By Dr Stuart Battersby (@blastStu) Co-founder atĀ Chatterbox
The social aspects of social media are often overlooked, missing the core point, you know, that people can talk toĀ each otherĀ about stuff. People can say things that others get excited about, annoyed about, sad about (I could go on).
We founded Chatterbox to solve this; to not just treat social media as a stream of unrelated pieces of text, but as threads of excitement which groups of people build together. Ā These are real conversations, good old fashion chatter between people.
The software we’ve built helps large organisations manage the deluge of data across social networks by finding and understanding this excitement: who caused it, who else got excited and what was it about? Ā This helps them effectively engage with their consumers, accelerate product innovation and drive sales.
Coming from academic backgrounds (Chatterbox is actually backed by our research at Queen Mary University of London) we could see that whilst we were quite strong in research and tech, we needed some guidance in developing the essential commercial aspects of our business.
This, along with O2 being within our target market, drove our decision to apply for the Wayra accelerator programme.Ā Three months in, we can say that the experience certainly has been one of acceleration.
A few days after winning Wayra Week (the final pitching event, video below) I was whisked off to present Chatterbox to two different departments at Telefonica totalling over 700 people… not bad exposure for an early stage company wouldn’t you say?
We’re now in a recruitment phase building our both the tech and commercial sides of our team.Ā Over the last few months we’ve been growing and developing our platform with a large set of real world beta testers and it should be born into the world by the end of September. Ā The development certainly doesn’t stop there though, this point will be the beginning of an intense journey – we’ve got many more exciting features up our digital sleeves that we’ll be bringing to the platform as we develop from our initial launch.
Visit the Chatterbox website here
And here’s a video of our initial pitch!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQBfmcUo8iE&feature=relmfu[/youtube]
