Meeting with Ashish Mistry at the ATDC

Good meeting with Ashish Mistry at the ATDC offices. The meeting was short, so this blog entry is fairly short. We covered a lot of ground quickly and will get back together in about ten days to really dig in.

Ashish is organizing a conference for 1000 people this weekend. Sanjay Gupta from CNN is speaking. His cell phone and inbox alert were ringing constantly. That said, he wasn't distracted and genuinely wanted to learn about Reger.com.

He clearly understands blogs, wikis and technology. Little to no learning curve. So we got into bigger issues quickly. He mentioned a book called Snow Crash. While I haven't read it, it paints a picture of a hyper-connected future. This led to some discussion of cyborglogging, sousveillance and ubiquitous computing.

And, again, I found myself incredibly excited about these concepts. Building a personal nostalgia repository is why I created reger.com. Later this reinforced my desire to go after the consumer market. It focuses on reger.com's unique strengths and avoids direct competition with blog market leaders. How to go about this best is open. Do I create a new market... calling it the PNR space? Or do I compete in the blogging market with a product that's clearly differentiated as having advanced features?

Ashish is focused on marketing and sales efforts. So after some initial Reger.com intro we delved into my main question: how to generate sales off of the budget I now have. He's got a number of ideas but believes that the key is defining who the most efficient market is. I agree.

So we'll get back together in ten days for more of a "roll up your sleeves" weekend meeting. I'm looking forward to it.

Thanks for the time Ashish. Good luck on your conference. I'll see you soon!