Welcome to Whosintown - Where Business Travellers Connect

We were very kindly invited by the charming people at Mashupevent to present to a select audience of industry specialists, observers and investors at NESTA in London. The idea was to get the salient points of your business presentation across in 3 minutes max and my goodness, Tony Fish is very efficient at making sure folks stick to their allotted 3 minutes. You can see my co-founder David Henderson strutting his stuff here. This polished presentation only possible through hours of rehearsals in the pub the night before: I think the regulars thought David was trying out for the local am dram club.

Before and after the presentation side of things we had a booth (actually a smallish table)  from which to demonstrate our wares. Myself and David were really pleased at not only the turnout for the event but how interested everyone was (or at least, politely appeared to be) in the Whosintown concept of smarter business travel and of course greener travel. A number of people thought we did the same things as others in the business networking space and whilst that’s true, more attendees were able to see that we’re quite different in so far as we really aim not just at business folk but business folk who travel a lot and who want to meet like minded people on their travels.  In case you didn’t know, you can do this by sharing travel plans on your Whosintown profile. If you’re ever invited or are thinking of going to  Mashupevent, you must: good fun with good people and the chance to meet with people who might use your ideas, might give you ideas of course potential investors. Off the back of this event we’ve got meetings with 3 possible investment partners, so it can’t be bad. As we’re pre funded, any opportunity to mingle with the great and the good of the VC Funding or angel investor world is very welcome. So, there you go, a very pleasant half day’s event, good fun AND really good wine and canapes to finish off with too!!

Andrew Montgomery, Co-Founder Whosintown.

Its always interesting to see how people interact with their networking providers whether its for business or pleasure. Whosintown is currently looking to developing an API to hook into Facebook as you would think this was a necessity. However a recent article on Silicom.com doesn’t exactly have us rethinking our strategy, but it certainly gets you wondering about the practical benefits for professionals using domestic networking sites and how they are set up. If you read the article you will see that a number of execs share the views of Florentin Albu who comments “Florentin Albu, ICT manager for the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), uses several social networking tools with a “varying degree of success” and said for business-related networking Facebook scores lowest.” It seems to be the old story of horses for courses and sites designed for business people not surprisingly seem to fit the bill better for business people. Whosintown is certainly finding this to be the case: not only are users complimenting us on how easy the site is to use, but the added value of hooking up with fellow business people whilst on your travels is a bit of a double bonus ( we like to think of it as smarter networking). So, we will certainly be carrying on with our plans to offer a Facebook API and to interact with other sites, but we’re now more conscious of the importance of keeping a focus on the fact that Whosintown is and will remain a tool for the business people who want to travel smarter.

David Henderson. Co-Founder of Whosintown

Whosintown had a great time at the recent Business Travel Show. We were hoping to meet with some of the key decision makers in the business travel world at Earls Court and we certainly weren’t disappointed. It became apparent that one of the key benefits Whosintown offers, is going to be the ability to lower carbon emissions both for the individual and for organisations large and small. Without dropping any names at this stage, lets just say that we got a great response from executives at one of the UK’s leading carbon advisory orgs and also from the kind folks from one of the larger city councils who are promoting a smarter travel policy for business travellers within their city. In fact their mantra is very similar to what Whosintown promotes which is cut your carbon emissions, save money by going on fewer business trips but make each of those trips more productive.

We also had some very promising meetings with airlines and train companies. The angle these guys seem to want to take is plugging Whosintown into their loyalty card and executive club members. Lots of interesting things to look at here including affiliations with airlines and hotels working together to increase business and also with car hire companies working from airport or hotel sites. Once we got talking to some of these guys the number of ways to use the Whosintown service really started to grow. We were hoping that we might have bumped into some people from our space at the show, but they hadn’t taken time to turn up or maybe they just didn’t know the show was on.

Maybe because we were the only company of our type at the show, we got interviewed by several business travel magazines including the influential Trave Trade Gazette amongst others. We are looking forward to reading the articles when they are published. So hopefully this time next year we’ll have our own stand at the show, but in the meantime thanks to the guys at Business Taxis for letting use their stand for hanging out on!!

So now that Whosintown has launched, I thought we should share some background info on the co-founders - myself, Paul Stanyer and Andrew Montgomery. Monty and I are both Scots who grew up in Glasgow. Fate brought us together 25 years ago selling Financial Services for a Dutch Bank but we quickly realised we had a similar desire to affect our own destinies by spotting and trying to plug a a gap in the US woollen market for Scottish Cashmere garments. Unfortunately after an unsolicited approach, the ageing owners of the rather well known woollen company didn’t quite buy into our youthful exuberance and that closed that avenue! Monty re-built and then sold the family engineering business and moved to Manchester which he has used as a base to launch a handful of successful Internet companies. I spent most of the 80’s in the Travel Industry living and working in The Alps and Greece before completely diversifying into a career in Telecoms throughout the 90’s as Global Account Director within the Finance sector of the C&W Group. Enter Paul - he and I worked together in the Greek Isles late 80’s and whilst I moved into Corporate land circa ‘89 Paul continued to develop a very successful career spanning the 90’s driving overseas Sales, Marketing & Operational programes for some of the UK’s premier Travel Companies. Despite pursuing our individual aspirations throughout the 90’s we stayed in contact and met up the next century when I introduced Paul to Monty around 2003. Paul was now a very successful entrepreneur having launched both Holiday Taxis & Business Taxis, from zero to hero and Monty was growing his Pack-Net Internet business amongst others. Meanwhile I was chasing the elusive IPO with numerous Global start-up ventures. We had a few beers, figured we all had similar experiences whilst globetrotting, created Whosintown to solve the pain for Road-Warriors and the rest is history. Serendipity brought us together, we do not intend to waste this huge oportunity - come and join us! David

The founders of Whosintown will be at the Business Travel Show at Earls Court from Feb 5th - 7th to meet and greet with some of the movers in the business travel industry. We are hoping to spread the word about our services and how this can benefit not only companies and individuals but also the planet. When used correctly the Whosintown system makes for smarter travel, so saves time, increases numbers of meetings on any given trip and hopefully if you’re travelling less then that’s got to be good for the environment.

Of course Whosintown is also great for business networking and works well even if you are staying in your own location as it tells you who’s coming to your town. Once we get back from the show we’ll let you know how we get on and hopefully be reporting on a high level of interest. If you’re at the show we’d be happy to meet up.