www.ArmedZilla.com: Social Networking Site for U.S. Veterans Delivers Largest Support Initiative in American History

ArmedZilla is a new social networking site focused on the U.S. Military community, providing a needed platform to connect military personnel, veterans, friends, family and supporters worldwide. The platform does what Facebook and other community platforms have not: fill a support and service gap missing far too long within the military community.

Currently, there are 24 million American veterans and more than two million men and women serving in the U.S. Military. Many feel a need to share experiences, make new connections while in the military, and stay connected once discharged. ArmedZilla’s site, accessible at no cost, provides this community with necessary and easy to use support services that helps them in their day-to-day lives. ArmedZilla members can share their stories, be recognized for their service, re-connect with former buddies, and interact with friends, family and supporters.

ArmedZilla is one of many new companies that represent the continued bold segmentation of the social networking ecosystem. As the cable television industry took the newtwork few to thousands of targeted, very specific audience channels, so too goes social networking. The audiences with specific, narrow interests served by cable television are many. Some narrow in a larger context – Food Network or HSN – others in a much smaller context: The Puppy Channel.

As more segmented community targeted social networking sites prepare to launch, the need for talented software engineering resources as enablers grows in parallel. The demand has easily outstripped supply. Specialists like Avantica Technologies, with its Agile-based Nearshore model (same time-zone, economical, available, English speaking developers) is filling the gap. ArmedZilla’s founder and CEO said about his company’s collaboration with Avantica:

“Our decision to work with Avantica is based on their ability to integrate their talented software developers and testers into our internal team. They were productive immediately, helping us meet our aggressive release goals.”

Avantica’s Latin America-based software developers worked closely with ArmedZilla’s internal development team to build a reliable, feature rich site that can scale to support rapid traffic growth. Avantica’s QA engineers, also part of the team, utilize leading testing tools supporting TC definition, test cycle execution, and QA results delivery. It’s a highly collaborative effort between the two companies built on an Agile engineering model designed to get the platform rapidly launched.

As CBS, NBC and ABC once dominated American television, only to give way to an ever more powerful cable television tidal wave of audience segmentation, many see an appropriate analogy for social networking. Facebook, LinkedIn and others may face a similar future.