In between checking out the sights of Kathmandu I had the chance to meet up for lunch with Bal Joshi the founder of Thamel.com. Thamel allows Nepalese abroad to buy gifts and services for their relatives living in Nepal.
It was a great exchanging ideas with Bal as both of our companies are focused on serving friends and family separated from their loved ones back home. Thamel does an amazing job providing services from birthday cake delivery to offering mortgages to buy a home in Nepal. They even take a picture of gifts being delivered to family members for their relatives to enjoy overseas. Thamel’s most unusual product is live goats which they deliver. That’s when I realized how easy the load business really is!
This will be a special year at the Philippine Fiesta in New Jersey, August 18th and 19th. I am excited to announce that Beau Canlas from MYX will be joining Aryty at the event to meet with guests and even take time for photo opportunities!
I met Beau while visiting Manila last spring. This Virginia naitive is a rising star on the MYX network in the Philippines and already is hosting 2 shows on MYX stateside! Beau’s positive energy and charisma cannot be ignored but most of all this Fil-Am’s pride in his heritage truly shines through!
Check out Beau!
Make sure to stop by the Aryty booth this weekend and say hello to Beau!
Aryty is a proud to be a sponsor of this years Philippine Fiesta to be held August 18th and 19th. This is one of the best events of the year with special performances from Pops and Piolo in addition to Jun Polistico!
You can expect to see top competition in the Fiesta Idol Championship, Filipina beauties in the Miss Philippine Fiesta competition, interesting exhibits and of course outstanding performances from the headliners! The Aryty Angels will be attending all the way from sunny California and there will be a special guest appearance in the Aryty booth on Sunday!
The weekend is sure to be amazing! Hope to see you there.
Google officially announced their acquisition of GrandCentral. GC allows you to have one phone number for life that will reach you at any of your other phone numbers. Some of the cool features they offer include screening calls, listening in on voice mails in progress, customized greetings and unlimited control of your messages.
The impressive thing GrandCentral did was to take a simple concept and execute exceptionally well on it. Their usability and design is fantastic and their features are very easy to use. Even Googlely!
Craig and Vincent, the founders of GrandCentral are awesome guys and I congratulate them and their whole team on a job well done! Google is fortunate to have them on board.
MeetMoi is a new location based mobile dating service that lets you find dates without ever having to logon to your PC. You can exchange pictures and text messages with other singles through your phone while remaining anonymous until your ready to meet. A million people wrote about MeetMoi today including the Wall Street Journal, Techcrunch and others. Congrats to the team there!
Andrew Weinreich, the founder of MeetMoi is a good friend. We originally met in 1998 while I was working at Alex. Brown (investment bank) and Andrew was the CEO of a 3 person company called Macroview Communications aka SixDegrees. I visited Andrew’s office to learn more about his company on the chance it would become a winner and a client for the firm. After 5 minutes of sharing his story he asked me why I would be wasting my time at a bank when I could be do something interesting and following a dream. When I told him that I didn’t have a great idea for a new business he explained “It doesn’t matter because it will never seem like you have the right idea. Just do something!” Within 6 months of that meeting I quit my job on his encouragement to start a company and 12 months later Andrew sold SixDegrees for $125 million! Since then Andrew has started several other companies and is now off to the races with MeetMoi. Thanks to Andrew I’m working on new ways to get people saying Aryty a little more often.
His advice is some of the best I ever received. It never seems like the right time or place to start a business but the most important thing to do is get started on something! And until you do check out MeetMoi, maybe you’ll find a hot date!
I’m finally in Manila and haven’t had a moment to stop! In between meetings, eating and sitting in traffic there has been little time for much else but it’s great to be back. Daniel, Aryty’s Creative Director has been busy meeting with local talents that work with us to build Aryty and snapping a photo diary of our trip along the way.
Hope to have a few moments to post some pics and blogs over the next few days! Never a dull moment in the load business.
This year I’ve taken lots of flights from New York to the West Coast promoting Aryty in Filipino communities like Daly City. Most of them have been on JetBlue.
Choosing to fly on JetBlue is easy. The price is good, the planes are great with color tv and leather seats and the staff is always upbeat and friendly. It’s one of the few companies today that I would go out of my way to recommend to someone. Their service is truly “viral.”
Today the founder of JetBlue, David Neeleman stepped down as CEO. Neeleman lived and breathed JetBlue. He’s always on flights interacting with customers, motivating the team and driving his vision of what flying should be like. Apparently lots of other people like that vision because JetBlue is one of the most successful carriers in the U.S.
I admire Mr. Neeleman and the company he built. Making flying pleasant is no easy task. I hope JetBlue won’t turn into just another average airline now that he’s gone. Daly City is too far to travel like that.
I was just reading a blog post written by one of my friends James who co-founded Hot or Not. He mentioned that when he and Jim started Hot or Not they sent an email to about 40 friends to let them know about the site. From there things took off as word of mouth spread. Since that time they estimate around 100 million people have visited the site!
Our success at Aryty depends on the same type of word of mouth that made Hot or Not such a homerun. We will never have enough money to advertise parang a large corporation and frankly you can’t buy trust. Instead our plan is to deliver the best service to buy cellphone load possible and to build our business one customer at a time. Hopefully if we do a great job you will help us by telling a friendabout Aryty.
Isabihin mo yung kaibigan mo tungkol sa Aryty! Salamat po
A strong peso is nice for Filipino’s who send their kids to school overseas or want to take a vacation in the states but it’s not great for those who want to send money to the Philippines or buy Philippine goods because you get fewer pesos for the dollar.
WOW! Tingnan mo ito!
We always try to keep the cost of sending load to the Philippines as low as possible for Aryty customers. Unfortunately we cannot control currency fluctuation. When the Peso goes up the price of load will increase and when the Peso goes down load prices will decline as well. And rest assured, while the dollar might be worth a little less for the time being, the gift of load is not!
Japan has a reputation for leading the world in mobile innovations. While if todays news out of DoCoMo is any indication of things to come for mobile culture in the Philippines break out the gravy!
DoCoMo which is Japan’s largest carrier announced they are partnering with McDonalds to let you pay for your Happy Meal and get promos using your DoCoMo mobile phone . Totoo ito! Fries and keitai!
So I was thinking….maybe Aryty should do a tie up with Jollibee! Instead of sending load to the Philippines you could use Aryty to send a Chickenjoy or crispy fries! Anong sa tingin mo?? haha
