About and Contact OpenEntry

For User Support contact  Support@OpenEntry.com
For administrative matters, contact Surendra Shahi (SShahi@OpenEntry.com) User Support Manager
For policy matters, contact Founder and CEO, Dr. Daniel Salcedo (DSalcedo@OpenEntry.com)
Address: 11112 Midvale Rd, Kensington MD 20895
Phone: +1.240.242.9798

OpenEntry is a wholly owned initiative of PEOPLink, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization based in Kensington, MD.  PEOPLink, founded in 1994 by Dr. Daniel Salcedo, has the mission of helping artisans and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in developing countries benefit from the exciting new opportunities opened up by the Internet.

PEOPLink launched the first global fair trade on-line catalog and began selling products from grass roots producers around the world.  Dan soon realized that, rather than paternalistically marketing the products of artisan producers, it made more development sense to build tools that empower them to create and maintain their own e-commerce catalogs.  This enables producers to bypass the long chain of middlemen that normally pay them no more than 10% of the final retail price.  So in 1997, PEOPLink began distributing digital cameras to producer groups and then built on-line training modules guiding them to edit the images. The modules were soon expanded to show how to cut-and-paste their company and product information into PEOPLink supplied HTML templates.  Finally PEOPLink built an uploader tool that enabled 44 producer groups in more than a dozen developing countries to create and maintain their own crude catalogs.

The venture was widely hailed for its pioneering use of the Internet to democratize global trade as reflected in the glowing articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Le Monde, CNN, NewsWeek's Cyberscope, MSNBC, Wired, United Nations World Development Report and more (see full list at PEOPLink Press).

In 1999, Dan realized the need for a tool to enable SMEs in building their own transactional catalogs and also to make it easy for SME networks to aggregate their members' individual catalogs into a branded market capable of generating the necessary visibility and credibility.  He wrote out the functional specifications for the CatGen (for "catalog generator") e-commerce platform and Jeff Skoll, then Vice President for Strategic Planning at eBay, helped launch it with a generous personal donation.  Oracle, impressed that CatGen placed database based e-commerce in the hands of SMEs worldwide, donated a full suite of its latest software.  Many other donors including the World Bank, USAID, the InterAmerican Development Bank, Kellogg Foundation, and more also supported the effort (see PEOPLink funders).

CatGen enlisted developers (based in Armenia, Ukraine, Siberia, India, Ecuador, Nepal, Ireland, and USA) to build a powerful e-commerce platform and guided thousands of SMEs in 44 of the poorest countries to participate.  A United Nations Development Program evaluation in just one country, Nepal, concluded:

  1. The largest impact of implementing this 'pro-poor' e-commerce approach was on income and employment.
  2. Firms using it reported jobs directly attributable to on-line promotion . . . 3918 women.
  3. A relatively inexperienced group of young IT professionals could, with the proper tools, create employment for themselves while providing e-commerce services to local SMEs.

While CatGen was originally designed for the worldwide network of fair trade producers members of the World Fair Trade Organization, as it grew in power and functionality, commercial business networks (chambers of commerce, trade promotion organizations, industry associations) found they also needed network markets.  CatGen won the Global IT Excellence Award for Digital Opportunity by the World Information Technology and Services Alliance ("members represent 90% of the global IT market") and also established alliances with a wide range of public and private institutions including the following:

Yet, by mid-2008, CatGen was facing many of the difficulties typical of small "dot-coms" - managing one's own server was complicated and the high cost of technical staff in the US, Russia, and Nepal was prohibitive.  Facing serious financial difficulties as a non-profit without access to venture capital, Dan decided in late 2008 to relaunch CatGen using the latest "cloud computing" technology.  The catalog generator now uses Google tools and servers while the network market builder runs on Amazon's EC2 Cloud Computing Facility.  This development was underwritten by a gracious donation by Bruce Sallee.  In January 2009, it was relaunched with the more professional name OpenEntry.com.

In June 2009 OpenEntry signed a partnership agreement with the World Chambers Network of the International Chamber of Commerce to build a global marketplace www.WCNMarket.com and promote network markets throughout its 12,000 member chambers representing 40 million businesses worldwide.

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