Kent, Hannah building new global brand
Carl Kent, CEO of MyMediaTones Inc., has reached the threshhold of disrupting the $7 billion coupon market. The signature product FriendCoup just debuted on the Apple App Store for the iPhone, and Android Marketplace.
The application is an in-store, mobile bar code reader that scans product packages, pulls (vs. pushes ) matching coupons, competing offers, and calculates real time discounts based on shopping behavior. Kent projects close to 85 percent redemption, compared to a rate of 1 percent for paper coupons and almost 10 percent for current mobile couponing.
Dr. Mark Hannah is chief technology officer. The Silicon Graphics co-founder developed the scientific workstations which enabled advances in animation, simulations and design. Now he has turned his mathematical wizardry to coupons.
Kent and Hannah are among the 13th annual 50 Most Important African-Americans in Technology. Selectees gather on Jan. 15 in Washington, D.C. for Innovation & Equity 2013: Keeping America First in Technology: Public Innovation & Supplier Diversity. Raising capital for ventures such as FriendCoup is one of the major topics towards a goal of seeding dozens of billion-dollar global companies. The company has participated in the Catapulting Innovation Showcase for the past three years.
Winner of the Jack Kilby Award in 1995, Dr. Hannah is the visionary who co-founded Silicon Graphics. He designed the Geometry Engine Chip which thrust SGI into leadership in 3D special effects for films such as Jurassic Park and Terminator 2, ultimately enabling SGI to become the world's first billion dollar graphics company. Hannah went on to become an active investor in other entrepreneurial endeavors and and was Chief Technology Officer of SongPro with the late Ron L. Jones. He holds degrees from Illinois Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. from Stanford.
At MyMediaTones, Inc. Marc has helped shape the patent-pending mobile coupons-on- demand platform FriendCoup (www.FriendCoup.com), which launched on the iPhone in July , 2011 and rapidly scaled, amassing distribution in 56,000 grocery and pharmacy locations across American, putting the company's unique signature on a high growth $7 Billion consumer packaged goods coupon market.
As a grad student at Stanford University 4 years ago, Carl Kent, a former AT&T executive, founded and developed patents for MyMediaTones, and later expanded the company with his fraternity brother and fellow high school, undergrad, and grad school alum, Hannah, who holds a BS Electrical Engineering from Illinois Institute of Technology , and a Masters & PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford.
The company became part of the Catapult Innovation Showcase at the 11th annual Innovation & Equity Symposium, accessing valuable contacts among peer innovators and experts.
