GeekWire Utilizes Zipwhip at SummerBash

June 29, 2012 Leave a comment

The following guest post is courtesy of Rebecca Lovell, Chief Business Officer at GeekWire. 

Last week GeekWire hosted the biggest, geekiest, sportiest summer bash you can imagine. We packed over 500 techies into the Showbox SODO, and featured three tournaments (intermediate ping pong, expert ping pong, and foosball) as well as pick-up games of GeekBall and Beer Pong (not to mention a golden ping pong scavenger hunt). Sound like a lot of cats to herd? You better believe it. That’s why we were thrilled to partner with Zipwhip on their Android-based texting technology to help us in tournament-wrangling.

Ahead of the big day, we gathered the mobile phone numbers of our ping pong players so we could easily communicate with them. Going into the event, our assumption was that this would be a back-stop…a last resort if our players didn’t hear announcements over the PA, or we couldn’t spot them with their glow-in-the-dark necklaces, or if our carrier pigeon never returned to home base. What we learned at the event itself was that the super-easy Zipwhip interface enabled us to communicate quickly and personally with each of our players. As our tournament manager announced the upcoming games, our newest geek on the GeekWire team (Emily Shahan) sent out messages to each player wishing him/her luck and announcing their game times-right from her laptop. One of our intermediate players, Teddy Choi of Zillow, even credited his first win to Emily’s encouraging text!

We were delighted to use the Zipwhip platform to serve as such a quick-and-easy extension of customer service at our event. We can’t wait to see what the Zipwhip team cooks up next (group texting on the consumer to consumer product?  hope so!).

-Rebecca Lovell

Filed under Out And About Tagged with ,

Zipwhip Attends GeekWire Summit

March 9, 2012 Leave a comment

 

 

On Wednesday we joined tech industry luminary Ray Ozzie, Hulu CTO Richard Tom and 500 other industry taste-makers at the GeekWire Summit in downtown Seattle to talk tech and celebrate GeekWire’s 1st birthday. The event featured fireside chats and panels that covered everything from the new iPad, to the future of television. The summit portion of the day went from 1:00-5:00, and was followed by a birthday party that featured a “dev-licious” signature cocktail, killer food (more sliders please) and plenty of lively conversation. Things went from business to pleasure in 60 seconds after the last panel of the day. That’s when Presidents of the United States of America member Dave Dederer decided to serenade the GeekWire team with a spruced up version of Happy Birthday, following a few sips of wine.

The event was a great opportunity to celebrate the success of a fellow startup. More than relying on GeekWire to stay informed on the latest trends and breaking news from our industry, companies like ours benefit a great deal from the exposure the site offers. A story featured on GeekWire provides reach beyond that of many company blogs and generates interest in technology among the greater public. It was pleasure to take part in the celebration. So to John Cook, Todd Bishop, Johnathan Sposato and the rest of the team, Happy Birthday. May there be many more to come.

Filed under Out And About Tagged with ,

The Startup Conference-Seattle, “Project Frothy”

February 17, 2012 1 Comment

 

 

The Startup Conference Seattle, Project “Frothy”

February 16th, 2012

As a startup it’s critical to not only execute ideas, but to once in a while pull a white fluffy rabbit out of you’re a**, I mean hat—that’s what happened yesterday at The Startup Conference in Seattle, WA. On Wed Feb 16th at 9:45AM, project “Frothy” was conceived, 24 hours later “Frothy” was complete and deemed a success.

Zipwhip’s CEO, John Lauer, was invited to speak on the conference panel, How to get your story in the press, moderated by John Cook of Geekwire. Although John had no shortage of past PR stunts to share with the audience, he wanted to make a splash at the conference that was both relevant to the panel, and fun. It was time for the world to start hearing about Zipwhip TextSpresso, which is slotted to launch on Monday, March 5th, 2012.

In short, Zipwhip TextPresso is a top of the line Jura Impressa XS90 (from seattlecoffeegear.com) that was stripped down and rejiggered to work with lots of moving parts imported from all around the world to deliver a perfectly rich and frothy TextSpresso, just the way you like it. In other words, you text in your order to the Zipwhip TextSpresso machine from wherever you are so that your morning latte is waiting for you at Zipwhip headquarters. And it just so happens to have your name and phone number printed on the top of the froth with edible inks- a little extra sizzle for the homies.

To our knowledge, there is no text enabled espresso machine anywhere in the world, which makes Zipwhip TextSpresso special and worth sharing with others. I can assure you that it’s worthy of experiencing for yourself, and that’s exactly what project “Frothy” set out to do. We extended an exclusive invite to all attendees of the conference by handing out a promotional greeting card as they arrived inviting them to text the word “frothy” to phone number 206 631 9536. Each participant received a one year subscription to perfectly rich and frothy TextSpresso from Zipwhip. From the amount of people I saw texting the word frothy, I’m confident that we’ll be seeing some new faces around the TextSpresso machine during the morning commute. In fact, we might end up needing to make the warming tray larger.

In closing, TextSpresso is completely absurd, potentially really stupid, but holy crap is it a lot of fun. For that reason alone, it was worth all the effort and it got the Co-founder of Geekwire, John Cook, to publicly say that’s the type of story he wants to write about.

Cheers!

Filed under Out And About Tagged with , , , ,

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.