Jenn Padgett encourages opinions at U-Debate.com
Have an opinion? Try U-debate.com
By Steve Liner
BUSINESS MATTERS EDITOR
What's a girl to do with a communication degree from Florida State University, a desire to make a difference and a dream of creating her own company?
Jenn Padgett has an answer, at least for herself.
Padgett now works as a publicist for a book publisher in Nashville, Tenn., but how long she keeps doing that depends on the success of her newest venture, U-Debate.com.
"We noticed that none of the regular message boards offered really effective debating," avid Internet user Padgett said. "Opinions on U-Tube and My Space get lost in the millions of posts."
So Padgett and her fiance, Jack Behar, decided to create their own site to allow for one-on-one video debates. The result is U-Debate.com. The Beta version of the site saw its initial launch Nov. 4 and its first upgrade, to allow text posting on debate topics, went live Monday. The site is designed to allow other viewers to watch the debaters and go online either with their own video or support through text files.
An added bonus for participants is the declaration of a debate winner. Debaters can either forfeit, Padgett said, or if one fails to respond to a post within a week, the system does it for them. In the meantime, visitors to the site can see how the voting is going.
U-Debate.com is actually a product of Padgett and Behar's initial company, Cubed Monkey, a fledgling marketing and Web design firm. At the moment the business plan is very simple: the couple is building sweat equity by managing their company and its products personally in their time away from regular 9-to-5 positions. Behar is a designer for a Miami-based marketing firm.
U-Debate.com (by the way, the hyphen is important. Without it, a Web surfer will go to the wrong place online) may be new and more representative of its founders vision and effort than financial investment, Padgett said. A great deal of research went into determining no other such site was available online and that the site could become economically self-sustaining.
"This is not so much a money-making venture right now," Padgett said. "But, eventually, as more people find us and use the site, banner ads and sponsorships will follow."
To help things along Padgett and Behar are hitting My Space through a U-Debate page and developing a video presentation for U-Tube to get page views. And Behar has designed the site so that as more people enter debates the key search engines can take notice and move U-Debate.com up in the searches. Also planned, according to Padgett, are celebrity guest debates to attract attention.
Padgett and Behar named their company Cubed Monkey using a term gaining Information Age currency. A cubed monkey is a Web designer or other cyber-professional hired by a company and assigned to a cubical to do the creative work in support of Web sites. Such people are said to "work like cubed monkeys," according to Padgett.
She and Behar will not have to worry about such a fate should Cubed Monkey and its U-Debate.com product take off.