What good can we startup out of mobile tech?
I encourage for-profit tech startups to incorporate sensible, socially significant charitable efforts into their endeavours early on. Choose beneficiaries that are close to your heart and execute in practical and authentic fashion. Should the success of lightening strike and you achieve rapid growth, team expansion and investor interest you'll be tempted to do without or worse still disguise opportunism in the form of community service creating casting couches from incubators for the sole purpose of pup tenting a cheap labour force. From the start search for causes that you believe in that are well run and underfunded. Our first app Tip This was rejected from The App Store for including a section that discouraged the purchase of bottled water in restaurants and provided a direct link to Bret Wilson's water charity CAWST. The app turbo-charges the users accent into Restaurant Royalty and is commonly read in dining rooms - the ideal time to argue the superfluous nature of bottled water and provide an opportunity to make a donation instead. According to Apple's R&R any app that solicits donations has to be free and our's was a lofty $2.99. After an impassionate appeal and some of my customary, albeit unsavoury arm-twisting the app was approved as is, sells well on four continents, was recently translated into Chinese and provides a steady stream of revenue to CAWST. Emboldened by it's success I included the O3D program into a following app called iTendr. iTendr expedites group reservations for corporate dining. Like it or not, every business luncheon includes dessert. The O3D program allows guests to 'opt out of dessert' early in the organizing of the event seeing a portion of those funds flow through to local charities. In similar fashion our latest iPad app The Nebulizer is used in restaurants as a spinning roulette of prizes for birthday guests. To redeem their cake, guests check in on Facebook through The Nebulizer creating a valuable ad for the venue. The explosion of online exposure is compared to a social media supernova! The Facebook post is given added meaning if the guest chooses the option to forego the dessert and instead have the restaurant make a charitable donation on their behalf. Mobile tech is giving us real time and increasingly nimble opportunities to choose a greater good over an unneeded given, let's make the most of it from the start!