Wildfire team sunburned, exhausted and content…

We’ve always aspired to be a great company that works hard and plays hard (like the guys at Patagonia that hit the surf during their lunch hour or the Burton team that takes the day off on powder days). This week we’ve come one step closer to achieving this by basing ourselves in Whistler for the week. Working in the morning and evenings and snowboarding and mountain biking in the afternoons….it doesn’t get much better than this. For anyone looking to get in a few more turns before the season ends, Blackcomb Mountain still has a pretty good base. And at this time of the year you get to snowboard with bears (not kidding….we came across one today on the ski slopes) so the adrenaline rush is even better than usual!

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Zuckerberg & Sandberg on Facebook's Vision, Opportunities & Privacy

Below is a great interview with Mark Zuckerberg (Founder & CEO, Facebook) and Sheryl Sandberg (COO, Facebook) at the recent D6 Conference in San Diego. Enjoy!

Interview (Part 1 | 5:52 mins)

[brightcove vid=1576310560&exp=910498365&w=486&h=412]

Interview (Part 2 | 6:59 mins)

[brightcove vid=1578613944&exp=910498365&w=486&h=412]

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WildfireApp featured at Facebook Developer Garage in Tokyo

Good news….last week we were invited by Facebook to present our app at their developer garage in Tokyo! One of our developers, Masaki, presented at the event (see photos below) and according to him our app was one of the best received….but I guess he could be a little biased ;)

Photo: Masaki presenting our app. Awesome job!

 

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Our app has launched!

The alpha/invitational version of our app has launched! After all-nighters pulled around the globe (many thanks Masaki in Japan, Gugod in Taiwan, Erkki in Estonia and Alain in Boston!) our Wildfire application is finally live and ready for users. So please help us out by applying for an invite at www.WildfireApp.com and telling us what you think. All feedback is very much appreciated!

So what, you're probably asking, is the Wildfire App? It's a handy tool for businesses to create online promotions (e.g. sweepstakes and contests) that are integrated with the viral features (e.g. friend invites, newsfeeds, minifeeds) of social networks. So for any one person that enters a promotion via our app, scores of their social networks friends will hear about it too and the promotion will spread virally. We've especially designed our product so that it's simple and cost-effective enough for even the smallest business to use; you can literally have a sweepstakes or contest up and running in minutes. We enable you to create attractive banners (or you can upload your own) and you can post these on your website, your company's social network page(s) or both.

For those of you who are not regular participants in online sweepstakes and contests, you'll probably be surprised how popular these things are. A whopping 80% of all online users have entered online sweepstakes and 50% enter them at least monthly! According to Jupiter Research*, offering sweepstakes online is one of the most effective ways to attract large audiences to a viral campaign. For example, company pages on Facebook and MySpace that offer contests on average acquire twice as many friends as pages without contests**.

So check out our app at www.WildfireApp.com. We'd love to get your feedback!

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Welcome to our blog!

Hey everyone! Welcome to the very first post of our newly created blog. In addition to keeping you up-to-date with new product developments and happenings at our company, we hope that this blog will serve as a useful resource for those of you who are trying to figure out how on earth your company can effectively reach the hundreds of millions of social network users (50% of whom* log into their accounts at least once per day!). The social network crowd is a fairly illusive one as they tend to not like being marketed to and they are (at least in my experience) pretty good at ignoring banner ads. We think we've developed a handy tool for reaching them (in a way that benefits both users and companies) so we look forward to sharing this with you along with our two cents on how best to market on social networks. We'll also, no doubt, keep you posted on the joys and troughs of launching a new business (especially when your business partner is your fiance!). So far it's been mostly joys (despite many sleepless nights and long working weekends) but, as with any startup, I'm sure there'll also be many tough spots. Anyway, thanks for reading and please do drop us a post if you have any comments or questions.

* according to Jupiter Research

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