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Hey guys,
Have a great idea but need a developer? Come participate in a workshop on outsourcing to learn how to create your own start up this Friday(November 19th) from 3-4 in JMHH F55. Our own Evan Rosenbaum is an expert and has used outsourcing to found 4 companies over 5 years.

He’ll be starting from scratch, so don’t hesitate to come by. Don’t forget your laptops and please RSVP here BY TOMORROW for FREE food
-Your friends @theIMG

We’re having our first General Body Meeting this Monday, October 4^th at 6pm in room F95. Get pumped! We’ll be laying out a general road map along with opportunities to get involved. We’ll discuss future tutorials from how to optimize your personal web presence (and impress potential recruiters who are snooping around on the internet) to how to use a specific innovative web or mobile app of your choosing. We’ll also discuss group events that involve interaction with digital media and talks from impressive tech industry leaders. And who would forget the incredible, exclusive internship opportunities that we provide and one-on-one interviews with high-level VC’s and other leaders in the technology industry. You don’t want to miss this meeting!

We want to hear what you’re interested in learning about during the GBM, so please drop by and speak up! If you’re coming, please RSVP here.

Great job to everyone who participated in the pitch competition! There were many high quality ideas presented.

Check out git.to/ideas to post your ideas and discover other ideas that your fellow Penn students have. Don’t forget to post your email next to your idea!

Once again, thanks for coming to the pitch competition, and the IMG hopes to see you tomorrow at noon to kick off the coding phase of the Pennapps hackathon.

As the date for the Pennapps hackathon approaches, the IMG team would like to share some of our favorite web mashups. Let these examples spark your imagination for the upcoming pitch competition, and maybe you’ll find a hack or two that you’d like to play around with.

Please Rob Me

Please Rob Me is an interesting mashup with a message: It can be dangerous to publicly reveal your location with checkins. The service aggregates foursquare checkins and allows you to filter through them by location and twitter username. It notes that you have left your home if you check into an outside location. Are you a Foursquare user? Remember to lock your doors people!

Mayor War

Mayor War is a fun game using Foursquare. Your home base consists of all the places in which you’ve achieved mayorship. From your home base, you can attack other locations and level up by winning battles. You can even recruit a team through Twitter!

The Rap Map

The Rap Map is a tool to learn the rap history of your hood. The map matches geographic locations with rap lyric references and famous rap-related spots, such as well-known rap studios.

Hunch’s Map

Hunch is a recommendation service that gets to know you by asking you questions. With the collected data, Hunch gives you restaurant, nightlife, museum, and clothing store suggestions (and even more!). The map mashup also provides convenient links to Foursquare and Yelp pages if you’d like to know more about the suggested place.

JibJab

JibJab let’s you send e-cards to your Facebook friends for almost any occasion. It’s incredibly simple. It also tells you which of your Facebook friends’ birthdays are approaching, so you won’t ever forget to send your friend a birthday card again.

Quora

Quora.com is like Yahoo Answers on steroids. If you connect with Facebook, Quora shows you which of your friends are already on the site so that you can follow them. Quora also allows your friends, the people who know you best, to suggest topics to follow, so that you’re immediately immersed in content that is relevant to you.

Bit.ly

If you’re a loyal Twat, then you probably already know this one. Bit.ly is an easy-to-use url shortener that allows you to place links into your Tweets without exceeding the 140 character limit. You can even Tweet the link right from the site!

Here are the products that most heavily rely on their integration with third-parties apps:

Flavors.me

Flavors.me creates your own personal website. It’s great for self-promotion. Flavors.me seamlessly connects with your Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Posterous, Tumblr, and Wordpress (plus more!) accounts to either provide links to or display some information from your personal profiles.

Disqus

Disqus is the number one comment system that you can implement on your site or blog. It’s proven to increase site engagement. It allows people to either create a Disqus account or leave comments using you Facebook or Twitter accounts.

And those are all of our favorite mashups! We hope you discovered some interesting new web products. And don’t forget to come to the Pennapps hackathon and pitch competition kicking off on Thursday, September 16.

Looking back, it’s been one crazy year for IMG. Here’s a quick overview of all the events we’ve worked hard to bring to campus last school year. If you are interested in getting involved next year or wish to learn more, please contact Matt Newberg at matt (at)  interactivemediagroup (dot) org.

Joseph Ansanelli, Serial Entrepreneur

Joseph Ansanelli joined IMG for breakfast to share his experiences in building organizations from the ground up. He recommended following your passion and separated working at a consulting firm (“telling someone how to do something”) to working at a technology company (“actually be out there doing something”). Joe also spoke about his new investments in mobile security startup Lookout and realtime translation company Smartling.

Frank Eliason of @comcastcares

IMG hosted Frank Eliason for a talk on how he started a worldwide trend of public brands engaging consumers via social media. Frank discussed how his team monitors 6,000 blog posts and more than 1,000 tweets a day. He recommends putting a face to the brand’s name on social media outlets, as he has done for @comcastcares.

Andrew Chun of CBS Interactive
Andrew sat down with a small group of IMG members and shared his experiences from some of the largest media companies in the world. Discussing his role in mobile applications at CBS, Andrew shed light on how media companies are adapting to their new industry landscape.

Digital Day 1: NYC

IMG made a trip to New York City to visit Microsoft and Dogpatch Labs. Students visited the Microsoft Envisioning Center to take a peek at the upcoming technologies that Microsoft is concentrating efforts on. At Dogpatch Labs, Jon Steinberg recommended that students interested in entrepreneurship go and start something to benefit from learning that is only accessible through the startup process.

Venmo
Venmo introduced its mobile payment system to IMG and had students passing virtual currency around the room within minutes. Students had the opportunity to win some real Venmo cash to use at their favorite local food trucks. Currently based in Philadelphia, Venmo is expanding its network of stores and restaurants that accept payments through its system.

Secrets of Successful Recruiting: The Missing Manual
Yujin Chung (WG ‘10) held a talk for IMG members on building genuine relationships with industry professionals to get on the path towards and internship or career. He gave students a very practical toolkit for connecting with people and showcasing one’s strengths. Several students had a chance to ask questions and learn from Yujin’s experience in practicing what he preaches to receive offers in consulting and media companies.

Shaun Abrahamson of Mutopo
IMG hosted Shaun Abrahamson for a talk on his latest project, the betacup. With so much waste from paper cups as a result of the emergence of the coffee shop, Shaun launched a contest to determine the best strategy for reducing paper cup use, taking a mass collaboration approach to this growing problem.

Digital Day 2: Social Media Edition

Image by Sacca via Flickr

Back by popular demand, IMG visited Firstborn and Charity: Water in New York City to learn about each one’s success with social media.

Russ Fradin of Adify

Russ sat down with students to talk about his undergraduate experience, how he started his career, and the ups and downs of entrepreneurship. Before founding Adify, Russ ran biz dev at Wine.com, comScore, and Flycast.

Dinner with Jim Young of Hot or Not

Image via CrunchBase

A select number of students were lucky enough to have dinner with newly minted partner at i/o Ventures and founder of HotOrNot.com. Jim spoke about his new iPhone app business and nearly convinced everyone to work for a small startup, or start a company, as opposed to working for a tech giant like Google or Microsoft.

Chuck Cordray of Hearst Magazines Digital

Members had an intimate lunch with SVP of Hearst Magazines Digital Media, Chuck Cordray. We had a long debate about the future of paid content, behavioral targeting, and old media titans (like AOL).

IMG GeoHunt with Venmo and SCVNGR
IMG organized a 4-day, campus-wide scavenger hunt, sending students through Penn’s mysterious past to collect clues and unlock cash prizes up to $200. Several students participated and learned about the advantages of using Venmo through a fun and interactive process.

IMG Meetup
IMG held an end of the year meetup (at Capogiro of course) to give IMG members a chance to catch up, enjoy some gelato, and geek out a bit before finals. IMG had a great year with some amazing speakers and events, and it was great to see some of our members come and just hang out for a bit.

Who: You, IMG members, and the IMG Board
What: IMG Meetup (Free Capogiro!)
When: Tomorrow (Friday) at 3PM-4PM
Where: Capogiro (40th and Walnut)

IMG is all about bringing people and ideas together and we’ve had a blast making that happen over the past year. We want to continue that trend with an IMG meetup tomorrow, giving us another chance to get to know each other before the year wraps up. Come by and chat with us about tech, social media, or whatever else you are excited about (we love learning about things we haven’t heard of). We’ll have a tab going at Capogiro so you can enjoy free gelato and coffee!

This event is open to everyone, no matter how knowledgeable you are about the tech space. We were all newbies once, and we’d be more than happy to answer any questions you have or help you get set up with things like twitter, facebook, foursquare, venmo, hotpatato, gravity, etc. We even have some Google Voice and Google Wave invites that we can give out if you are interested!

From March 12-15, Matt attended the annual South by Southwest interactive conference in Austin, TX. The five day interactive portion is also joined by music and film. Over the years SXSW has become the leading conference for tech innovators and nerds to network and attend panels featuring industry thought leaders. In 2007, Twitter launched its first beta at SXSW. Ever since, the conference has become a “launch pad” for other startups such as Foursquare, which debuted in 2009.

Check out Matt’s blog post here and an interview he did with MBA student Yujin Chung for the Cisco Eos blog below!

We really enjoyed having everyone come out to see Yujin Chung talk about tips for successful recruiting. In case you couldn’t make it, here’s the slide deck from the event!