We’re pleased to announce our recognition at the 2013 Westpac Hawke’s Bay Chamber of Commerce Business Awards a few days ago.
Our new product Strea.ma won the first award of the night, the Gen-i Business Breakthrough category. This award “seeks to locate and encourage creative business ideas that offer a real breakthrough in a process, system, function or simply invention- that is capable of being supported into commercial reality”.
We’re thrilled that our peers in the local business community feel that Strea.ma delivers in these key aspects.
Mogul has a history of success at the Hawke’s Bay Business Awards. Mogul clients won the Online Business Award in both 2011 (Agrecovery) and 2012 (Lumsden Kindergarten).
Read more about the 2013 Hawke’s Bay Business Awards here.
Here is Gen-i’s official press release about the award:
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19 November 2013
Hawke’s Bay digital marketing company Mogul Limited wins Gen-i Breakthrough Award for innovative social media app Strea.ma
Social media display wall a hit with judges and billion-dollar company Xero
An innovative social media app designed by Hawke’s Bay digital marketing company Mogul Limited is set for a bright future after receiving the Gen-i Breakthrough Award at the recent Hawke’s Bay Business Awards, and an enthusiastic endorsement from the CEO of star-performing accounting company Xero.
The Gen-i Breakthrough award seeks to “locate and encourage creative business ideas from the Hawke’s Bay that offer a real breakthrough in a process, system, function or invention, which is capable of being supported into commercial reality.”
The winning app, known as Strea.ma, is used at live events to aggregate social media updates from the world’s favourite social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, displaying them in a dynamic, constantly-moving visual interface of text messages and images.
One of the judges for the award, Gen-i Area Manager for Hawke’s Bay Robert Monteith said that a key strength in Strea.ma’s business development plan – a core element of judging criteria – was its use of a prototype to gather in-market testing and feedback.
“The panel saw clearly how this approach helped Mogul Limited with fine tuning the product’s functionality prior to launch,” says Monteith.
“Strea.ma is a great new application of technology that may become common place at many conferences and events and certainly has both national and international appeal.”
The Strea.ma app prototype won plaudits early on from the CEO of online accounting software company Rod Drury, who says Strea.ma has now become a staple part of Xero’s events.
“It’s hard to imagine a modern conference without Strea.ma. It amplifies the social media experience for attendees, our staff and thousands of people watching the action on the web,” says Drury.
Matthew Miller, Managing Director of Mogul Limited, says the Gen-i Breakthrough award win is a huge boost for his company which he says will increase Strea.ma’s credibility and profile with prospective clients.
“This win is very positive for us because it makes our staff feel more excited about working here, which makes it easier for us to attract top talent to Hawke’s Bay and perhaps even investment,” says Miller.
“Most of all, it validates the time and effort that we have put into building this business from scratch here in Hawke’s Bay and makes us feel even more confident about Strea.ma’s future.”
Miller says the idea for Strea.ma came from attending events where social media tools were meant to be a core part of the experience, but were delivered in a chaotic and fragmented fashion.
“We know how social media can make a live event a lot more interactive and fun and create a lot of buzz. But it’s difficult to get an overview of the many conversations that are occurring from moment to moment unless you have your eyes fixed to your mobile device; which inevitably means you are not engaging socially with other attendees.”
Strea.ma solves these problems by bringing all updates from the different social networks together, and presenting them in a beautiful interface on a big screen, so that viewing the images and reading the updates becomes a shared experience.
“We had a good look at a number of competing products and none of them had the feature set, ease of use, and visual appeal of what we had in mind. They also didn’t cater for a broad range of social networks, which we saw as a key feature.
“Attendees are much more motivated to join the conversation, share a thought, or upload a photo at events with Strea.ma. They become more fun and interactive, and are likely to get more exposure in social networks from the extra activity,” says Miller.
Strea.ma was also recently a finalist in the New Zealand Innovators Awards in the “Innovation in Media, Music and Entertainment” category.
Miller says that with the Gen-i Breakthrough award win under their belt, Mogul is now preparing to ramp up marketing efforts for Strea.ma and target businesses in New Zealand, Australia, the UK and USA. Support for this is already coming from key clients such as Xero, who featured the app at events they held in San Francisco and London.
“Mogul’s core business is still digital marketing, so we’re feeding back a lot of the learnings from Strea.ma into the work that we’re doing for our other clients.
“The Strea.ma product is now at a point where it is generating its own revenue and appears to be viable, but further development and marketing will require additional funding. This will come from Mogul initially, but we are interested in talking to investors.”
