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Fall 2011 Newsletter: New Partners, New Awards, New Staff

New Strategic Partnership in Colombia

We are thrilled to announce that we have signed a contract with a major new partner in Colombia. Carvajal Tecnología y Servicios is a well-known Colombian company with operations in 15 countries that is already working with both shopkeepers and their suppliers to develop innovative technology solutions. To give just one example, they are working with the Colombian government to offer financial services to lower-income communities via a payment network installed in small retail stores. Their other products include business intelligence, e-commerce platforms, and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and Information Technology Outsourcing (ITO) services, among others. Carvajal Tecnología y Servicios is part of Grupo Carvajal, a Colombian company founded in 1904 with seven different operating units and nearly $2 billion in revenues.
As part of our alliance Carvajal will be deploying Tiendatek in shops throughout Colombia and together we will be developing and commercializing new products for consumer packaged goods companies, financial entities and others. In a small world twist, we worked with shopkeepers involved with the Carvajal Foundation several years ago to test and refine the first Tiendatek prototype.
The goals of our partnership are ambitious, and we’ve already gone public with the announcement, so stay tuned for exciting operational updates.

Frogtek Wins Major Competition For Mobile Startups in Europe

In dramatic fashion, we learned in September that we had won first place in Vodafone Mobile Clicks, described by the New York Times as the biggest competition for European mobile start-ups (we are a global company but our main technology office is in Spain). Our CTO Guillermo represented us at the finals in Amsterdam and later collected the prize money of €150,000. More than anything we were humbled to be mentioned in the same sentence as so many impressive companies.

You can see our presentation for Vodafone here and an interview with Guillermo immediately after the awards ceremony here.

Frogtek Mexico Reaches the Finals in the IniciativaMX Contest
We are also proud to announce that we were chosen from over 50,000 applications as one of the 50 finalists for Iniciativa MX, a TV show in Mexico that highlights the best social initiatives in the country. This unique program brings together the leading television channels to create awareness and support for social entrepreneurs through a reality-show format. Fortunately we didn’t have to live in a camera-covered house and received over $100,000 in support as well as a very solid stamp of approval. Moreover, all of the finalists were recently invited to have breakfast with the President of Mexico Felipe Calderon!

New Operational Strategy in Mexico

We are preparing to implement a much more aggressive sales and deployment strategy in Mexico and to help prepare we have created new sales roles as well as convinced a seasoned entrepreneur (see bio below) to join our team. As part of this planning process we are now riding in the delivery trucks of a key partner visiting over 40 small stores per person per day and at each stop we are testing different sales pitches and pricing models in order to refine our value proposition. We will have much more to report here in our next newsletter.

New Web site at Frogtek.org

It was well overdue but we finally have a new Web site. The new Frogtek.org (or Frogtek.com) has new information about our products, activities and awards and we will continue to add content in the coming weeks and months. Check it out!
Team in Mexico Grows

We have grown the team in Mexico in order to accelerate deployment, mostly recently with a very experienced entrepreneur in his own right.
Marcos Eshkenazi. We are extremely excited to have Marcos join our team as he is already a successful entrepreneur with a long record of building companies from the ground up. In total he has founded 15 different companies and accumulated more than 18,000 “flight hours” related to building start-ups. Among his companies are: Digital City, the first distributor for Movistar (Telefonica) in Mexico; Avizpate.com, an online travel comparison service; and Chikabum, the first company to bring custom content to mobile phones in Latin America. Marcos is also an investor in Frogtek so we want to give him a double welcome. Welcome Welcome Marcos!

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