Ben Rigby
Rigby graduated from Stanford University with Honors, Distinction, and Phi Beta Kappa. After a 2 year stint as Lead Engineer at a social software company that was acquired by Student Advantage, he co-founded Akimbo Design in 1997. Akimbo developed and managed award-winning Web sites for marquee brands like Nokia, The North Face, Sony Pictures, and Calvin Klein. His company produced three Web design books, won dozens of awards, and had work featured in most major media publications. In 2002, Rigby took a position as CTO of DFILM, a web and mobile applications company that licensed its white-label software product to Sam Adams Beer, Hyundai, Old Navy, IBM, The Sierra Club, and Scion.
In 2004, Rigby shifted gears to the social sector, founding Mobile Voter, which was the first organization in the world to engage young voters via text messaging (SMS). With grants from Pew Charitable Trusts and MacArthur Foundation, Mobile Voter registered tens of thousands of voters. In 2007, Rigby wrote Mobilizing Generation 2.0 (Wiley Press) - a social media handbook for nonprofits. And most recently, Rigby became CTO and now is CEO of Sparked.com - a for-profit social enterprise that has created a crowdsourced volunteering platform that has been licensed by Kraft Foods, SAP, Google, Aegis Media, Teradata, LinkedIn, and more.
"I am a Social Citizen because strong communities inspire me. "
Sparked
Sparked makes it easy for busy people to give back. It's an entirely *online* form of volunteering that allows you to lend your professional skills whenever and wherever you have time. Whether you've got 10 minutes at the bus stop or an hour after work - they've got a nonprofit "challenge" for you. At Sparked, it's their goal to offer *convenient* online volunteerism to you. They are driven to fit volunteerism into the same kind of time that you might normally spend on Facebook, Farmville, or Twitter. It's volunteerism for the digital age. At Sparked they call it microvolunteering.
Tweets
-
Wow. Twitter revenue should top $1b in 2014. t.co/BbeoeEGY
7 hours 59 min ago. -
Good tips on landing a customer meeting from @inc. t.co/ZmeGK0mX #leanstartup13 hours 46 min ago.
-
@GM pullout from Facebook *ads* shows how much big companies are paying for Facebook *page* management ($30m) t.co/RgKTIFol21 hours 16 min ago.
-
Marketers share their social media analytics plans for 2012: t.co/CUzeCWvc #smm from @clickz1 day 8 hours ago.
-
Good writeup on the impact of Salesforce's BuddyMedia acquisition in @adage: t.co/obbWKhUy #smm1 day 14 hours ago.