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Web site creator aims to boost island businesses
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Posted on Jul 01 2008
The creator of a new Web site designed to bolster the Commonwealth’s business community is on Saipan this week to unveil it and encourage new members.
Debbie Wissel, a fellow with the U.S. Department of the Interior, will give local business leaders a presentation today at the Saipan Chamber of Commerce’s monthly meeting on Islandbusinesslink.com, a site that will act as an online hub for entrepreneurs, investors and others to meet in cyberspace.
“It’s like online dating for businesses,” Wissel said in an interview Tuesday.
In addition to the presentation, Wissel will be at the Chamber’s offices today between 8am and 11am to introduce people to the site and help them sign up.
The Web site is the product of feedback given to Interior during a series of annual business conferences. Wissel said the Internet’s power to connect people across vast geographic distances enables people to “bridge that business gap” and find new opportunities.
Membership on the site is free and it has already gained more than 350 members, Wissel said. The memberships are divided into three categories, including government memberships for agencies looking to post items like requests for proposals; partner memberships for business people looking for new investments; and island memberships for locals hoping to sell products or find new partners.
For now, most of the business opportunities posted on the site involve land deals, Wissel said. That could soon change, however, as more members sign up and more investors take notice.
“Now is the time to get your profile posted on the site in order to get your business or opportunity seen by the new investors that will be looking to it,” Wissel said.
Wissel, a candidate for an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, has served previously as the manager for an investment research and advisory firm in New York.
