Smibs You Later |
While Doorbell keeps team members in contact, Urban also wants to help create new business connections with the Smibs network. Like other social networking sites, it’s free to join and gives business professionals a platform to promote their skills and recent work, as well as make contact with others in their field.
And the two systems work in tandem: if you hit it off with someone on the Smibs network and the two of you decide to take on a project together, each person’s contact information and related correspondences transfer smoothly into Doorbell with just a few clicks.
These are ideas that have been marinating in Urban’s head ever since he founded his first company, the consulting and marketing firm Plainpeak, in Heidelberg in 1991. That company still exists today, with a Canadian counterpart located in Edmonton and a client list that includes the Government of Alberta and auto manufacturers Daimler and Chrysler. As Urban puts it, “Smibs builds exactly what Plainpeak would’ve loved to have over those 20 years.”
Urban remains the president of the Plainpeak group and a majority shareholder in the German company despite permanently relocating here in 2006. The seeds for the decision to move were sown after attending a friend’s New Year’s Eve party in Edmonton several years back, where he spent two hours deep in conversation with an attractive woman who was also a skilled dressage rider.
“I had a German accent, and dressage riding is a German domain,” Urban remembers. “She basically came towards me and said, ‘You’re German? I need to talk to you!’ She thought that, automatically, everyone that has a German accent has to be involved with riding.”
Urban went back to Germany soon afterwards, and the two stayed in contact via email (the woman teased him that his English wasn’t good enough to keep up a phone conversation). Urban invited her to join him on a vacation in Malaysia as friends, and before long they were smitten. For the next three years, they shuttled between Edmonton and Germany on a six-week rotation.
He and Christy were married in September 2005, and decided to settle here in Alberta the following spring.
Between his work with Smibs, Doorbell and The Grow Smart Show, Urban has had the chance to meet up-and-coming entrepreneurs from all over the world. But he says he’s continually impressed by the zeal shown by fellow Albertans at local conventions called DemoCamps, where new products are tested in front of and debated by a crowd of tech enthusiasts. (An early version of Doorbell was named most successful demo at the very first DemoCamp in Edmonton in 2006.)
“It’s a tech community in Edmonton of young entrepreneurs, software developers, geeks, designers, people that like technology and people out of the business world that started to come together,” Urban says.
As you might imagine, Urban is an active user of both the Smibs network and Doorbell. Looking at his ever-expanding lists of contacts and upcoming tasks is yet another reminder of how fully he practises his gospel of using the web to get your company’s name out there.
One of his to-dos, marked by Doorbell with a bright red marker as long overdue, reads, “Get a big-ass steak.” Hopefully Urban’s able to check it off soon.
Next Up is a series of profiles of emerging leaders in Alberta’s business community and public life.
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