Meeting people is hard

Introducing yourself is often the hardest part of the beginning of any friendship. Whether in a classroom, at a party, club or business event, meeting new people is difficult.

We'll often turn to our phones just to avoid “awkward” eye contact with the people around us. We do this whether we're simply waiting for a friend to arrive, dining, traveling, or sitting alone. It's strange how social media can have that effect on us, making us less social and leaving us often feeling alone even as we stay "connected" with others online.

We tend to undervalue in-person interactions, which are important in helping us feel connected and less lonely. A recent study found that 87 percent of millennials admitted to missing out on a conversation with someone nearby because they were distracted by their phone.

 

And do business cards really help us stay connected to people we meet? Everywhere we go, it seems we can't operate without business cards. We might even feel a need to make excuses if we don't have a business card to hand out.

And yet, printing billions of business cards is environmentally harmful, wasteful and unnecessary. Millions of trees are cut down to produce the over 27 million business cards that are printed each day. Yet, 88 percent of cards handed out get thrown away within a week!

In today's technology-driven world, business cards should be a thing of the past.

At Blue, our logo says it all! Imagine that as soon as you arrive at a college class, party or networking event, everybody suddenly knows your name and something about you. That’s the power of Blue - your virtual name tag that brings together the digital and physical worlds!

Technology is everywhere. Most of us rely on the Internet to shop, seek information and stay "connected" with people around the world. But what about meeting people around you in real life?

We believe in using technology for social good. Technology has made it harder to meet people in a crowded room or simply connect with someone close by. We go to social events and often leave feeling like we really didn't "meet" anyone or make any meaningful connections. But, if social interactions offline are necessary to feel less lonely, how do we get people to connect in person with others around them? The answer is Blue.

A smart business card and mobile app for the modern age

At Blue, we believe reinventing the name tag is our greatest opportunity to maximize social opportunity. Using Bluetooth Low Energy and Near Field Communication, we help connect you with people nearby on existing social media networks and more.

Blue uses cutting-edge technology to reinvent the business card. The Blue Smart Card allows you to instantly share your social information with just one tap. And best of all, the other person doesn't need the Blue app to receive your information and add you to their contacts!

The Blue Smart Card works on most Android and newer iPhones that are NFC compatible. It's a great conversation starter and leaves a lasting impression on everyone you meet. Use our mobile app to activate your Blue Smart Card on the go!

The best part of Blue is our mobile app that uses our Bluetooth Auto-Networking™ technology that introduces you to people you cross paths with in real-life and encourages users to be social in person. 

You simply turn on Blue, slide your phone back in your pocket and as soon as you cross paths with another user in REAL-LIFE, you'll receive a notification!

It's that easy. We call it ambient networking - our vision to ultimately build a world of friends wherever you go.

People meeting people in real life on Blue

We are compatible with all major carriers and 65+ different phone models. We are LIVE on both Apple App Store and Google Play, and have been growing virally! There are over 40,000 users on The Blue Network interacting with 10,000+ people every day. This is the time for a new way to network! 

$400,000 in revenue in the last 6 months

Through online advertising, affiliate marketing, enterprise clients and brand partnerships we are generating $80k/month in revenues and growing.

Blue is for Everyone, Everywhere, Anywhere, Anytime

As humans, we are inherently social. Our well-being and health are tied to interactions with others. Social interactions are the essence of the human experience. It's what gives life meaning.

Just about everywhere and anywhere we go, and anytime we're somewhere, life is more meaningful experienced with others. Blue is the first app that encourages authentic and meaningful interactions in any social or business setting. Meeting people doesn't have to be hard. 

Our customers include:

B2C: students, business owners, business professionals, recruiters, and social media users

B2B retail: shopping malls, brand stores, convenience stores, and gas stations

B2B hospitality: Businesses that entertain or receive guests, such as hotels, casinos, restaurants, bars, nightclubs, schools, vacations, stadiums, convention centers, airports

B2G government/institutional: Smart cities, advertising, transportation, safety/security, government, insurance, code enforcement, and regulatory applications

While our high-tech products appeal to the younger generation, our Blue Smart Card and Blue App were made for people of all ages looking to upgrade the way they connect. 

As a Bluetooth product, Blue lets you put on your virtual name tag wherever you are, even without an internet connection. Go ahead. Be truly social.

A framework for success

We believe in using technology for social good. Our business model is all about delivering products and services that customers both value and see as good. 

Our Blue Smart Card sold through our eCommerce platform delivers valuable benefits. It not only reinvents the business card, but also connects you to a new world of possibilities through our groundbreaking Blue app.

Tens of thousands of people have purchased the Blue Smart Card and we're just getting started! Our recently introduced white-label and reseller programs Powered by Blue are also generating revenues as more and more enterprises do away with traditional business cards, boost their image and join the New Way to Network™ as a company.

The Blue app, which is free to download on the Apple App Store and Google Play, is the first true virtual social networking app.  Blue is good. It enhances authentic face-to-face human interaction by offering zero-friction introduction to people you cross paths with in real time and real life. Blue will offer innovative in-app premium features and micro-payments to its users (B2C), and in-app advertising, retail beacons, subscriptions and lead generation to enterprise clients (B2B).

Our innovative operating and financial models are integral to our blended eCommerce, Software as a Service (SaaS), Bluetooth as a Service™ (BaaS), Smart Devices and Mobile Applications revenue model.

Join our affiliate program and Get Paid to Be Social™. We have thousands of affiliates around the world earning thousands of dollars every month for being social.

Come grow with us!

3 billion smartphones in use worldwide

And with over 10 billion business cards printed each year, the market for Blue Smart Cards is almost endless!

Blue’s market is global, and includes 207 million students attending colleges worldwide and 3 billion smartphone users around the world. The market includes 205 million adults in the U.S. alone attending professional events annually, plus hundreds of millions of small business owners and entrepreneurs across the planet, from DJ's, realtors, insurance agents and recruiters, to software engineers, consultants, accountants and everyday business people like us.

The outlook for blue is exceptional. The demand for mobile cellular apps remains high with 350 billion app downloads projected worldwide in 2020 (Google)! With social networking and messaging apps growing 394% year over year, Blue enters this high growth category where app conversion averages 11.35%, higher than most categories. We will use advanced analytics to adapt, evolve, and pivot Blue as necessary to ensure market growth and user retention.

With the smart card market growing to $21B by 2023, the Blue Smart Card is the perfect product that disrupts the business card market offering a smarter, more convenient solution to a traditional and necessary business expense. 

The Blue Market Network.

What is the Blue Market Network?

The Blue Marketplace will provide opportunities & transactions among multiple users and applications. 

The Blue Network provides a secure profile of a person's identity and then lets them interact with other people in the network or businesses.

Blue is creating the first Bluetooth Market Network enabling anyone with a smartphone to discover, pay and interact with people and things nearby autonomously, via Bluetooth, near field communication (NFC), radio-frequency identification (RFID) and other short-range wireless communications technologies.

Businesses will subscribe to our Bluetooth as a Service™ (BaaS) Model through our API that includes hardware components that allow organizations to send custom messages and reach Blue app users nearby who have subscribed to the business or service.

This is proximity marketing, the holy grail for marketers and businesses, and a great benefit to app users. Blue will provide a Bluetooth as a Service solution for businesses in a world where you can walk into your favorite gym and instantly receive your workouts for the day, walk into a bar and instantly receive happy hour specials, or walk around a campus and instantly be informed and navigated by the University using beacon technology – all without having to download an app for every separate retailer, business, educational institution, campus event or venue. 

Say you're going out shopping - you can use Blue to discover coupons at your favorite restaurant or store in real-time as you are walking by. $2 off a slice of pizza... or 15% off on groceries or a new pair of jeans - count me in!

The Blue Network is unique in that it will combine the main elements of both Networks and Marketplaces. It will use Bluetooth as a Service software to focus action around longer-term projects, not just a quick transaction, and promotes Blue as a differentiated Network, helping build long-term partnerships.

The Blue Network is also unique from a monetization standpoint. It combines the strong network effects defensibility and scalability of direct large scale social networks together with the lucrative business models of BaaS or marketplace businesses.

Blue works like a name tag — just turn it on and meet people nearby, not miles away

Blue is the world’s most innovative Bluetooth ambient social network. We believe each person will discover and develop his or her own way to make Blue useful. Whether in a classroom, family reunion, fundraising event, electronic concert, college party, club, convention, chamber networking event or company picnic, Blue connects you with others in real life.

Blue is a game-changer and opens new market space uniquely focusing on real-time Bluetooth ambient discovery and making introductions easy. Blue competes in the highly competitive app market against social media networks of many large and small companies, including well-known global competitors.

We believe the Blue app’s ability to see social profiles of other users in real life and its all-in-one ability to consolidate access to selected social media profiles, websites, emails, phone numbers, payment applications, etc. is innovative and disruptive, and potentially culture and behavior-changing. Dormant and underlying competitors include apps that are generally are not intended to discover people in the same room (ambient setting). We believe Blue has no “direct” substitute.

In the smart card market space there are numerous established and recent competitors. None of which offer a smart card integrated with a mobile ambient networking app linked to a Bluetooth Market Network.

We are here to power the future of Internet of Things

Our ultimate vision is to build a platform that makes it safe and secure for you to interact with the world around you. 

The future is here. Technology is all around us. Smart wearables, smart devices, smart homes, smart cars, and smart things are looking to connect and interact with us on a daily basis.

Blue was created to make life more enjoyable and meaningful by encouraging genuine interactions with others. The Blue app provides an effortless bridge between you and all the smart technologies around you - in your home, in your car, at the mall and your favorite restaurant.

Concerns about data privacy and security are important to us. We see a future where interaction with smart devices is permission-based, and user data is protected using highly technical cryptographic techniques. 

Many problems plague our daily digital lives - problems that reduce our freedom, even though the Internet was intended to make us more free. We are at a point where most of our data, even private data, is curated and stored on centralized servers with no direct connections between we the people. Every private message, every mouse click on an advertisement, every scroll on a video is recorded somewhere, effectively mining us for information for later use. 

Unfortunately, our private data is not private. In this modern digital ecosystem, we the people are the product with companies making billions of dollars off our data. We are products of decades-old centralized platform-based economic models. But change is inevitable, and pioneers like Blue will change this by returning control of our data to its rightful owners — we the people.

Long-term Blue will use blockchain technology to disrupt the centrally-based platform economy. We are pro-business and for-profit; but, we also believe in greater income equality and sharing of the value chain created by social networks. We intend to integrate capabilities through open-source software to empower users to curate your own content, feeds and advertising (think mini-RSS’s); as well as allow users to interact with the hundreds of billions of “smart” devices that will inherently evolve with cryptographic blockchain connectivity technologies, including Bluetooth Peer-to-Peer.

Blue is the future. 

The future is here. Invest in Blue and invest in changing the world. And build a world of friends everywhere you go.

Billionaire Tim Draper invests $1.1M in Blue

We are proud to announce Tim Draper, the billionaire VC who has previously funded Tesla, Skype, SpaceX, Twitch, Hotmail, Robinhood, and 23 other unicorns at the seed stage, invests in Blue.

On Friday, April 24, 2020, Blue closed its $1.368M Series Seed Round with lead investor Tim Draper investing $1M through Draper Associates. Draper University Ventures also participated in the round and invested $100,000.

$600k from friends and family

We have over two dozen private investors that have invested in us the past four years from $1,000 to $200,000 each in support of our vision, including college students and professionals.

Jose Montero is the visionary driving force of Blue, a Martin Luther King High School graduate and former Riverside Community College student. Jose has sales and leadership experience as a Personal Training Sales Manager with L.A. Fitness and Multi-Level-Marketing. He was 7th in the nation for weekend sales at L.A. Fitness. He is an avid reader and self-taught learner and started his first business at age 18. In 2012, Jose made a YouTube video that went viral garnering over 300,000 views within a few months. He's a growth hacker, digital marketer, and has an eye for design. Jose is a Draper University Graduate - Hero Training Entrepreneurship Program, and is Co-Founder, CEO and President of Blue.

Mario Contreras, Chief Product Development Officer, has eight years UI-UX (User Interface-User Experience) design experience that includes design work for Nissan, Infiniti, Toshiba, Honda, and Snapchat. Mario loves to design with simplicity and usability in mind, nicely blended with beautiful and modern aesthetics to result in an efficient and sharp pixel perfect interface. He believes the focus is the number one priority when it comes to design.

Christen Montero, Chief Marketing Officer, is a graduate of the University of Redlands - Johnston Center, where she earned her B.A. in Holistic Study of the Mind, Metaphysics, Marketing and Education. In 2016, she completed her Master’s degree in Business Management (MBA) with a concentration in Marketing and Consulting. At the age of 18 while in college full-time she began working as an independent- contractor in Marketing and Account Management. Christen has over 10 years’ experience executing a variety of Event Marketing Campaigns for companies such as Google, Xbox, Coca-Cola, CitiBank, Samsung, Maybelline, Lexus, Ciroc (and more) at some of the largest events in California.   

Jose Montero Sr. has 37-years’ experience across multiple industries, with roles that include General Manager, Division Marketing Manager, Product Development Manager, Plant Manager, Director of Operations, CEO Coach and Management Consultant. At age 23 Jose Sr. founded his first business - a vertically integrated multi-state retail products and services company that flourished for 12 years. Jose has spent half his career as an entrepreneur and half in corporate. He is presently with one of the nation's largest healthcare providers overseeing manufacturing and construction activities on capital projects. Jose is a Lean/Six-Sigma Master Black Belt, Change Management specialist and Performance Improvement guru. He earned Engineering and Management degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Sloan School of Management, and a Masters in Management from Claremont Graduate University Peter F. Drucker School of Management. Jose Sr. is COO, CFO and Chairman of the Board.