Updates and Opportunities

I've been demanded by my only reader to update, so here goes.

Today planning began for a new venture for my company Solvo Media, a very interesting prospect that I am very, very excited for, although admitedly, very worried about.

Back in September I released "Firehouse", an application for Facebook for firefighters to display their service information on their Facebook profiles. To date we have just under 13,000 users. Since it's initial development the application has evolved. As stated, originally you just installed the app, filled in your information, and you never visited the app again. Now we have a searchable profile system with a message center, you can save your shift calendars for reference, a forum to discuss issues, and an incident reporting page where people can throw up pictures of incidents they've attended - and then anyone can add those images to a flash slideshow on their profile.

All that being said, Adam and I decided that the time has come to expand Firehouse one more step. This started Saturday when we officially changed the name of the application from Firehouse, to Fire-EMS, mostly because Firehouse is a trademark of Cygnus Publishing, who own Firehouse Magazine and Firehouse.com. This is an important rebranding for us, because with our title alone we let EMTs know that they too can and should use our application.

The new project we are embarking on is a niche-based excercise. What this means is we're banking on the fact that while our idea isn't entirely original, it still has an outstanding characteristic that makes it viable. So finally, what is the idea? Simple, we're starting an online, fire and EMS magazine.

Now, this is certainly not original in its totality. After all there is Firehouse Magazine, FireEngineering, and FireRescue Magazine (who published my senior thesis last April). So how do we plan on getting away with this?

Here's the Niche:

Our application represents, generally speaking, the youth of the fire service. These are people who are really active firefighters, love their jobs, and have probably less than 10 years experience. These people read the aforementioned magazines. But the magazines don't listen to these people. Despite their ability to articulate or express their opinions on specific subjects, their lack of years of service makes their ideas fairly null and void. This is certainly understandable, if I purchase Firehouse Magazine, I don't really want some with 5 years experience telling me what drill to run if I have 15 years experience.

But, with 13,000 users, there's bound to be some who have legitimate things to say. Even if it's been said before, it's still important, and should be reinforced. So what we are going to do is publish an online magazine in pdf form, once every two months, that compiles these articles written by the community, and put it up for download, free of charge, for the community. If there's any money to be made it's off of the Facebook application itself (which currently pays the overhead for Solvo Media), and maybe advertising within the magazine as well, if we decide to go that route.

We hope this will be fairly revolutionary, as it will be a free publication, every firefighter with an internet connection and a printer can read it and distribute it, making it a great way to get critical information into every firehouse throughout the world.


Any former girlfriends of mine looking to put editor on her resume by chance?