The Everywhereigo blog space is dedicated to the mobile design, technology and marketing world with a kindred-spirit tip of the hat to social media and social marketing. For shorter updates you can follow our tweets at www.twitter.com/everywhereigo. For event announcements, mobile news alerts and special offers please text-to-join by texting everywhereigo to 77950.

Done Deal: PhindMe (and Everywhereigo) Acquired by Movitas

Yes, quite exciting news for Everywhereigo and our customers. For PhindMe too of course. Meaning, now we’re better than ever. I’ll post Chuck’s message to our customers here, and more comments will be forthcoming!

I am very happy to announce that PhindMe has completed a strategic deal and along with the Everywhereigo service has been acquired by Movitas LLC.

Movitas (www.movitas.com) is a leading provider of mobile marketing solutions for the hospitality industry. Movitas’ Chief Executive Officer, Keith Forshew, is a recognized hospitality, ecommerce and software industry expert with extensive experience leading fast-growth technology companies. Its well-respected Board of Directors includes Pat Croce, former President of the Philadelphia 76ers, entrepreneur and author; Terry Williams, Co-founder and Managing Partner at Next Stage Capital; and Mike McNulty, Co-founder of VerticalNet, Inc.

What this means to you:
This deal is great news for PhindMe and Everywhereigo customers and partners! First, it allows us to continue our rapid growth in the maturing mobile marketplace. Second, you can expect to see a very focused commitment and continuous improvement in the coming weeks and months, with important updates to features, functionality and usability. Additionally, with the PhindMe management team taking senior leadership roles within Movitas, you will have access to the same people you have today — without interruption. For prospective customers, you can be assured that under Movitas the opportunity to benefit from mobile solutions is greater than before.

What this means to us:
This is an exciting time in the lifecycle of our business. For the PhindMe team, we have an incredible opportunity to bring our Everywhereigo products and services to a broader set of customers. In fact, PhindMe has already begun deployments of its products within the Movitas customer base of hotels and resort properties. This also gives us access to complimentary resources that can further drive the operations of our business and the goals of our customers.  Perhaps what is most poignant –  is the opportunity for two dynamic teams with a common vision to collaborate as one. We believe the total is far greater than the sum of its parts.

On behalf of the PhindMe team, I thank you for being a customer and I welcome you to Movitas. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me or any other team member with any questions or concerns. As Movitas, we’re ready to help you move toward the future of mobile business.

Sincerely,

Chuck Sacco
Co-Founder and CEO
PhindMe Mobile

Press Release: Mobile Social Hub

Everywhereigo was featured in this press release today, November 9, 2009. Press, please contact us for more information – contact details in the release, below.

Weaving Social Media Threads Together for a Branded Mobile Website

The Next Generation of Mobile Web Design Software, Everywhereigo, Introduces the Mobile Social Hub Solution, Allowing Businesses to Harness Influencers on YouTube, Twitter, Flickr and the Like to Create More Loyal Customers.

Philadelphia, PA, November 9, 2009 — While marketing experts scramble to explain what to do with all of the valuable social media located on sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, a mobile technology company has side-stepped the debate with a simple suggestion.

Gather it under the business’ own brand in a mobile-friendly social hub.

Mobilizing Social Media With the Mobile Social Hub

Everywhereigo added some interesting capabilities the last several months with feeds and multimedia handling - and one thing that emerged was the ability to create a mobile social website, or as we have been referring to it, the mobile social hub.

Everywhereigo Design for Mobile - Information about creating a Mobile Social Hub

In a nutshell, the mobile social hub is the mobile web experience you create around your business’ product or service that also features user generated media from your customer community. It’s not for everyone, but if you have happy customers – even better, fanatical fans – then this is how to leverage them to help you create new customers.

Read all about the mobile social hub here, and please attend the free Webinar: Mobilizing Social Media.

Early November Product Update

This week we’re proud to announce more great updates from our development team. The biggest highlights are updates to our editors, the introduction of filters, and a beta customer search functionality. Here’s the latest:

• Editor Update – We use a third party editor and are excited to roll out their latest updates. With the latest release you’ll notice a slick style and  improvements on many of the editors core features such as improvements to the image editor,  the link manager, the paste from word functionality and also a number of bug fixes around different browsers and HTML translation. We’ve played with the new tools for a couple of weeks and we’re very excited about the update.
• Filters on Customer and Business Tables –  Our user management and our business management tools now have filters.  For user management you can select to display the filters by clicking on “show filter” at the bottom of the user management grid. Partners will also see the ability to sort through businesses through their client selector pages.

Creating a YouTube Feed With Everywhereigo

Having a Youtube feed on your mobile site will allow users to view select videos posted by you or others, incorporating a more visual aspect into your site. Users are able to view these videos without being redirected away from your branded mobile experience.

End of October Product Update

Tonight was our final release of October. We’re excited to announce the following updates:

• Campaign Archive and Delete – Customers asked for it and we now have it. You can archive campaigns or delete them by visiting the campaign management page and selecting to archive or delete a campaign. Campaigns can also be restored from the archives if you’d like in order to start them back up.
• Ability to select campaigns to go to email or text only – Some users choose both email and text as their preferred communication channel, but clients were looking to only send to one or the other. We’ve now added a way to select whether you want to just send to text users, email users or both in the group message section of the campaigns page.

Ringing The Bell for Mobile Tickets

Everywhereigo elite programmer Olesya Gelfond ringing the bell to celebrate the initial launch of TicketLeap Mobile

That’s a Baiada Center tradition for resident startups whenever there’s awesome news. The Everywhereigo technology team worked hard to create the mobile user interface for TicketLeap’s self serve event ticketing web site  – see for yourself: just go to www.ticketleap.com on any mobile phone.

What’s so special? A few things we can think of right off the bat.

#1, this puppy works on any phone and provides an exceptional user interface on all of them. That’s because the Everywhereigo mobile web application publishing engine does more than simply wrapping a mobile template around desktop-bound web content: it provides the right creative to the right phone, optimizing performance on any device and ensuring both sides of the transaction have a secure, successful and satisfying experience.

#2, great looking design and usability that is consistent with the main web site. Thanks to Olesya, TicketLeap users who visit the site on their mobile will be treated to the same crisp, clean and easy-to-use online experience they get when they’re visiting the desktop-style version of the site.

More to come on this – in the meantime – Congrats Olesya!

Craft Brewers Southern Tier Brewing Let Their Customers Do The Selling

Southern Tier Mobile Site on iPhone

It’s Oktoberfest time over at Everywhereigo and we’re excited to be working with one of our favorite breweries, Southern Tier Brewing Company. Southern Tier is known for some amazing beers such as Unearthly, Chokolat, Pumking, Harvest, Hop Sun, and much much more. They are also one of the many quickly growing craft breweries in the Northeast with an ongoing project to triple the size of their brewery and increase their distribution throughout the country. With this comes the need for some additional marketing power, or as Southern Tier’s marketing guru and graphic designer Nathan Arnone puts it, “It’s time for the shelves to talk.”

As part of the project, Southern Tier created shelf stickers with SMS campaign calls-to-action to place around stores and bars. The stickers direct users to more information about the brews by texting in “STBC” or “STBC Unearthly” to 77950. Customers receive text message responses that then bring them to a mobile landing page, which has more information about the beers, but also includes great user generated content such as YouTube customer reviews and Twitter comment posts. Ultimately creating a more compelling story around each of the beers and encouraging others to try them, and to post their own feedback and comments.

Control Skip to Nav and Back to Top Links

Some designers have requested more control over whether the Skip to Nav and Back to Top links are displayed on their site. This may be done for sites that are setup to be splash pages, when a site owner wants a user to scroll through the content or if you’re using navigation elements within the content area. In order to turn these off all you need to do is go to the Design Your Site page, scroll to the middle of the page and check whether you want these links visible or not. You also can add a “Back” button for smartphone sites that will allow your user to navigate back to the previous page. This feature is especially helpful when converting our sites to an application.

Adding Analytics to Your Mobile Site

We recently made an update to help our customers track the stats for their mobile sites. Previously we added Google Analytics, but this only worked for smartphones due to their support for Javascript. With the recent additions of Bango, Admob and Motally you can now add analytics for all mobile devices to your site. Below is instructions for each of these.