Milpitas, California, January 29, 2008 – As Web 2.0 concepts evolve, ideas that leverage the peer-to-peer model are transforming traditional interactions by adding a flavor of community, content, context and collaboration. Today, iMantri.com, a business social networking site, is harnessing this approach to launch a venue where people can find and interact with mentors based on specific goals they want to achieve or specific competencies they want to develop. Apart from matching mentors and mentees, iMantri also features a process and a framework to facilitate mentoring interactions.
There is growing interest in mentoring, in social and corporate arenas. Programs such as Big Brothers Big Sisters have been shown to reduce truancy among youth. Similarly, organizations such as SCORE have attracted thousands of mentors and mentees who benefit from having sought out each other. However, mentoring relationships can be difficult to develop even in established professional networking sites. iMantri addresses this problem by building on the power of social networking in the industry’s first dedicated peer-to-peer mentoring site that facilitates the mentor-mentee relationship based on competencies and goals.
"At an emotional level, people strive for affirmation and validation, and at a rational level they want a sounding board and a shoulder to lean on," said Satya Iluri, CEO and co-founder, iMantri. "iMantri fulfills these needs for employees, executives, entrepreneurs and other career-minded individuals by providing a way for them to find mentors who possess the competencies they are seeking or who can help with specific goals, while simultaneously offering their own competencies and wisdom to others.”
iMantri applies the best of both mentoring and social networking to create a non-hierarchical mentoring relationship based on individual expertise. This means that mentors and mentees can both give and receive advice and acquire new skills based on their areas of knowledge and goals.
More than a listing of mentoring classifieds, iMantri provides a framework for mentoring, as well as tools to facilitate the process and help sustain the mentor-mentee relationship. Both mentors and mentees fill out a questionnaire to analyze their skills and competencies, create a competency map, and develop a mentoring needs analysis. Then both mentors and mentees can search for each other using a mentor matching engine that is based on profile characteristics, demographic details, and other criteria.
iMantri’s core features include:
• Mentoring Resources: Individual users will be provided contextual resources such as books, articles, news and related products and services that they can use in their mentoring process
iMantri’s beta release is now open to the public. Registration is free at www.imantri.com.
iMantri is a peer-to-peer social network for mentoring and coaching. The site facilitates connections between mentors and mentees and also provides a framework and tools for fostering mentoring relationships online. iMantri is founded by veterans in the field of management and technology and with a strong advisory board of experts from the coaching, mentoring, training and leadership development worlds. The company is headquartered in Silicon Valley. Visit iMantri at: www.imantri.com.
