match2blue

Unless you have been sleeping under a stone for the last couple of days you just couldn’t escape the news about the grey cloud coming from Iceland which has been covering almost the whole of Europe for over a week now. Probably you are a victim of nature’s latest strike against travel-mad civilization and are stuck in an airport in the middle of nowhere where you wanted to relax from your boss for two days until get back to work in Warsaw or Stockholm 2000 miles away.

Affected travelers shouldn’t lose hope – there are a lot of ways to deal with the forces of nature in the year 2010. The most popular one in the last couple of days is simply networking – it is extremely likely that you are not the only person among thousands sitting in the concourse in an airport in Central Europe and wanting to get to Rome as fast as possible. And that’s exactly what travelers are doing at the moment – engaging, exchanging, socializing. People search actively for travel mates or ask for tips from others on how to make the best of a bad situation, as Online Social Media reports. And with the help of mobile social networking tools for smartphones, like Miles & More MemberScout, every smartphone user can find a travel companion. This application, with which travelers can simply search for other travelers near their current location or arrange a common trip, has experienced an enormous response in the last two days. Posts like “How is the situation at the MUC airport?” or “Anybody stuck in Oslo and looking for a way to Rome?” were flooding the member-helps-member section of the application. Requests like “Anybody going from Zurich to Helsinki?” resulting in spontaneous ride sharing, apart from the usual Taxi Sharing function, which had been transformed into an Anything-That-Moves-Sharing function. The app, especially adjusted to the requirements of frequent flyers, almost seems to be as firm as a rock in the face of the disaster by giving travelers a ray of hope on the (ash grey) horizon.

We are really excited to announce that Miles & More just recently launched its “Miles & More MemberScout” Version 2.0 powered by match2blue. Right now the app is available in the Apple App Store. But Blackberry users don‘t worry, a BlackBerry version will be available soon. The app is for frequent travelers who can engage with other travelers and access useful information on their travels. Users can recommend some remarkable places to eat or stay and the best places to visit and of course also get information from others. All this happens in real time, so you can access your profile on your arrival at the airport and search for other people to share a taxi together to get to the city center. Members get customized information through our „matching-engine“ – an automatic reconciliation of the transferred information.

Based on the Miles & More MemberScout app we want to provide you a deeper insight into our technology and the features we developed and use for our customers. So we decided to present some of our features more detailed and individually including the technology behind it during the next couple of weeks.

We also just released a press release together with Progress Apama about the app and its possibilities. And Lufthansa released a press release themselves to promote the app that can be found on the Lufthansa Website. Moreover the weekly German magazine “Werben und Verkaufen” just chose MemberScout as the App of the week. Thanks a lot guys! So there is a lot going on at the moment for us and we are really excited about it. Stay tuned!

Do you want to work in a young and creative team where your ideas can make a big difference? We are now looking for an assistant to the CFO/ COO. You are working solely responsible as a Human Resource Manager and support the CFO in strategic and operative tasks concerning finance and operations. Interested? Get to know more and apply today!

Yesterday Marc H. Morial, the President and CEO of the National Urban League and John D. Hofmeister, the Chairman, were inviting to kick-off the National Urban League Centennial Celebration. One of the guests at the event was the mayor of New York City Michael Bloomberg. The National Urban League presented that evening amongst others their new online and mobile platforms that connect the Urban League and its family of nearly 100 affiliates in one continuous community for the first time. The mobile application ” I Am Empowered” was developed by match2blue and is available for download at the Apple App Store, Android Market and coming soon, the Blackberry App World. Members can access information and engage with others. Check out the video above for a first glimpse at the app. More information to come soon here.

On the 28th and 29th of January our CEO Stephanie Renda was at the M-Days in Munich to join the discussion about the future perspectives of mobile communication channels. Most importantly for us was the second day, because Dr. Torsten Wingenter from Lufthansa presented the Lufthansa Miles & More MemberScout application in the panel “Customers! Mobile Performance, Perspectives of Applications and Succesful Content Networks” which was moderated by the analyst expert Peggy Anne Salz from MSearchGroove.

The audience clearly liked the presentation as there was an animated discussion with the audience about the topic Mobile Communities that followed. All in all the first official presentation of our app in front of an expert audience was a great success.

The previous day Torsten Schwarz from Absolit already presented the MemberScout app briefly in his presentation about Location Based Services and acquisition of new business via Smartphones. Talking about acquistion of new business, we were successful at the M-Days, too … more to come soon!

After a long see-saw we had to move out of our office in TriBeCa last week and were a little bit sad of course. But luckily we found a new space that is as good as the old one … or even better. So now we can become creative again and work on new products. We have some great applications in the pipeline as well as an update for the Lufthansa Memberscout application which will all be released in the next couple of weeks.

There is also going be a major change in our backend system that improves our matching engine and implicates brand-new possibilities for match2blue. We are very excited about all these changes in the near future. So stay tuned for some updates!

mobile zeitgeist just released the 5th issue of mobile zeitgeist SPECIAL, this time the topic is Mobile 2.0 with a focus on mobile applications and App Stores. We are happy that we could contribute an article to this interesting topic on page 9: “Unternehmenskomunikation von Web 2.0 zu Mobile 2.0″.

You can download all issues here at mobile-zeitgeist.com. A big thank you goes to mobile zeitgeist and Heike Scholz.