Global Business Incubation (GBI) Joins Forces with eZ-Xpo to Connect Startups and Local Business Ecosystems to Global Marketplace

Online, October 31, 2013 (Newswire.com) - eZ-Xpo today announced a strategic partnership agreement with Global Business Incubation, GBI to jumpstart local business and startup ecosystem by helping them expand beyond their local reach through virtual expo marketplaces, virtual trade missions, virtual social learning and virtual job fairs. The first kick-off GBI Virtual Global Business Incubation Marketplace will complement with its physical event series "Winning in the New Virtual Collaborative Economy" at CSULB Student Life and Development in Long Beach, California.

Together with eZ-Xpo, GBI - Virtual Global Business Incubation Marketplace will empower young visionaries, small business and early-stage startups to engage and connect with potential investors and strategic partners across different industries for potential partnerships and collaboration.

"We are excited to join forces with eZ-Xpo to jumpstart the local and startup ecosystem with this powerful game changer to help build a global entrepreneurial business incubation ecosystem, allowing innovation clusters in every city, state, and country," said Tonia McDonald, President of GBI.

"Not only will this help accelerate entrepreneurial innovation for early startups and expand local reach and exports, but it will also boost local jobs with eZ-Xpo's Virtual Job Fair and crowdsourcing capabilities," she added.

"GBI is a new game changing entrepreneurial incubation organization and we are proud to help them empower all entrepreneurs and local business for global collaboration beyond traditional local reach. Angel and VC investors can pre-screen startups based product life stage, investment size, and industry. Entrepreneurs can engage with potential investors through chat and live webinar," explained Matt Fok, CEO of eZ-Xpo.

"With this entrepreneurial environment, together we can help accelerate innovation from cool ideas to commercial stage with joint collaboration with every stakeholder from industry leaders, mentors, and academia," added Fok.

Key features of the GBI - Virtual Global Business Incubation Marketplace includes:

1. Daily Deal - Offering daily deal and discounts for every member. Exhibitors can offer special discounts on their products and services and build a long-term business relationship in their virtual booth.

2. Virtual Local Business Showcase - Offering unlimited virtual showcase for entrepreneurs to practice their pitch before talking to investors. Peers and mentors can offer constructive critiques and feedback on business ideas and pitch. GBI can host virtual local business expos on a monthly basis with a specific targeted niche industry (i.e., banking, real estate, insurance, health care etc.)

3. Deal Flow Screening - Angel and VC investors can screen out startup companies based on product life cycle stage (i.e., prototype, beta, and launch), investment size, industry, and revenue.

4. Empowering your sales force: With GBI- Virtual Global Business Incubation Marketplace, marketing and sales teams can listen and respond to community conversations to gain a better understanding of your customers' business needs while at the same time gain access to qualified buyers.

5. Automatic Marketing Automation - Each virtual booth can automatically feed qualified leads (attendees) to exhibitor's CRM application and email campaign application for higher marketing ROI.

6. Marketing Intelligence - Each virtual booth has built-in marketing analytics to track each attendee activity. Exhibitor can easily identify their best qualified prospect based on their visit duration and the actual marketing content they have viewed.

7. Knowledge sharing: Each virtual booth comes with a variety of online resources like forums, product tours for documentation and how-to videos to help customers find solutions and solve problems. StartupExpo365 makes it easy for people to discover and share interesting content with familiar social networking tools such as "likes" and @mentions.

8. Social self-service: Providing self-service through peer-to-peer support forums and online FAQs saves you money and it also saves your customers time.

9. Virtual Business Ecosystem through your Private Business Network Marketplace -
It's easy for every community to build its own private virtual business ecosystem with specific strategic partners and customers. With a single universal login, attendees can easily navigate from one marketplace (i.e., Virtual Local Business Expo, Virtual Job Fair, and Social Learning Marketplace) to other strategic partners' marketplaces.

The Virtual GBI Global Business Incubation Marketplace is open for early adopters now. For all early adopters and game changers, please contact Tonia McDonald, at [email protected] or [email protected] , President at GBI or Matt Fok, CEO of eZ-Xpo at [email protected].

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About GBI

Global Business Incubation (GBI) is a non-profit research development organization "think and do tank" that catalyzes the business development process of launching an idea, a business and a community through growing cooperative business incubator cluster models that grow companies. GBI's innovative model business incubator received the Official White House Millennium Council Award in recognition of GBI as a model of the White House designed program. GBI was founded in 1991 on the campus of Loyola Marymount University (LMU) at the College of Business Administration. GBI continues to partner with LMU to host conferences, workshops, symposiums on business incubation, wealth creation, technology start-up camps and the future of technology.

About IC2

Innovation, Creativity and Capital, IC² Institute at the University of Texas at Austin (UTA) was founded in 1977 as a "think and do" tank to test the belief of its founder, George Kozmetsky, that technological innovation can catalyze regional economic development through the active and directional collaboration among the university, government, and private sectors. Since then, the Institute has researched the theory and practice of entrepreneurial wealth creation and has been instrumental in Austin's growth as an innovation and technology center and in the development of knowledge-based economies in over 30 countries.