When Jamie Smith '03 spent a weekend with some high school friends at a cottage near their hometown of Toronto last summer, they had no idea that the get together would mark the beginning of a highly successful business venture.
Nearly a year later, the group now runs their own company, toMarket, a provider of digital taxi-cab advertising.
The group of six students who created and run toMarket came up with the idea of installing GPS-based screens in cabs for advertisers to more efficiently reach consumers.
"You need a captive audience and the ability to target ads well so it provides useful information to the viewer as well as exposure for the advertiser," said Smith.
toMarket is currently thriving in Toronto and nearing the company's goal of one to 1.5 million Canadian dollars in investments.
So far 25 screens have been installed in cabs -- now known as "toMarket cabs" in Toronto.
The company hopes to have 600 in place by October and 2,000 by March.
Smith and his cofounders, friends of his from his all-boys school in Toronto, Upper Canada College, recognized the necessity of such effective advertising at their weekend retreat last year. They developed thin, touchscreen computers, integrated with a Global Positioning System in the trunk and mounted on the back of the headrest of the passenger seat, as a new medium of advertising.
These screens offer local businesses the ability to control where viewers see their ads, for example, showing their ad while the cab passes by their business.
Passengers control these 10.4-inch interactive screens to select the music in the cab and find out about local restaurants, stores and art galleries.
The map on the screen shows passengers where they are and ensures them that they are being driven along the quickest route to their destination.
A daunting feat to start up any company, no less such a complex one, the young founders of toMarket are seeing success through their hard work, which Smith describes as "intense."
"This is definitely a change from Dartmouth life," he said. "At the beginning of the summer I was putting in 100-plus hour weeks, sometimes working for 32 hours at a time."
He is now maintaining the contents of the advertising units and supervising the installations, while the "other arm" is now searching for more investments to reach their goal.
The entire process has not been completely instinctive to the young men, even for a group of six who all attend or have graduated from prestigious Canadian or American Universities.
"We've learned that, in a business like this, it's really tough to make anything work perfectly on our first go at it.
"Everything takes two cuts and a lot has been picking it up as we go," he said.
The founders of toMarket are working past the stumbling blocks, making decisions about even the tiniest details, and seeing their final products in cabs zooming through Toronto.
They are still looking for investors as well as strategic partners, particularly at wireless providers and hardware producers, telecommunications and media companies from the advertising, as well as general telecommunications side, he said.
The company hopes to spread to New York and other major U.S. and Canadian cities over the next few years.
