In the “think tank,” execs at NewsBlaster.com scheme and relax amid swirling bubbles. The tank,a home Jacuzzi,is actually where they spend a lot of time, said Vince Walden, president and COO. A web site launch in June and an anticipated IPO has NewsBlaster’s 14 employees working 12 to 20 hours a day, and in need of a little bubble-assisted relaxation.
The folks at Anaheim-based NewsBlaster are busy creating an online “automated public relations service” for firms wanting to promote products and services. The way it works: Businesses use a template to generate a press release, which then gets routed via e-mail to designated writers, editors, publishers, industry analysts and venture capital firms. NewsBlaster plans to charge businesses a $95, three-month membership fee.
On the NewsBlaster end, a database is built using “spider technology,” which crawls the Internet capturing e-mail addresses of various media professionals. Those addresses then are targeted by region, industry and 12 product key-words, said Sinan Kanatsiz. He is an investor in the company and principal of K-Comm, a six-person, high-tech marketing agency in Placentia.
The service also informs the business owner how long someone looked at a release and whether or not it was thrown away,the software monitors the delete option.
The NewsBlaster team projects it will secure 600 accounts per month. To do that, it will begin spending its monthly $140,000 marketing budget on ads in entrepreneurial magazines, local business journals and The Wall Street Journal.
NewsBlaster has raised somewhat less than $1 million in its first-round of investment capital. About 10 local angel investors in industries ranging from technology to retail back the company, Walden said, who is also an equity owner. NewsBlaster’s chief technology consultant, Shahram Ghandeharizadeh is an equity owner as well. Ghandeharizadeh is a tenured research professor of computer science at USC and specializes in relational databases, the key technology behind the web site. n
