Today marks the one year anniversary of KnowEm‘s public launch and we could not be any happier with how much success we’ve enjoyed during our first year in business. We also thought it might be fun to celebrate our birthday by relaunching the original social media name checking service which started it all, CheckUserNames.com.
How It Started
KnowEm started as a service that would claim your username, trademark, brand or identity on 120 social media sites. Almost instantly we were contacted by companies who were looking for a more robust service that would also fill out all complete profile information and continue doing so on an ongoing basis as new social media sites were released.
As an answer to this business need, on May 15th 2009 we launched our beta Enterprise Dashboard. As of today, we’ve been able to use this dashboard to help our clients (ranging from local businesses to the Fortune 500) secure over 500,000 profiles as well as detect over 30,000 cases of brand squatting or trademark infringement. We’re extremely proud to report that all this work has been completed by our local in-house staff. Since security and privacy are our biggest concerns at KnowEm, we will never trust your sensitive data to any 3rd party, and none of our work is outsourced to offshore labor.
Last May we also met our primary Business Advisor, Paige Craig, who seemed like a perfect match to join our board. Paige is an Angel investor out of the Los Angeles area who truly knows his way around a startup. Brian Solis also joined around the same time as a business advisor and PR advisor.
In October we decided to take the business a step further, so we relaunched KnowEm offering some of the services that our dashboard clients had been using all year. We were also happy when Matt Inman decided to work with us and come on board as our creative director and give our site an excellent new interface.
It was around this time we were introduced to Robert Siciliano, and invited him to join us as a board member. Robert is nationally recognized as an expert in identity theft, so he seemed to be a perfect fit to make sure that our order processing was as secure as possible and that our users were not at risk for identity theft.
Since the new year began, the last 3 months have been very hectic; we acquired another site, we were selected out of 200+ finalists for the SXSW Business Accelerator, and we have formed some new amazing and unique partnerships (you’ll hear more about those in the next few weeks).
We just want to say thanks to everyone who made this first year a great one!
The post KnowEm’s 1 Year Anniversary; Relaunches CheckUserNames appeared first on KnowEm Social News Blog.
