Blackslate Media Group (BMG) is putting out a national call for fresh ideas from tech startups dubbed “THE CLICK PROJECT”, as the venture capital company seeks to boost its investment options and horizons.

Starting January 2013 BlackSlate will begin structuring a wide network of incubators, venture capitalists and angel investors across the island, but based in Silicon Mountain Mandeville Manchester Jamaica, as it searches for new technologies and applications or Apps as they are now called to help companies and brands bust through in the emerging mobile online and social media channels.

The process begins Monday January 7^th 2013 with an open call for “funding-ready” projects and startups at their Silicon Mountain Mandeville Manchester Jamaica complex. The town of Mandeville was selected as it’s now dubbed the ‘Silicon Mountain’ for its huge reservoir of technology-savvy youths being produced by the many tertiary institutions in the area. This has resulted in the town being marked as the next information and communication technology hub of Jamaica.

Blackslate plans to launch the selected startups within a six to eight months window. During this period brands and companies within the private and public sector will also be paired with other selected startups to create new mobile and social media ventures from scratch within 90-120 days.

Blackslate will then pitch the business concepts to angel investors and venture capitalists in hopes of securing seed funding for the start-ups. Blackslate for its part will also take an equity stake in each start-up.

Aldo Antonio Chief Marketing and Creative Officer at Blackslate

In outling the rationale for this business model and approach, Aldo Antonio Chief Marketing and Creative Officer at Blackslate indicated that “Increasingly we are seeing a move away from traditional advertising to compelling conversations and experiences between Brands and consumers. Traditional advertising is structured to” shout and bombard” consumers until they pay attention. The CLICK PROJECT is designed to help us find and create new mobile and social media projects and apps that will help our clients start a compelling conversation between their brands and customers, engaging that customer on their terms, where they hang out encouraging them to share.”

On the international stage consumers are spending an increasing amount of time on mobile devices, which account for 23% of daily media consumption.  Still, marketers have yet to dedicate a major percentage of their ad spending to the channel. Advertisers in the US will be spending this year about 1.5% of their media budgets on mobile with that forecast to jump to 2.4% next year and 5.5% by 2016, according to the Ad Age Mobile Fact Pack.

For instance, marketers are looking for help in so-called “social TV,” meaning mobile applications that would work closely with a marketer’s TV advertising, as viewers hop between the big and small screen. Other areas of focus and interest are mobile applications for in-store marketing, as well as technologies that can help companies lure on-the-go consumers to stores where its brands are sold.”

“Listen what we are doing is not unique. Other companies around the world are doing the same thing with the same understanding as us of how the market and consumer interactions are changing on a rapid basis. Like them we have to begin by considering all influences that encourage the consumer to buy, as rarely does a consumer make one-stop that results in a sale. We then have to measure whether that conversation made the brand; the Owner and the customer achieve a predefined satisfaction level. If it didn’t, then we’d like to do it better the next time, that’s the CLICK way and the future of advertising as we see it. But we must be able to find that media and medium….that’s what this is all about.” Aldo concluded. BM