Featured in Make it Business Magazine

!escunid’s own Michael-James Pennie has been featured on the front page and headline article of Make it Business’ Magazine’s Web Wonders edition. You can download a copy of the issue here.

Scaffolding kingpin Warren Dunn, 45, of Scaffold Depot wants to conquer the world. But he knows the world doesn’t operate exclusively in English.

A big part of Dunn’s strategy is to reach non-English-speaking markets through a new technology developed by Vancouver web firm goodboog.

“A company anywhere can take my information and understand my product and check to see if I have what they want,” says Dunn, whose Surrey-based company grossed $14 million in revenue last year. (www.scaffolddepot.ca.goodboog.com).

Goodboog’s “global virtual catalog” allows someone in, say, Japan to read about Dunn’s company in Japanese, in Norwegian in Norway, in Finnish in Finland. How does this work?

Essentially, goodboog organizes its clients by having them classify their products and services using its database of 76,000 categories. Since all 76,000 categories have been translated into 25 languages, users across the world can read about a company’s products and services in their native language.

“Ninety four point nine percent of the world’s population using the Internet is located outside of North America,” says Michael-James Pennie, a native of Vancouver and goodboog’s chief marketing officer. “With emerging economies worldwide, businesses have to think globally. For you to have a website that’s only in English is very limiting.”

Dunn, who signed up with goodboog three months ago and has 250 “Catalog Cards” displaying his scaffolding products, has received inquiries from China, Germany, South Africa, Brazil, and the United States, resulting in deals from China and in the United States.

He anticipates he’ll be hearing from non-English speakers using goodboog’s “Communication Translator,” which includes 4,000 pre-defined business correspondence phrases. “They can send me back a few reference phrases that can start the conversation. It’s about opening doors that would be closed otherwise,” Dunn says.

Dunn’s products can be found through the goodboog’s search engine as well as through search engines around the world. “We’ve partnered with Google, so we push the Catalog Cards in the Virtual Catalog through a web feed to a system called Google Base in order to allow direct product search engine indexing,” Pennie says.

Since Dunn’s scaffolding products are funnelled through Google Base (which is Google’s product search engine), when a customer searches for “ladder,” Dunn’s goodboog site will figure higher in the page rankings.

“It will increase their page ranking,” says Pennie. “It’s a process that a company on its own would have to pay thousands of dollars to integrate and we do that automatically, which makes their products that much more visible.”

Goodboog is currently working to build similar partnerships with search engines worldwide, and as the company team embarks to Beijing with the BC Trade Mission this month, it will meet with Baidu, China’s equivalent of Google.

Goodboog currently has 2500 companies signed up with their own Virtual Catalog. “We have people from all around the world – China, India, Turkey, Hungary,” says Milan Hucko, 43, co-founder and CEO of goodboog. In his Kitsilano office, Hucko displays the online analytics map of the world, which shows a list of countries and the number of people currently surfing the catalog. The site receives between 22,000 and 30,000 hits a day.

Goodboog has been savvy to attract a customer base. Any company can list its business card for free. In total, about 3 million free firm-business cards are listed worldwide, with 97,000 in Canada. And newly rolled out this month is their virtual rolodex, in which business professionals can profile themselves and network with other professionals worldwide for free.

A “newbie” on the internet, Cynthia Newman, 50, owner of The Little Skin Care Company, is enamored of goodboog’s easy-to-use platform. “This is a good way for people just starting up in business. It’s easy, simple, and you can control and update your own site any time and it’s very inexpensive.”

She is hoping that The Little Skin Care Company will move beyond “cottage industry” size with its exposure 1. in goodboog’s global virtual catalog.

“I’m looking at mega size,” says Newman, who works out of her West Vancouver home. Newman cooks up a natural, multi-purpose skin creams from a recipe that her Swedish grandmother in Chicago developed for her husband in the 1920s to help soften his hands, which were calloused and coarse from fixing cars and farm equipment.

Newman’s creams, some industrial strength and some cosmetic, contain baking soda and Hawaiian sea salt and a number of secret ingredients that are all natural. To her delight, the creams have also been useful for contact dermatitis, acne, and psoriasis.

A recent subscriber to goodboog, Newman was pleased to see the number of hits her products received – 112 within the first day of set-up. “I had a person call the next night asking me to send a sample to New Zealand … I was really impressed. Wow, this is working already!”

Newman calls goodboog a “one-stop shopping” for her online needs: a website, a domain name and she’s looking forward to the possibility of adding interactive web 2.0-like features to her site, such as video of her cooking up the creams (www.psor-relief.ca.goodboog.com).

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