» 2008 » September

I just returned from San Francisco after heading out there last week for TechCrunch 50.  It was an exciting 3 days to say the least. Although, I have to say that I was more impressed with the judges and the tech celebrities than the actual presenters.  My expectations were built up from the previous years TechCrunch 40 and two amazing startups, Animoto.com and Mint.com.

Everybody including me was pretty excited to see presenter, Ashton Kutcher and his wife Demi Moore.  Michael Arlington put together an A-list of judges which included: Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Cuban, Chris DeWolfe, Tim O’Reilly, Kevin Rose to name a few. 

(more…)

Expedited Travel, parent company of RushMyPassport.com and RushMyTravelVisa.com, has opened its first retail location in South Florida.  Located at 412 Clematis Street,  Expedited Travel will serve as the first licensed passport hand courier in West Palm Beach.  Consumers can get their U.S. passports and travel visas processed in as quickly as 24 hours.  Mayor Lois Frankel of West Palm Beach was amongst the many guests that attended the grand opening party which was held on September 4, 2008 from 5:00 pm till 8:00 pm.

Expedited Travel was co-founded by BOALT in June 2007 along with investment firm, Main Street.  The company was formed as a solution to the passport crisis which occurred last summer.  Since its inception, Expedited Travel has been featured on CNN, Forbes and CNSBC.  Expedited Travel’s sales exceeded 5 million dollars in the first year and is already on track to exceed last years sales by over 20% in this volatile economy.

I’ve been asked on several occasions to recount my most memorable experience in interactive advertising.  Since the start of my career in 1997, I’ve seen a lot of crazy things happen, however, nothing tops the experience I had just shortly after Hurricane Katrina.  My client and good friend now, Shawn Burst, asked me to help out a friend of his, Dolph Frederico.  When I called Dolph, he told me about this crazy t-shirt idea he had regarding Ray Nagin subsequent to his speech on rebuilding New Orleans.

In case you don’t remember he wanted to rebuild a “chocolate New Orleans” and said, “you can’t have New Orleans no other way.”  As you can imagine, it caused a public uproar.
(more…)

This summer we celebrated our 1st year anniversary for RushMyPassport.com.  RushMyPassport.com was BOALT’s first startup and we are extremely excited with the year-end financials.  We set, what I thought, was a pretty ambitious sales goal of $5 mil in our first year and we reached it with a few days left in the fiscal year.

After being featured on the home page of Forbes, MSNBC and CNN as “the passport pros”, we’ve quickly become a disrupter in our industry.  In the past year, I’ve also been interviewed by two talk radio stations.

We’ve helped over 25k people in 1 year receive their passport in 24 hours and we work with over 400 of the Fortune 500 companies. 

Stay tuned, we have a lot in store for our 2nd fiscal year.