Mobile Technology with a Twist: Dan Trigub '04
It’s a story without a predictable A to B: Boy goes to Vassar. Boy graduates with a degree in economics. Boy begins in consulting, and then transitions to investment banking. Boy ditches banking to become chief financial officer of a company specializing in proximity marketing services. Such is the path of Daniel Trigub ’04, who, along with his partners, developed Blue Bite, a technology service that specializes in transmitting media content—from coupons to videos to photographs—to Bluetooth- and WiFi enabled cell phones, PDAs, and laptops within geographic areas sprinkled with “transmission clouds.”
It was during his stint at GCA Savvian, a San Francisco-based investment bank, that Trigub met Mikhail Damiani, a fellow employee who would later become Blue Bite’s CEO and co-founder. Their jobs at the bank provided the two firsthand knowledge about a variety of technology companies based in the Silicon Valley, but also inspired a craving for something more. “I was tired of sitting in meetings and helping 23-year-olds sell their companies for millions of dollars,” notes Trigub. “After spending countless hours making fancy PowerPoint presentations for a company or crunching the same boring analysis in Excel, [Mikhail and I] would ask, ‘Why aren’t we doing this for ourselves, for our own company?’”
Blue Bite was started in 2007 by Damiani and his childhood friend Tom Duncan; Trigub came on board soon after. The team has made the company one of the leading American proximity marketing services by combining two of advertising’s fastest growing categories—digital place-based media and mobile marketing. When compatible phones enter a BlueBite “transmission cloud” its users are issued a prompt asking whether they would like to accept or reject an incoming file. A mobile phone user walking past a billboard for a new movie may receive a download of its trailer, for example, or a concert-goer may receive an MP3 of the band’s latest hit that can be saved to the audio library on her PDA.
Blue Bite has snagged the attention of many high-profile clients, including Coca-Cola, The CW (GossipGirl), Def Leppard, and Macy’s. The company is beginning to see its share of awards, too. Blue Bite was recently honored with a 2009 Mobile Excellence Award, one of the most prestigious awards given in the mobile entertainment industry; it won “Best Mobile Advertising.”
Moreover, the company continues to grow (it now has 10 U.S. and 25 European employees). “The management team and I are very excited for the future,” says Trigub.
—Baize Buzan '10
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Blue Bite
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