Better Together!

Today’s been an exciting day as 80108 Media™ announced we are merging with go2®, a leader in mobile search and directory services to become go2 Media™.

What’s this mean for you? We’re adding more focus to the growing demand for local, personal, mobile content. We’re working to create the ultimate user experience for the local information you want delivered at just the right time, in just the right fashion.

Find the press release of our merger here.

It’s Been a While – But It’s Worth It!

Sorry for such a long lapse between now and our last post. With today being such a big day, we figured we needed to get the word out on our recent MITX / BIMA award nomination and our new way we’ve improved your mobile content experience with 80108’s mobile website.

First things first, we we’re selected to be one of four finalists for the Best of Mobile and one of five finalists for Technology. Check it out here at www.mitxawards.com.

Through our pilot phase, several of you let us know you wanted to access our content from your mobile phone via the mobile web. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out the best way to display and think we have a winner. Feel free to check out our mobile website by entering http://www.80108.com from your mobile phone. You’ll get the content you like, plus the chance to check out some of our other channels.

Let us know what more we can do for you. If you’re not getting our email newsletters, make sure to log into MyAccount and add it to your profile. Keep your fingers crossed for a two award win!

-Adam

Hello, Is this thing on?

After a lot of white board drawings and quick approval from Facebook, you can now find and add our application, RiYL (Recommended if You Like) to your profile page. Whether you’re new to facebook (like me, as those who remember the bounded facebooks on campus) or are a seasoned alum, RiYL is designed to give you the best of your city without all the work.

The Intern’s First Big Project

As an intern, at least from my experience, your job is to do whatever tasks or projects you’re told to do. Sometimes it’s grueling, sometimes it’s interesting, and then everyone once in a while you get a project that’s just really cool, like my last project, which sent me to the quaint resort town of Kennebunkport, Maine.

During the first several weeks of my internship I was told to keep the weekend of July 20th open. As time went on, I learned that this particular weekend was IDG Venture Boston’s annual summer PR event called Catch the Wave. For the event, the general partners of this venture capital firm invite investors, CEOs of portfolio companies, and other IDG friends for a networking event/weekend getaway. This year, Catch the Wave decided to add a new feature, the 80108 text messaging service. The week prior and during the course of the event, people would receive text messages from 80108 with weather updates, logistical information, trivia questions, and other relevant information.

The Case for Semantics – one person’s lazy is another person’s convenience

One of the great things about building a product from the ground up is when users share with you their experience and it matches or exceeds your hopes. For example, I came in this morning to my normal feed of Google Alerts, a simple little tool I use to scour the web for all of the previous day’s postings about 80108 and 80108.com.

This morning, I was presented with a link to the Blog “The Nullset” and a post authored by nyuszi who blogged about 80108 as part of a recent BzzAgent campaign we wrapped in June for BostonNow.com.

Adventures in Social Networking [aka. How To Win Friends & Influence People]

Though originally intended for individual use, “corporate” MySpace profiles are nothing new. Bands can get big on the basis of their friend count alone, and in addition to every man/woman/child (some of which haven’t been born yet), most films, comedy troups, bars, shops, and yes, corporate entities, have their own account. The ubiquitious “Tom” has 183,615,590 friends and counting, and his number 1 friend is AT&T.

An intern’s first week

Ahh the office environment, I could go on and on about it except for the fact that I’ve been here a total of 8 days. So I’ll just talk about my first impressions instead.

I first heard about 80108 through a friend, an older, wiser, corporate friend who works in venture capital. She told me to check out this new text messaging company called 80108 and then tell her what I thought. So I explored the website and signed up for the service. I mean, it sounded pretty good, free text messages about things going on around Boston, why not?

Welcome & A Sum of 80108 Text Messages

Welcome to the 80108 Media blog. It’s brand spanking new but not super fancy. On these pages we hope to share an inside perspective on the company, our service and our subscribers. We’ll do our best to post on a semi-regular basis and keep things entertaining.

Thank you to everyone who has signed up for 80108. The feedback so far has been overwhelmingly positive. We’ve been really happy to hear about so many ‘80108 moments’: when one of our messages arrives at exactly the right time – from a free concert notification when Ryan was feeling particularly bored and uninspired, the final score for a sports game when Jack couldn’t watch, or the severe weather alert about an approaching thunderstorm just as Caroline was heading out the door (note: names have been changed to protect the innocent).