New features for industry social network i-Meet and PhindMe Mobile

Two high-profile, Web-based Philadelphia startups each announced more services to their products recently.

Center City-based, event-planning social network i-Meet.com announced today its partnership with PlannerNet, a service aimed at helping its nearly 10,000 member organizations to find, rate and contract for project-based labor.

That move follows a host of new add-ons to PhindMe Mobile, a mobile Web direct-to-consumer advertising company based at Drexel University’s Baiada Center for Entrepreneurship, which came earlier this month, according to a company press release.

The new service offered by i-Meet, the brainchild of 17th and Oregon’s own John Pino, is said to identify professional meeting and event skills that are available worldwide, helping to match planner experience and projects for event organizers. It’s a move Pino hinted at during an interview with Technically Philly in May.

“In this challenging, economic environment, companies are becoming more inclined to staff their events on a project by project basis,” Pino says in a company press release. “By connecting our worldwide social network to PlannerNet, we’re… delivering qualified talent”

PhindMe’s new features are more varied, ranging from native smartphone applications to Twitter functionality.

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Friday Q&A: John Pino, CEO of networking site i-Meet

John Pino loves launching companies and loves Philadelphia.

So where else would you expect him to launch what he says just might be the next big professional networking service?

In November, Pino founded and self-funded i-Meet.com, which utilizes social-networking features to connect like-minded people in their efforts to organize, plan and promote events. The South Philadelphia-native, who grew up near 17th and Oregon Avenue in St. Monica’s Parish, didn’t want his tech startup based anywhere else but Center City, which he says is on its way to being the next great corridor of innovation.

His “strong launch team” all learned the tech-business game in Philly.

“The impetus,” for the launch Pino says, was a “screaming need for a worldwide network in the meeting and event industry, and we decided we would make it happen. Especially when we figured out how to put a business overlay over the social aspects of the community.”

Now i-Meet has more than 7,000 members from 100 countries worldwide, Pino says, and, though he wouldn’t disclose specific revenue figures, the company has a real monetization strategy, including premium options.

We didn’t mention that we caught the social networker on Facebook, but he did mention how he’s going to make bank, why we don’t need another social network and that his parents were not part of organized crime.

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