Formerly a university professor, I now divide my time between practicing as a licensed psychologist in the greater Atlanta metro area, and practicing entrepreneurship in the Four Athens tech startup scene.

My most recent venture is wagglez.com, a hyper-local (but scalable) deals and discovery app which connects merchants and consumers through an efficient and non-invasive interface.

A waggle dance is a term used in beekeeping and ethology for a particular figure-eight dance of the honey bee. By performing this dance, successful foragers can share, with other members of the colony, information about the direction and distance to patches of flowers yielding nectar and pollen, to water sources, or to new housing locations.

Bees solved the local discovery problem eons ago... and at wagglez we are simply leveraging mobile technology in order to follow in their footsteps (err, dancesteps).

On the merchant side, a local business can login to their account and create or modify deals that are pushed to end-users in real-time, monitor metrics and track deals campaigns so as to maximize new customer acquisition and enhance existing customer loyalty.

On the consumer side, an end-user can scan existing deals on their free mobile app and successfully forage the market with up-to-the-second information about the deals around them. They will soon be able to follow their favorite merchants and receive notifications the moment a new deal is created, elliminating the need to have multiple relationships with multiple merchants... significantly reducing the number of annoying texts, emails, etc. they currently receive.

Since we are digital, the pricing and control our platform offers local merchants beats printed coupons and deals hands-down. Since we are mobile, the convenience and utility provided to our end-users provides an intelligent and timely solution to the soon-to-be by-gone era of print coupons and deals.