Entreprenuer & Innovator
I began my business career in elementary school where I paid the girls to build origami snappers and fortune tellers and sold them to classmates in the school. That was short lived due to the relative easiness to backwards engineer the product.
Fast forward to the year 1999, everyone I knew with a computer was on AOL’s Instant Messenger (AIM). I wanted the ability to forward messages to my cellphone via SMS when I was away from my computer, I didn’t want to miss anything! I created, what I believe to be the very first, IM to SMS forwarding system. I called it Wireless IM!
Wireless IM flourished for a few years with hundreds of thousands of active users but then AOL released a new version of AIM with this feature built in, as did MSN and Yahoo.
I took a hiatus from college to become an intern in Congressman Patrick Kennedy’s legislative office in Washington, D.C. It was a non-paying position so I supported myself by creating web applications and immediately reselling them. I was building business directory, SMS and mapping applications. I continued to do this even after I left Washington up until the summer of 2007.
In the summer of 2007 I was on vacation with my girlfriend fiancee wife Stacia, and I was trying to read TechCrunch on my Blackberry. It was impossible to do. When we got home I quickly created a prototype of MoFuse and I showed it to some bloggers.
I showed it to Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb and he loved it. This was some validation for me, so I spent the next few months polishing it up and making it a real, usable product. I launched MoFuse in October of 2007 and within a few months we had tens of thousands of people signed up and using the service!
Four years after publicly launching MoFuse, I decided to step aside and transition my role out of the day-to-day operations. I'm now focusing on other opportunities and I'm excited for what's next!
In the Press
- MoFuse on MSNBC
- 2010 40 Under 40 in Rhode Island
- 2008 Rising Star Innovator
- Providence Business News: David Berube Profile
- Providence Business News: Disney Experience Leads to Mobile Solution
- Providence Business News: Q&A with David Berube
- Linux Journal (2008): Going Mobile with David Berube
On the Web
- My Blog, Startup Bound
- Founder of MoFuse
- David Berube on Facebook
- David Berube on Twitter
