Archive for May, 2010

May 28

Posted by TeamS2

Posted in Marketing

Stage Two Newsletter Launching Today!

Just a quick note to let everyone know that we are launching a new “Stage Two News & Views” newsletter today (Should be going out soon – it’s probably in your spam box, rightfully or not). The purpose of the newsletter is to pass along the best articles we’ve found dealing with consumer lifestyle technology, PR/marketing, and social media. As a part of this effort, we have created a survey for our newsletter readers to provide feedback on our inaugural campaign. If you are not already receiving S2 News and Views and would like to be added to the list, please email us at newsletter@stagetwo.com. Looking forward to hearing your feedback!

May 27

Posted by David

Posted in Clients

Client News: New BOKU advisors, strategic funding and new folks on the management team

Andreesen Horowitz are now advisors and investors in BOKU.  They’ve cemented their strategic relationship with the company through an undisclosed amount of funding.  Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz are both co-founders at Netscape (and many other successful technology startups), and are currently investors in Skype, Zynga, Facebook and many others. For BOKU, this as a huge endorsement of their company, their technology and their management team. Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz are figuratively rockstars in Silicon Valley; they took a long, hard look at the mobile payments space, and chose BOKU for several reasons:
  1. technology (robust payments system, industry-leading fraud & risk prevention, great merchant analytics)
  2. infrastructure (Paymo is live in 60 countries, BOKU has direct relationships with more than 200 carriers and 1000+ merchants, etc.)
  3. management team (everyone has either a payments or a mobile background – or both)

Also announced today are two new hires to the BOKU management team:

  • David Yoo, former SVP and Chief Product Officer at AT&T Interactive will become the SVP of Strategy for BOKU
  • Kevin Grant, former VP of Sales for Mobi TV and SBC Data Com business will become the SVP of Sales for BOKU
The big deal for mobile payments is gong to be carrier relationships and interest rates – these additions to the management team are directly targeted at creating strong carrier relationships with interest rates conducive to mobile payments.  BOKU is setting themselves up for tremendous success through a combination of an effective management team, outstanding technology and great advisors.  A little VC funding doesn’t hurt either.
The stories have had great play in the news today, and a number of publications have picked up the news.  The list is below, and we’ll add new coverage as we see it.

May 07

Posted by TeamS2

Posted in Marketing

Stage Two Newsletter Launching Today!

Just a quick note to let everyone know that we are launching a new “Stage Two News & Views” newsletter today (Should be going out soon – it’s probably in your spam box, rightfully or not). The purpose of the newsletter is to pass along the best articles we’ve found dealing with consumer lifestyle technology, PR/marketing, and social media. As a part of this effort, we have created a survey for our newsletter readers to provide feedback on our inaugural campaign. If you are not already receiving S2 News and Views and would like to be added to the list, please email us at newsletter@stagetwo.com. Looking forward to hearing your feedback!

May 06

Posted by Meghan

Posted in Stage Two

Meet the New Girl, Meghan Murphy!

During this beautiful first week of May I’m happy to begin my new position as part of the Stage Two team! With my marketing background in the videogame industry, I look forward to continuing focus on consumer tech products and services. Combining my love of tech and marketing – and all things nerd – I couldn’t ask for anything more!

I jumped into the media relations field working with professional services and data companies, then made a much more exciting leap into the world of videogames. After helping launch an international cross-platform game for Nokia I checked out the publishing industry helping expand west coast initiatives for the award-winning online magazine The Escapist. Now I’m excited to help Stage Two clients be rockstars in their own right!

Just last year I moved to San Francisco from North Carolina (also known as Cackalack if you’re a southern local) and continue to fall in love with the city every day. You can usually find me biking around, initiating impromptu dance parties or enjoying a local band at one of the many amazing venues here.

In the world of the Internets you can follow me on Twitter @megmurph or follow my recent Hipstamatic obsession on Tumblr http://meghanmurphysuperstar.tumblr.com/

May 03

Posted by David

Posted in Clients

Client News: Face.com goes public!

Things are hopping in Tel Aviv this morning (evening?), as Face.com today launches their  developer community, including an open API to let third-party developers tap into Face’s industry-leading consumer facial recognition technology.  This includes access to the powerful algorithm that powers their Facebook applications, Photo Finder and Photo Tagger.  Those apps have scanned over 7 billion photos so far, identifying more than 52 million faces.  The API will be available here: http://developers.face.com.

Face is enabling developers to tap into their face detection and face recognition tech through simple REST API calls.  Via Facebook’s and Twitter’s APIs, developers will be able to apply face recognition to their social graph, and create new ways for friends to engage through photos. As the developer community grows, the index of tags grows as well, allowing for more robust applications and increasingly accurate facial recognition.

Face.com has some of the best facial recognition tech available to consumers in the world – technology that is highly accurate, able to identify faces even in difficult circumstances like poor lighting, poor focus, subjects wearing eyeglasses, facial hair, and even halloween costumes.  Face’s technology also works well at Web-scale, rapidly performing face detection, facial analysis and identification even with very  large groups of photos.

A few different publications have covered the launch today, including both technology-focused developer-oriented blogs.  The list of coverage is below – we will update the list as the day goes by.