"We went live in October with RE/MAX Mobile - 170 offices, 2,800 associates. It's our version of the Smarter Agent app," Amanda Brown, regional director from RE/MAX of New Jersey, told me. "The agents have embraced it. Everyone was already comfortable with the Web. But this allows the agents to get all that information in the palm of their hands instantly.
"It's not cheap," she added. "But we've been able to work out a deal through the tech piece of our advertising budget."
The Blumbergs started messing with mobile Internet applications a decade ago. Ben Franklin Technology Partners financed early mobile-phone software demos that would hunt for users' locations when that was still a novelty, not a privacy issue.
"We'd take a Palm 7 and put a GPS clip on it," said Brad Blumberg. The result: "We now have five granted patents." Blumberg is building not just an app, but also a system-neutral platform, "like salesforce.com for mobile."
Smarter Agent is boosting its current staff of 34 with recent hires such as Philip Charles-Pierre, a former Travelocity executive who moved here from New York, and Nick Smoot and Allen Hartwig, who moved here to work for Smarter Agent when it bought their firm, toorme.com, in Seattle.
Smoot moved his wife and kids here after she endorsed Philadelphia on a visit, Blumberg told me. Hartwig went to Fishtown and said, "This is it," according to Blumberg. "He said, 'If you're not from the East, you want to live in a loft.' He saw that movie Big, the loft with the basketball court, and he wanted that. And they love all the bars and restaurants. It's what young kids like."
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