Social Internet

Ideablob — and a win at at DEMO!

So I have some very exciting news to share! (www.advanta.com) Advanta Bank Corp - where I work in their Innovation Group, just launched www.ideablob.com at the prestigious DEMO (www.demo.com) conference in San Diego last week.

Advanta is one of the largest issuers of Mastercard credit cards for small business owners. We have been in financial services for over 50 years. For the last four months, our team was frantically pushing through to bring ideablob to life. And in case you didn’t know — it’s a huge feat for a bank to have managed this in such a short time. (I’ve become a quasi-expert on legalese involving the launch of a social network!) It was a not only a fantastic learning experience, but also incredibly gratifying to see how brillaintly our legal, Project management, customer service and innovation teams worked together. Truly a roller-coaster ride!

We had every intention of launching this year, but getting into DEMO motivated us and pushed us further to launch sooner. DEMO only invites about 70 companies from hundreds of applications it receives. And our fantastic team (all members are not pictured above) went and conquered !

I will soon share with you our flickr photo stream, but to give you an idea of how carefully and beautifully the whole launch was orchestrated — 10 of us from Advanta were at DEMO, each of us had different T-shirts that represented a particular small business industry and we had matching business cards with it. On the first day — I was the DRAMA QUEEN, representing actors (yepp — they are a small business) and my business card stated facts about actors. The T-shirts were a delight and we were asked several times if they were for sale! haha…

Anyhow, I’d urge you to check out www.ideablob.com

It’s a humble effort from a bank to try to be different and to try to make a difference. We want to build this online community for the give and take of business ideas. We are also awarding $10,000 to the business idea that gains the most votes at the end of each month. Yep - we are talking the talk and walking the walk. As we should be. I’m very proud of my team and the guys at Red Tettermer (www.redtettemer.com) and Seso Media (www.seso.net) who helped us make this possible.

(BTW — we also won the People’s Choice award at Demo. woohooo. Any Demo peeps that chance upon this, do say hello!)