Movitas Mobile plans to raise $2.7 million

According to recent SEC filings Movitas, recent acquirer of PhindMeMobile, is in the midst of raising $2.7 million in funding. According to documents, filed yesterday, the company has raised $700,000 thus far.

The Collegeville-based company specializes in mobile marketing for the hospitality industry and other location-based businesses and events.

No venture capital firm appears to be associated with the funding round.

In an email to Technically Philly, Movitas spokesperson Suzanne Harris declined to comment.

More details on Motivas purchase of PhindMe

Word first leaked of Motivas Mobile purchasing Phindme Mobile when, as a Phindme spokeswoman puts it, “a Google crawler made its way through a Wordpress preview.”

It took five days for the deal between the two regional mobile technology companies to be finalized, announced and now celebrated.

“It’s about people and the chance to join forces with well-respected entrepreneurs and innovators who share a common vision,” Suzanne Harris of PhindMe told Technically Philly.

Details of the deal continue to become clear.

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BREAKING: PhindMe acquired by Movitas

This time, they tell us it has really happened.

PhindMe Mobile, the mobile Web direct-to-consumer advertising company based at Drexel University’s Baiada Center for Entrepreneurship, has been purchased by Collegeville-based Motivas Mobile for an undisclosed sum, according to a message sent to Technically Philly by the company’s chief operating officer Doug Bellenger.

This announcement comes fives days after a draft of the announcement was published on PhindMe’s corporate blog accidentally, Bellenger telling us then “this has not happened.” The message was quickly taken down, but Technically Philly and Philly Tech News spotted it.

Motivas specializes in mobile marketing for the hospitality industry, according to today’s announcement on the PhindMe blog. According to the post, “PhindMe has already begun deployments of its products within the Movitas customer base of hotels and resort properties,” including its recently release Everywhereigo.

More details to follow. See the Motivas press release here.

Links: SAP goes green and More

DEFINITE READS

• The Washington Post reports that 61 percent polled by Newsweek and Intel say the economic recession hurt the nation’s edge in innovations.

After the jump, a software company goes green, a statewide emergency notification program and other tech stories you should eye, including our best read piece of the week.

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TNT: PhindMe gets social with Everywhereigo

PhindMe Mobile has been preaching mobile for years, ever since it entered into Drexel’s Lebow College of Business competition.

First, the company focused on text-based marketing before unrolling Everywhereigo, the company’s mobile CMS. Now, PhindMe is looking to become the premier vendor for social media-focused mobile Web sites. A buzzword packed space that CMO Jon Cooper says is currently unoccupied.

“[Social] follows the evolution of mobile from being a simple utility,” Cooper says.

To stake its claim as the go-to social media experts in the mobile sphere, the company has just released Social Media Hub, a series of features for its mobile CMS that allow users to easily incorporate social media content in their mobile Web site. And, if all goes well, the company will be one of the next great mobile platforms for businesses.

“Social media is the fundamental thing we want to be good at,” Cooper says.

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Friday Q & A: Doug Bellenger of Philly Startup Leaders and PhindMe

In its two years of existence Philly Startup Leaders has outgrown its Web site and much of its administrative backend.

“We saw this list of activities creeping up on us,” said Doug Bellenger member of the PSL Board of Directors and COO of PhindMe Mobile. “And we said, ‘How are we going to address all of this?’”

To help bring the entrepreneurial support group up to date, it has organized an entire weekend hackithon that hopes to gather together the community to cross some items off its to do list.

We asked Bellenger what specific goal the group has for the weekend event as well as what he feels is PSL’s greatest accomplishment.

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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: Chuck Sacco, CEO of PhindMe Mobile

It’s a helluva school project.

While completing MBA degrees at Drexel University in 2006, Chuck Sacco, Doug Bellenger and two others founded PhindMe Mobile, with vague plans on improving the mobile Web-based interaction between businesses and their customers.

Since then, two have bailed and now CEO Sacco and COO Bellenger are leading a small team crafting the future of mobile Web direct-to-consumer advertising.

Sacco, who did his undergraduate work at St. Joseph’s University, has a few technology startups in his past and has learned from them, he said.

“For me, it’s always been about having platforms where you can plug in functions and take them into new markets as the world changes,” he said.

PhindMe, has to be an example of that – one on which Sacco was willing to bet. He and Bellenger put in about $80,000 of their own capital to launch, and last June they borrowed nearly $225,000 more from friends and family, according to the Philadelphia Business Journal. They launched in October, and they say they’ll break even as early as June – helped by the national attention they’ve gotten in advertising communities.

Below see how the South Jersey native – who says he has “always considered Philadelphia as home” – describes PhindMe’s future and for whom the alumnus of St. Joe’s and Drexel cheers in Big Five basketball.

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