Company name: Shazamm
Location: 77 Eddy St., Providence
Type of business: Web design, e-commerce, and Web hosting.
Founders: Dana Paul, Jim Deacon and Keith Sereby
Annual revenues: Haven’t completed first year of business
Established: 1999
“Trying to save the Internet, one Web site at a time.”
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That in a nutshell is the mission of the three guys who founded Shazamm. It’s also a tongue in cheek takeoff of their already whimsical slogan: “Web solutions for a peaceful planet.”
Photographer Dana Paul, illustrator Jim Deacon and graphic designer Keith Sereby met about two years ago while working part-time jobs at the same company. During that time they discovered they had great working chemistry and a common fascination with the Internet, which ultimately led them to start a Web design company. One of their specialties is rebuilding existing Web sites or making them more user friendly.
When naming their company they wanted something unusual they could have a little fun with, and play on Paul’s longtime superhero worship. Shazamm was a popular Saturday morning TV superhero during the 1970s, whom Paul admired.
”I just thought, how cool would it be to be ‘Shazamm,’ and save the Web?,” Paul joked. “Trying to save the Internet, one Web site at a time.”
Though the guys from Shazamm only hung their capes out, as it were, about six months ago, the team has already worked for some impressive clients. They created a Web site for ESPN’s X Games, which provided up-to-the-minute information and photos for media covering the extreme sports event in San Francisco in June and July. The cable television sports channel already has a sophisticated Web site, but the X Games staff decided to use a media site to help promote the event, according to Ian Votteri, of ESPN’s marketing department.
Reporters and editors could log onto the X Games site to get event news, biographies of athletes competing in sports ranging from sky surfing to street luge, and download photographs shortly after each event took place.
”This site kind of enabled us to distribute information to the media in a more timely fashion almost a service like AP,” Votteri said, referring to the Associated Press’s business of dispatching breaking stories and photos to news organizations.
The X Games staff decided to try the Web site, after Paul pitched the idea, Votteri explained. Paul, who grew up in the Cranston area, has shot the games since the inaugural event in Rhode Island four years ago.
Votteri added that ESPN is often approached by entrepreneurs offering to promote events via the Internet. But some offers, such as Webcasting, are not “complementary” since ESPN already has certain capabilities. “Shazamm was offering something we weren’t really offering,” he explained.
ESPN also used the media site to promote B3 (bikes, boards and blades), a smaller competition in Oceanside, Calif., this summer and may use it to promote other events, Votteri said.
At the X Games, Paul and Deacon took the photos, which were then posted by Sereby; who, as the team’s self-taught Internet expert, held vigil in an ESPN production truck working on the site. USA Today even published a shot of skateboarder Tony Hawk taken by Deacon, who’d never done professional photography before. He received a crash course in using digital cameras from Paul a day before the games started.
”By the way, none of us ever thought we’d get that,” Deacon said of the ESPN job.
”Jim and I thought Dana was completely out in left field,” Sereby said.
Sereby, a Woonsocket native and Rhode Island College graduate, has worked in graphic design for 11 years and is responsible for some well-known Rhode Island logos. Among his designs: the Pawtucket Red Sox new logo and bear mascot, “Paws,” which was partly inspired by the birth of a baby polar bear at Roger Williams Park.
Shazamm is now working on a site for NBC’s Gravity Games, which is another extreme sports competition.
Though they’ve done well with national clients so far, Deacon said they want to work with more local companies.
Up to now they’ve been getting jobs by talking to people, such as Charles Fishbein, president of the Coffee Exchange on Wickenden Street, about their Web sites. Fishbein said he hired Shazamm to help finish an e-commerce site, which he’d started with another company but had stalled for awhile. Part of the problem, he said, was he was unable to explain what he wanted to the first consultants.
”They (Shazamm) were able to draw out from us the right questions; we didn’t know the right questions to ask,” Fishbein said.
”We’re getting a lot of calls that we’re calling ‘search and rescue,'” Paul said.
As a photographer, Paul said he’s often distressed when he surfs the Web and visits ill conceived and designed sites. Paul graduated from Newport’s Salve Regina University in 1990, after which he planned to start law school. Shortly after graduating, however, he decided instead to pursue photography.
Deacon – who graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1989 and has done illustrations for major publications, including the Boston Globe and The New York Times – said part of the problem is that there are so many software programs out there now that let almost anybody create a Web site. “It’s really more than technology that makes pages work,” he said.
