18 July 2014 / Tampa Bay Business Journal – Honestly, when the call came in, the bowl game official could have told me the sponsor was going to be Jaguar or CSX or even The Melting Pot and I would have said “ho-hum” and written a nice little scoop to beat my competition to the story and let that be that.
He said, “It’s gonna be called the Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowl,” and my face lit up. The most disruptive force in technology today is slapping its name on an early bowl game in St. Pete? That’s exactly what I would have been hoping for if I had known to hope.
Bitcoin is a digital currency unsecured by any government entity that can be used just like a credit card at participating merchants. This week’s Tampa Bay Business Journal cover story addresses how BitPay, the Atlanta payment processor that signed a three-year title sponsorship to put bitcoin’s name on the game, plans to turn St. Pete into the world’s largest bitcoin-friendly city – if only during the week of the game.
Here are five reasons Tampa Bay would be smart to pay attention and take advantage of this new relationship.
1. It’s free. It costs us nothing to have the word bitcoin attached to the name St. Petersburg on all of the advertising materials that will push the event. People all over the world will associate St. Petersburg with this new and disruptive technology and you would spend a fortune to get people to think that without the sponsorship deal.
2. Nobody owns it yet. Most of the startups in the digital currency space are in Silicon Valley, and some others are in Atlanta, but no city has forged itself as the home to this technology. It can be us. It can be us because, as BitPay Vice President of Marketing Stephanie Wargo is fond of saying, “Bitcoin is Internet 1994 right now.” What would we give to have been there to roll out the red carpet for tech companies in 1994?….. Read more
