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Dating Software
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October 22nd, 2008 12:30 AM
I met Jim Crabbe in June 2007 at his office – a table in a corner of the Mandolin Cafe on South 12th Street in Central Tacoma.
The Tacoma entrepreneur’s business networking startup –Konnects.com – had three employees, including his partner, Nick Huzar.
Crabbe also had recently contracted with a software team in India to write some Web enhancements and had just surpassed 25,000 early adopters around the world. Me included. You can log on, create your own business profile and connect with me, if you’d like.
Konnects.com aims to connect people in the business world in a virtual networking niche that falls between two of its larger online competitors – LinkedIn and Facebook.
When I caught up with Crabbe this month, I found him in his new office space on the 11th floor of the Heritage Bank building in downtown Tacoma. With 12 employees now. And a worldwide membership that has just reached 500,000 and climbing.
Yet true to his company’s austere, dot-com startup circumstances Crabbe keeps a sleeping bag handy for those nights when the pace and workload won’t allow him to go home.
“People are shocked when they find out a company like ours exists in Tacoma,” Crabbe said.
But how to continue the venture has become the immediate question. Konnects.com has survived so far on the contributions of angel investors and has yet to make a profit. As CEO, Crabbe has just started another round of angel investor recruitment to keep the company operating until the financial markets loosen up enough that he can solicit a more substantial investment infusion from a venture capital company.
One of Konnects’ angel investors, Jay Gallinatti, thinks so highly of Konnects’ potential that he devoted 20 hours a week as an in-office consultant advising the company on its next steps.
Gallinatti knows how the dot-com world works. He once helped lead a start-up search engine – GoTo.com in 1998 – that grew from 12 employees to over 600 in three years. GoTo.com became Overture Services, which Yahoo bought for $1.6 billion in 2003.
Where Gallinatti once saw rapid growth and fortunes in the search engine business, he now sees it in applications that connect people.
“To a lot of people my age or older, when you raise the idea of social networking, the response you get is, ‘Huh?’” Gallinatti said. “Most don’t really understand it unless they’re doing online dating. That’s social networking with a special purpose.”
But for a younger generation of people who create profiles, make friends and stay in touch via their postings on sites such as MySpace and Facebook, having an identity in cyberspace is part of life.
The Konnects benefit comes from offering the enhanced photo, document and video sharing and easy connection-to-connection interaction you find on Facebook – but in a professional environment where your public, online face serves as your face to the business world.
If you’re my age, 47, you’ll remember when we had business cards with just our phone number on it. Remember when putting your fax number on the business card seemed nouveau riche? Then we added cell phone numbers and, eventually, e-mail addresses. Some day, we’ll have our Konnects address so we can look up each other’s business profiles.
“If you only create a profile on Facebook and want to use it for your professional life too,” Crabbe said, “it’s like trying to do business at a wedding reception. You might be able to do some business, but it’s not the right setting. You have to break through some social norms and conventions to do it. It’s no different online.
“We’re creating a place where you can create a robust, professional representation of yourself. Where you can do more than just messaging. Where you can chat, video chat, share documents, blog, have video conferencing anywhere in the world.”
Konnects allows its users to create online communities by geography or interest, then provides analytical tools to study the make-up of each community.
The closest competitor to Konnects, LinkedIn, has a vastly larger number of registered users at 26 million vs. 500,000. LinkedIn has gained a reputation as a reputable place for job seekers – largely because the profile you create there acts as an online rйsumй. But that’s about all it does.
“I’ve been on LinkedIn for about four years, but I’ve never done anything with it,” Gallinatti said.
He described LinkedIn as a big address book where you stockpile connections like a baseball card collection. It sits on your desk in case you need it to look for a job. At the same time, Crabbe envies LinkedIn’s size. Konnects needs to scale up to that critical mass with additional registered members using its better-than-LinkedIn features to succeed.
“There’s plenty of room in the (online) space for everyone,” Crabbe said. Think of it as KING, KOMO, KIRO and KCPQ all offering local TV news – local viewers have their favorite for one reason or another and all the stations thrive.
While you can sign up for Konnects’ basic service for free and make connections with others, the site offers its premium interactive features for as little as $1.99 a month.
“The last year has been a whirlwind,” Crabbe said. “The growth gets fast and faster; it’s compounding in nature. It’s one thing to sit down with a business plan, but it’s another thing to see it take off like it has.”
thenewstribune.com/business/columnists/voelpel/story/515134.html
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