The information, data, logo and drawings embodied in all parts of this business plan are strictly confidential and are supplied on the understanding that they will be held confidentially and not disclosed to third parties without the prior and expressed written consent of UrbanPoint. UrbanPoint - City and Culture-Specific Information for All Your Needs
Executive
Summary
Synopsis: Description: UrbanPoint is an intemet-based information organization that provides consumers and businesses with customized entertainment information, products, and services. Stage: Phase 1_ Product/Service Development and Refinement.
Niche: City- and culture-specific venue and event information. Funding: Seeking a $2 - $5 Million investment for working capital, marketing, technical requirements, employees, and partnerships.
Company:
Primarily, UrbanPoint's focus is on content. We are committed to gathering and processing the vast amount of entertainment data available, subsequently delivering high-quality, accurate information to our users. Starting with the United States, we aim to localize and personalize the world's entertainment options and offer unmatched services to the entire Web community. Our mission: The mission is to be the most recognized and highest-utilized resource for all city- and culturespecific venue and event information. We aim to do this by being successful in the following areas: (1) Consistently acquiring the widest range of entertainment information available and grouping it into genres that our users require. (2) Providing highly trafficked and highly utilized platforms for Internet advertising. (3) Connecting consumers, event holders, venue owners, and corporations with each other. (4) Empowering consumers to educate themselves on both their own and other cultures. (5) Creating business partnerships with emerging Internet technology companies to bring the consumer the best and most efficient products and services available. (6) Taking all necessary steps to ensure that UrbanPoint remains one of the most recognizable brands around. This includes branching into fashion offerings (i.e., branded t-shirts, sweatshirts, hats, and other accessories), direct marketing, and "bricks and mortar" establishments (discussed later in this document).
UrbanPoint Executive Summary Page 1 of 5
Business
Product/Services:
UrbanPoint aims to produce the following products and services, each designed to both build brand awareness and empower the user. Urbanpoint.com - The official UrbanPoint website features: (1) A vast collection of entertainment venue and event information grouped by city and/or culture. (2) Daily and weekly e-mail newsletters detailing venue and event information geared to each specific user's interests. (3) (Phase II) - Through the usage of an electronic card, UrbanPass TM, users will be able to purchase UrbanPoints. These UrbanPoints will enable them partake venues and events featured on urbanpoint.com and purchase related merchandise. Venues in mind to benefit from this include bars/nightclubs, restaurants, hotels, and clothing stores. Entrance into participating venues and events, along with some merchandise may be available at a discounted price. UrbanPoint Business-to-Business - UrbanPoint offers various business-to-business services: (1) UrbanSiteTM: Offer event organizers and venue owners a convenient and painless way to gain an Internet presence on a highly trafficked site. UrbanSites are small co-branded websites (maximum size of 75K) created within UrbanPoint to help draw special attention to your specific event and/or venue. They are 100-percent created and maintained by UrbanPoint. (2) Customized Co-branded Information: UrbanPoint centralizes customized event and venue information that caters to the needs of a particular client's customer base. With the client's input, we create cobranded webpage information hosted and maintained by UrbanPoint. The finished product allows for a user to gain a subset of UrbanPoint-specific event and venue information, all without "leaving" the client's website. (3) Book-and-Buyr_: UrbanPoint offers clients the opportunity to "book and buy" tickets to events listed on urbanpoint.com for their guests. The way this works is that UrbanPoint receives reduced pricing for blocks of tickets for specific events on urbanpoint.com. UrbanPoint would then sell the tickets to its client (Marriott, for example) at a "special cost", also charging Marriott an additional fee for facilitating the transaction. UrbanPoint would also be able to work with Marriott guests who register through UrbanPoint and direct them to additional venues and events, along with Marriott's customized cobranded set of UrbanPoint pages. (All venues and events the customer is linked to are through our affiliate partnerships, with UrbanPoint collecting a fee for every patron sent to them). (4) Licensing and Content Distribution: On a fee-basis (one-time and monthly), UrbanPoint provides its content for usage. This includes television and radio reports, outside Internet website usage, internal cobranded UrbanPoint usage, and prints media. UrbanPoint Marketing Communica¢ions - UrbanPoint will act as a paid facilitator for a number of entities. (1) UrbanPoint will connect event holders, looking for a place to present their event, with venue owners, looking for events to house at their venue. An online interface to facilitate this interaction is under development at urbanpoint.com. (2) UrbanPoint will connect venue owners, looking for corporate sponsorship of their venue (and events), with corporations looking to establish a local (or national) sponsorship presence. An online interface to facilitate this interaction is under development at urbanpoint.com. (3) UrbanPoint will work with individuals, groups, and associations to help convert an entertainment idea into an actual event. This includes planning, advertising, UrbanPoint promotion, and event facilitation. UrbanPoint Fashion - UrbanPoint will market UrbanPoint- and urbanpoint.com-branded t-shirts, assorted sweatgear, and hats. This will help to increase brand awareness of UrbanPoint. Depending on the success of this venture, the fashion line may be extended to include other wearables such as golf shirts, socks, etc. These items will be available in local and national-chain stores and through e-commerce on urbanpoint.com (Phase III) UrbanPoint "Bricks and Mortar rM'' stablishments - These quaint UrbanPoint-branded cafes E will reside in major cities that are represented on urbanpoint.com. Plans for them include a small menu for UrbanPoint Executive Summary Page 2 of 5
_r
cultural foods represented on urbanpoint.com, staging area for cultural events (i.e., live music, poetry, art displays, etc.), an online area with six (6) Internet-connected computers, and authentic UrbanPoint merchandise available for purchase. Consumers will also be able to purchase tickets for and get information on events featured on urbanpoint.com. Presently, UrbanPoint is an early stage company. Once funding has been secured and the above product areas have been put in place, we also have plans to extend our product offering to include an online and print magazine, local radio and television, full fashion line, and community outreach program. Critical factors in getting our products and services to market include (1) raising the requested amount of capital, and (2) executing our short-term growth and development plans. UrbanPoint will succeed because we are THE single source solution for city- and culture-specific venue and event information on the Internet.
Market: UrbanPoint defines its market as niche-specific entertainment information, marketing, and Internet services. Various IT trend analysis companies, including Gartner, Meta, and Forester, believe one of the most highlyunderdeveloped areas of the internet involves catering to specific niches. In particular, large, well-defined groups of individuals with detailed likes and dislikes have been vastly overlooked. Previously, the vision of the Internet was to create for the general population and hopefully snag as many "non-conformists" as possible. That model, while arguably still profitable, is quickly coming to an end about as fast as is the reliance on internet advertising as the chief revenue model for a website, as evidence by the recent NASDAQ stock market levels. Market Need/Opportunity_: In many industries, the Internet has leveraged substantial opportunities for companies with a fresh approach towards doing business in the new economy. However, the niche-specific information (particularly entertainment) industry, has yet to produce a product with a clear vision on how to best use the Web as a tool that serves consumers, vendors, advertisers, and business partners, all with specific tastes. UrbanPoint was created to meet this need by ieveraging the power of the Internet to produce information for empowerment and build relationships that are not easily forged. UrbanPoint was founded based on the convergence of four trends: (1) research of the city-specific entertainment industry. (2) Economic & cultural changes taking place both in the general world and on the Internet, which is not necessarily the same. (3) The growth of emerging technology companies featuring Internet products & services. (4) A desire for easy-to-locate information concerning local entertainment nationwide and greater interaction concerning the parties that facilitate the process of providing this information. Growth Rate: UrbanPoint intends to take advantage of this virtually, untapped market with its unique approach and product/service placement. Based on business models and using very conservative projections, Year 1 revenues are projected at $494,112.50 and conservatively forecasted to grow upwards of $592,935 and $711,522.00 in Year 2 and Year 3, respectively. Strategy to Promote: The key to market entry and brand awareness for UrbanPoint is simply to create the media environment desired by our customers. That includes keeping a constant ear to the wants and needs of our customers. By providing the necessary tools to empower the user, such as a wealth of accurate information and communication protocols (i.e., UrbanPoint e-mail accounts, free subscriptions to user-customized newsletters, and community chat and discussion boards), UrbanPoint will, in turn, be able to build effective partnerships throughout the community. These partnerships are a vital key to the success of UrbanPoint and other companies interested in building a new media and marketing network for their customers as well.
UrbanPoint Executive Summary Page 3 of 5
:t
Competition: Currently, the two (2) leading organizations that bring city-specific information to the Internet are AOL's DigitalCity.eom and TicketMaster's CitySeareh.eom. Both of these ventures have large financials bases, being owned by highly profitable entertainment conglomerates. As a result, they are delivering vast amounts of entertainment-related data about numerous cities. AOL uses its America Online base to populate the DigitalCity.com platform with information, while TicketMaster capitalizes on its online ticket partnership vendors to provide data for CitySearch.com. Though these are the two chief providers of city-specific information, neither ventures into the market for niche-specific programming. For this reason, UrbanPoint will carve and claim it's own place in an untapped area of the market. UrbanPoint's focus extends beyond acquiring event information for various cities and lumping them all together for the user to muddle through. We take the additional step of serving up information catered to the input of our consumers, primarily by cultures. We view ourselves as a 'first-mover" in our industry because we pull and push information forward and proactively make things happen, rather than simply sit back and wait for information to come to us for processing. UrbanPoint also provides marketing and additional services that connect the marketplace; something our competition has not even touched upon. This is another plus which makes our approach unique. Positioning: UrbanPoint will succeed because, even though, at first glance, we appear to be in the same industry as say, DigitalCity.com or CitySearch.com, we extend our marketplace to cover other uniquely-related areas as well. We actively create a need for our services rather than sit back and wait for clientele and consumers. In fact, we foresee a continuous drive of traffic, from our partners and customers, due to our ability to provide a fresh and easy-to-use alternative to a user choice for entertainment. UrbanPoint visitors will be able to not only interact and learn more about going-ons in cities and cultures around the U.S. and the World, but meet new and interesting people and empower themselves to learn more about their environment. That includes purchasing merchandise and become part of an online community with those who share similar interests.
Management: Andre P. Hood brings diverse experience and technical knowledge to UrbanPoint. His role is to drive the Company's overall direction, both consumer and business areas, while ensuring that the company consistently delivers the best possible information and user experience. Prior to founding UrbanPoint in early 2000, Andre was an Internet and E-Commerce Analyst with T. Rowe Price Associates in Baltimore, MD where his areas of specialization included e-commerce, business development, and maintenance of the Company's website. Mr. Hood has also served as an Internet Systems Consultant with Computer Task Group of Buffalo, NY where, most recently, he spearheaded the technical and budgetary aspects of various Y2K projects and continued new business development. His education includes a BS in Information Systems Management from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and a Master's degree in Business Strategy and Policy from Bowie State University. He has a wealth of knowledge and experience in the areas of project management, systems analysis, Internet applications development, and database management, along with a distinct understanding of entertainment venues and events. Andre is a board member of Millenium Management Group, Inc. Richard M. Hood, Jr. brings diverse marketing knowledge and business experience to UrbanPoint. His role is to advance the Company's business-to-business objectives, while also spearheading the marketing campaigns. Prior to joining UrbanPoint, Richard founded Off the Court, a sport marketing company geared toward advancing the agenda of the professional athlete where he remains a member of the Board. Previously, he worked as Marketing Coordinator for Fila SPL (the summer league organization for the NBA) in Los Angeles, CA, where he was responsible for various athlete exposure programs. Along with a wealth of business knowledge and experience, Richard is also by pursuing a graduate degree in International Management from the University of Maryland. UrbanPoint Executive Summary Page 4 of 5
UrbanPoint is in the process of putting together a solid, diverse advisory team with proven backgrounds, both in the Corporate and Governmental sector. Our current advisory team and prospect pool includes professionals with proven backgrounds in the areas of Entertainment, Internet Business and Development, Legal, Sports, Financial, and Marketing.
Funds Requested: UrbanPoint is seeking between $2M - $5M for a first round financial investment. This will be used for shortterm debt repayment, working capital, execution of the firm's business plan, and projects related to the development of our Internet products and services. To date, the owner has invested approximately $50,000 of personal and borrowed funds into this venture. These funds have supported equipment purchases, along with research, marketing, and additional costs related to start-up and development. Use of Proceeds: *The following non-conservative estimated expenses will be used to build a solid company and infrastructure including, but not limited to: Specific use for funds over a three-year period includes: Working capital (including expensed equipment, short-term debt repayment & supplies) Website hosting and related technical services Technical, legal, financial, research & business services Staffing (part-time): 4 Total = 2 web developers (1 junior/1 senior), 1 Marketing, 1 CEO Marketing, promotion, and advertising Fixed expenses including office space, utilities, etc. *Total:
$ $ $ $ $ $
........................
236,437.50 113,490.00 113,490.00 587,961.92 315,250.00 157,625.00
$1,524,254.42
*These figures represent totaled costs for three years with a 10 percent growth rate in each category. No other considerations are made beyond that.
Exit Strategy: UrbanPoint's financial strategy includes an IPO and/or possibly a buyout/spin-off of at least one division by the end of Year three (3). Our combination of accurate entertainment information, multiple revenue models, cutting-edge technology, niche programming, and quality marketing makes UrbanPoint an attractive company for investors and customers alike. This is sure to be reflected in the level of employee talent we attract, the quality of products and services we deliver, and revenue level we obtain. UrbanPoint also represents an attractive acquisition candidate for a media conglomerate looking for a competitive advantage in this market.
Contact Information: Andre P. Hood, CEO and Founder UrbanPoint, Inc. 4921 Colonel Contee Place, Suite 200 Upper Marlboro, MD 20772 Phone: (301) 780-6554 Fax: (801) 760-8299 Website: http://www.urbanpoint.com E-mail: aphco@urbanpoint.com UrbanPoint Executive Summary Page 5 of 5