A number of people have been asking me lately about when they can expect to see LiveMocha in action. I am very pleased to say that we have now entered a “closed” beta phase of our launch. Our team has done an amazing amount of work to get to this stage in just a matter of 5 months and its great to finally unveil the fruits of their hard work. To participate in this beta, please click on the beta link here and enter your e-mail address — we will contact you soon.

demo.jpg I am also pleased to say that we have been selected to demonstrate our offering at the DemoFall conference in San Diego from September 24 to 26th. Demo is a premier conference with a great reputation for showcasing the latest startup technology. Many companies such as Skype, Salesforce.com, VMWare (which had an amaziing IPO recently), have gotten their start at Demo. Demo will be the launch event for our offering and we will make the site open to everyone at that time. If you are a press person and are interested in getting more information, you can e-mail us at press@livemocha.com.

We started LiveMocha to ride one of the greatest macro economic trends of our time – globalization. According to Goldman Sachs, by 2025, the BRIC economies will account for more than half the GDP of the G6 economies and by 2050, they will be larger than all the G6 economies. Along with globalization, we have seen a tremendous boom in immigration and travel between various countries. In 2000, over 95 million people immigrated to other countries. International arrivals are projected to grow from 694 million to 1.6 billion by 2020 with East Asia and the Pacific expected to record the highest growth rates.

Globalization has created a tremendous need for people throughout the world to better understand and interact with each other. We have identified a multi-billion dollar market worldwide that is being under served right now by the current incumbents who have demonstrated very little innovation over the past decade. In fact, none of them have really embraced the web in any significant fashion, let alone Web 2.0 and Social Networking.

Like many other Web 2.0 companies, we believe we can disrupt the market and deliver significant new value by leveraging the latest trends in social networking to connect people in new and exciting ways and leverage their collective intelligence. As I have written in my previous blog post (Taking advantage of Platform Shifts), platform shifts such as the shift to internet computing and now to Web 2.0, provide the perfect opportunity for new companies to displace the existing incumbents by being the first to embrace the new platform. Often times, the current market leaders will dismiss the new platform as a passing fad but more importantly, they have an existing business model to protect that makes it impossible for them to adopt the change. By the time they realize what’s hit them, it’s too late because the new players have established the network effects making it difficult for copycat efforts to catch up.

Let the games begin!