Deal Radar 2009: DubMeNow

DubMeNow is a mobile application for exchanging business cards and instantaneously managing contact information. Founder Manoj Ramnani came up with the idea on a flight from Washington, DC to Seattle. He had collected over 30 business cards and began entering all of them in Outlook. He was halfway into the task when his laptop’s battery died, and he thought that there must be a better solution to business card exchange and management problems. Ramnani sketched out his idea and convinced Stephen Sklarew and Chris Hopkinson, with whom he had worked in the past, to quit their jobs and help him create DubMeNow.

When DubMeNow was founded a little over a year ago, there were only a handful of competitors offering text-based solutions with which people could send text messages with their contact information. But the company felt that the problem had not been fully addressed since people still had to enter the information into an address book and still had many outdated contacts. Then, when the release of the iPhone opened the app market, many contact exchange apps were developed that worked iPhone-to-iPhone only. There again, company contact information isn’t updated, and of course most people meet more than just iPhone users.

DubMeNow launched their DUB application in February 2009 and in August released a new version that has the ability to connect using GPS, can add photos, and has social networking fields for Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The company is selling an enterprise version that integrates with corporate CRM systems such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and Siebel. In this model, people use to DUB to save any contacts to their phone’s address book and directly into their company’s CRM system, and DUB automatically updates the user’s CRM any time a contact updates his or her information. The DubMeNow app is free. There is no advertising and the company does not sell data to third parties.

The company is currently focused on iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and Windows Mobile users. They are working on an app for the Palm Pre and for Nokia for later this year. DubMeNow is targeting the US market and plans to launch an international version before the end of the year. Among its competitors are Dropcard, a networking tool that acts as a virtual business card triggered by a text message, and rmbrME, a service which gives users an electronic business card with their contact information, photo and other important links such as links to their company’s website, social networks and blogs.

DubMeNow has over a million users and has partnerships with RIM, Microsoft, Google and LinkedIn. They are working on technology integrations and address books for other partners that will be announced in late September. Ramnani put in the seed money to develop the prototype and raised $400,000 and $1.1 million in angel rounds from strategic investors. DubMeNow is looking to raise more money next year.

Suggested Reading:

*The Apps Store Wars
*Secret Recipe for an iPhone App
*Does RIM See The Gap in the iPhone’s Defenses?

This segment is a part in the series : Deal Radar 2009