ShareWhere is excited to announce our new Merchant Acquisition Manager Rebecca VanDeCasteele! Rebecca will focus on merchant adoption and retention and keeping the StartupCity beer fridge low on inventory. Before we graciously saved her from the corporate world, Rebecca was at The Des Moines Register where she was an Outside Account Representative.

Everyone at ShareWhere is pumped to have Rebecca on the team and grateful that our company is still small enough that none of us have to remember how to spell her last name to get emails to her. Feel free to email her at rebecca@sharewhere.com and follow her on Twitter @RebeccaVDC.

ShareWhere Welcomes Employee #1

The whole ShareWhere team is totally excited to announce the hire of our new Marketing Manager and first full-time employee Chelsea Waits. Chelsea will focus on merchant and user adoption as well as keeping ShareWhere the coolest and most fun resident of StartupCity.

• Graduated from ISU this spring with a double major in marketing & management. I started out studying animal ‘something-or-another.’
• I’ve worked at a gas station, a farm supply store, coffee shops, a window manufacturer, and an ice cream company and I loved it all! (Note from ShareWhere: Not as much as she’s going to love ShareWhere, and it looks like all of her former experience will really come in handy. Why wasn’t some of that crap on her resume?)
• Random things: I love bike riding, have spent most all of the summers of my life fishing on the Skunk River–I can clean a catfish better than most. There’s nothing better than spending time with family and friends around the dinner table, and I’ve always had a love for Chicago–I was born into a Cubs family. (Now that is legitimate).
• Future outlook: I am totally ready for this next chapter of life! Super glad to have totally escaped corporate America and land a position on the ShareWhere team. Life is good. <— (Seriously, she wrote that!)

We are amazingly happy to have Chelsea on our team and look forward to the great contributions she’ll make. Follow Chelsea on Twitter (@cswaits) because she definitely needs more followers.

HUGE Updates To ShareWhere (at least really big)

We’ve been pretty quiet lately. Mostly because if we are busy chatting we probably aren’t working. Well, all of that working has finally paid-off (literally) for ShareWhere users! Check out our three big updates and, as always, let us know your thoughts:

ShareWhere Rewards:
If you caught the article in the business section of the Des Moines Register, then you might know that we have launched a pretty unique points/rewards system that gives our users the opportunity to turn their points into cash or donate them to charity. You have been accumulating points since the minute you’ve joined ShareWhere. Points for everything you have done. We’ve been carefully dropping them in a little piggy bank for you. Now we are giving you the chance to crack that piggy bank open. We have just launched the ability for our users to gain points and either cash them out or donate them to charity! You can learn more about the rewards and your own personal social piggy bank by checking out our Rewards Page.

ShareWhere Mobile:
We’ve also been working hard on some great updates to the ShareWhere Mobile app. Our just-launched mobile app (iPhone only for now, Android coming really soon) now lets you make plans, invite friends and check-in on the fly. You can share all of your activity socially so you don’t need to be checking in with multiple apps or manually sending your actions to other social networks. Keep in mind, all those checkins and plans are dropping pennies in your piggy bank. Check it out in the App Store.

ShareWhere Merchant Center:
Local merchants now have the ability to sign up and start utilizing our system to create, deliver and track great deals. With the ShareWhere Merchant Center any business can easily sign up and start talking to new and existing customers about whatever types of deals they want to offer. Not like daily deals sites that force merchants to make deals that don’t work for their business, ShareWhere lets merchants make any type of deal they want and that works for their business and their customer. Learn more about our: Merchant Center.

These are a few of the great things we have been working on to make ShareWhere the best place to share where you are going to be and get social with your friends. We have a ton more in the works and would love to hear your ideas on anything we can add that would make ShareWhere work even better for you! Shoot us a note anytime via our Contact Page.

This morning ShareWhere was featured in the Business section of the Des Moines Register. We wanted to thank the register staff and Marco Santana for the great article highlighting our social giving strategy and budding partnership with Camp Kesem!

Here is a brief excerpt:

On Thursday, ShareWhere launched a points reward system, iPhone mobile application and merchant center, marking the next stage in the tech startup’s growth, a stage that Hamilton has been working toward since even before he first set up shop at StartupCity Des Moines downtown in October.

ShareWhere is a location-based social platform that allows users to organize outings and then matches merchants with those users, resulting in more relevant special deals. Merchants pay a flat fee to use the service and users earn points by creating events, referring merchants and other events.

For the full article either pick up the Saturday print edition of the Register or view it online here: Online article

Thanks again to the great staff of the register for the coverage!

StartupCity Des Moines, ShareWhere and a couple of our other startup friends were recently featured in a great video about the emerging tech scene in Des Moines! Check it out and hopefully you’ll be inspired especially if you aren’t in a burgeoning tech scene…