Who's Afraid of Myspace?

Andrew Kortina, 23 year old University of Pennsylvania graduate and founder of PhilaFunk.com, is not. He studied philosophy and computer science at Penn and his website is in direct competition with Myspace. In his quest to take a share of the social networking market, he acquired angel funding and the Historic Bell Telephone Exchange in University City Philadelphia as his headquarters. Philafunk.com has given new life to the 104 year old building. The Bell Telephone Exchange is one of the oldest telephone company buildings in the world and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places with the U.S. Department of Interior. The building was built by Bell Telephone Company in 1902 as the telephone switching station for West Powelton, Philadelphia. Kortina is now operating his online digital music distribution and social networking company from the facility.

PhilaFunk.com was the first site to combine the power of a social network with an online music store where artists keep $.80 for every $.99 song they sell. PhilaFunk users can create their own pages and make friends, like on Myspace, but PhilaFunk's clean design and ease of use distinguishes it from the social networking giant. Besides providing a space where users can post profiles, pictures, events, and even embedded media from sites like YouTube, Google Video, and Flickr, PhilaFunk.com also allows musicians to upload their songs in mp3 format and sell them through the site's music store where music lovers can buy the songs using Pay Pal.

What about Myspace's plan to open its own music store? Kortina is not worried. According to Kortina, PhilaFunk's mission will be very similar to the battle between Apple and Micrsoft--Apple came out with their OS first, but Microsoft was able to capture a huge chunk of the market, so it has been a struggle for Apple. How do they compete? Apple consistently produces an easier to use and more beautiful product, so most people who are willing to try it get converted. A look at Apple’s sales curve over the past few years shows constant growth, especially since the release of OS X, the iPod, and iTunes. Kortina will mimic Apple's strategy as he tries to expand PhilaFunk. He plans to create a better looking, easier to use, and more functional website. Once people realize there's a better alternative, they may continue to use Myspace but they will start using PhilaFunk as well.

PhilaFunk's advantage as a relatively young and small company compared to other more established social networking sites is their agility: they are able to change the site and release new features requested by PhilaFunk users fairly quickly. This agile development paradigm is common to the community of developers using Ruby on Rails, a web application framework which is the backbone of PhilaFunk.com. Since the site's release in early August, major features like event listings and an invitation system similar to the one used by the popular site Evite.com, promotional tools that allow artists to link their other sites to their music store on PhilaFunk.com, embedded media support that allows users to display videos from YouTube and Google Video and slideshows from Flickr and Slide.com directly into their PhilaFunk.com pages, as well as constant upgrades to the core functionality of the site have been released.

Based on the site's steadily growing functionality and popularity, it looks like PhilaFunk.com will prove to be a major player in the social networking space.

Since Kortina's internet company went online from the Exchange on August 6, 2006, the company now has users and musicians from 38 states and 10 countries (Spain, England, Egypt, Canada, Germany, France, Hungary, Sweden, India and Italy). On September 19th he launched the First National Online Battle of the bands to take place entirely over the internet. The top 10 semi-finalist bands from all over the country will perform in the Historic Exchange September 2007. The band that receives the most online votes will receive a $10,000 cash prize.

“It's tough fighting the big boys,” said Kortina. “I posted the announcement about PhilaFunk's nationwide Online Battle of the Bands competition on our homepage one Tuesday night. Wednesday, while I was eating lunch I read that YouTube just announced a nationwide online battle of the bands competition. Seems like every time we do something, Myspace or Youtube or some other big site announces the same thing shortly afterwards.”

PhilaFunk.com is hosting the First National Online Battle of the Bands contest, awarding a $10,000 to the top independent band on PhilaFunk.com. The competition will run for 52 weeks and the winning band will get the $10,000 cash prize. At the end of the first 40 weeks of the contest, 40 weekly winners will have been determined. They will then advance to the second round of competition. In the second round of competition, the 40 contestants will be narrowed down to the Top 10 over 5 weeks. The Top 10 will be flown to the PhilaFunk headquarters in Philadelphia, PA where each band will record a video of 5 different live performances. These performances will be used to determine the winner of the $10,000.

Kortina has his work cut out for him. He is now looking for a strategic first round of venture capital funding. He claims that after his first round of funding, a significant share of the social networking market will become Philafunk.com members. In any event, the Historic Bell Telephone Exchange that once serviced West Powelton Philadelphia now has national and global customers.