampant. Predators are everywhere. Obviously, buySAFE was founded to make the Internet safer for online shoppers, and we did that for tens of millions of consumers.  This time around, we want to make technology safer for our kids (Fatherhood has a way of inspiring you to do such things).  Our new start-up is tackling two serious, prevalent and complex problems: Sexting and Predators.  The market simply hasn’t provided any effective solutions for parents yet, and we intend to fill that gap.

The business was inspired by my brother, Tim Woda, who as the parent of older children, has had to confront these difficult issues directly.  It seems like every time I speak with a parent of tweens or teens, they express the same frustrations and fear about allowing their kids to use digital technologies.  Since there are more than 37 million kids in the U.S. and more than 1.2 billion kids globally between the ages of 9 and 17, I believe there is an interesting business opportunity here.

The following is a short video overview of the Sexting and Predator problems that parents face today.  If you have any feedback or suggestions, please feel free to leave a comment.  I welcome your assistance.  Also, please share this video with your friends and family.  I believe it is important that we educate parents to make sure they are fully aware of the digital dangers they must manage on behalf of their kids. 

I recognize that I haven’t told you how we are going to attack these scary problems, but I will over the coming months.  I wanted to tease you first!  🙂  Before telling you everything, we have to finish building out our product and raise a bit of capital to finance our public launch.  Both of these activities are ongoing (and going well), and I will share more as we make additional progress.

I will continue to provide you with regular updates here on this blog, but if you want to get more frequent updates, feel free to become a fan on my Facebook Fan Page.  I am using it to share my daily thoughts on this start-up adventure.  Thanks, and stay tuned!

Grotech Ventures Leads a $6.6 Million Series B Round of Funding for Collective Intellect

TechCrunch reported last week that Grotech Ventures has led another round of financing for Collective Intellect.  The following is an excerpt from TechCrunch.

Collective Intellect, a service that can be used to track what people are saying around the net about certain topics, has raised an additional $6.6M in a Series B round led by Grotech Capital Group with participation by Appian Ventures, Croghan Investments, and Crawley Hatfield Capital.

You can read more about the financing here >> More Money for Collective Intellect to Keep Fingers on Pulse of Internet

Daily Roundup for 2008-04-16

  • It’s a question marketers are still grappling with years after the first waves of corporate blogging flooded the web. But for better or worse, it seems corporate blogging — and the title of chief blogger — is beginning to hit its stride. Companies such as Coca-Cola, Marriott and Kodak all have recently recruited chief bloggers, with or without the actual title, to tell their stories and engage consumers.
  • These days, online consumers and companies are collaborating on a range of activities, including R&D, marketing and after-sales support.  Here are a few examples of how brands and consumers are working together online.

Daily Roundup for 2008-04-14

  • Yahoo’s resistance to a takeover by Microsoft looks foolhardy to some investors and Wall Street analysts. But the push-back may prove effective in the end—at least by forcing the suitor to cough up a few more bucks a share.  Executives from Yahoo (YHOO) on Apr. 7 reiterated the reasons for their opposition. The $31-a-share offer, made public Feb. 1, "substantially undervalues" Yahoo, and its stock component is even less attractive in light of Microsoft’s (MSFT) slumping share price. "We have continued to launch new products and to take actions which leverage our scale, technology, people, and platforms as we execute on the strategy we publicly articulated," Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang and Chairman Roy Bostock wrote.
  • Microsoft (MSFT) just dropped the bomb on Yahoo (YHOO). Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on Apr. 5 sent a letter giving Yahoo’s board three weeks before it initiates a proxy fight, including nomination of a new slate of directors likely to approve the deal.

Facebook, Executives, College Students and Love

Facebook I was recently invited to join a professional colleague’s Facebook network.  Up until then, I had strictly used LinkedIn as my only social network primarily because a) I have always found LinkedIn to be very useful for business, and b) I perceived Facebook as a playground for college kids.

Well I was wrong.  Facebook is awesome, and many of my professional colleagues were way ahead of me in discovering the network’s value. Its utility becomes very powerful as your network multiplies and matures.  To be quite honest, I now view LinkedIn as a great place to view a professional profile or resume, but that is about it. Facebook provides a scalable method for communicating with your professional network.  The bottom-line is that I am learning to love Facebook. 

Since we are talking about Facebook, I thought you might also enjoy this article about the Facebook phenomenon.

For college students, if it’s Facebook, it’s love | Reuters” 

For the Facebook generation, love now comes with a drop-down menu.

With profiles on the Facebook social networking site (www.facebook.com/) almost de rigueur on college campuses, students can define their relationship status with menu choices ranging from “married” to that perennial favorite, “It’s complicated.”

“It’s complicated” could also describe the emotional calculations people in their late teens and early 20s make as they decide whether their relationships are what they call “Facebook-worthy.” MORE >>

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