The National and the 8D Network/Auctions

Hello Everyone,

I wanted to take a moment to provide an update with some of the things we have been working on and let you know our plans for the National. I realize we haven't shared much information recently as we have been putting a lot of things together and didn't want to discuss things until we had everything in place. However, we are at a point where we can provide a little more detail in terms of where things are headed.

As some of you already know, I have been working directly with a number of athletes to secure legitimate memorabilia for our private clients. One of those athletes is Andres Torres. While I originally met Andres to do a memorabilia deal with him, he and I have kind of become friends and we began talking about a number of things including his career, personal life, etc. One a side note, Andres is one of the nicest people you will ever meet and I feel extremely privileged to know him. Through our discussions, I came to find out that Andres suffers from ADHD and some people who know Andres are working on a documentary about his life that is going to be released this coming September. Here is a short trailer that will give you an idea of what the documentary will be like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beImAskdyqQ

After learning about the documentary, I asked Andres what will be done once people learn more about ADHD from the documentary. At that point, I told Andres we could help people who become aware of the condition by building a site to provide information and community benefits for people in need. After discussing this with Andres, I decided to further explore a concept I had looked into a few years ago. Specifically, we are now in the process of building a network of websites to help athletes and celebrities promote various causes they support.

We are extremely excited about what we are building and we have had tremendous response from the athletes and their agents. We are getting ready to launch sites for Andres as well as Pablo Sandoval (likely this week) and have lined up a number of athletes whose sites will be included in the network. While we are building the sites individually right now, our CTO is developing a process where we will be able to complete multiple sites (30-50) at one time. In fact, we have quite a few athletes lined up to include in the network once we get the initial sites completed. To get things started, we have definitive agreements to build sites for the following athletes:

Andres Torres: 8D network site
Pablo Sandoval: http://pablosandoval48.com/
Kerri Walsh: http://www.kerriwalsh.com/
Rashied Davis: http://rashieddavischarities.org/
Chris Brown: http://www.nxtlevelfoundation.org/
LaGarrette Blount www.legarretteblount27.com (site pending)
Gerald McRath www.geraldmcrath51.com (site pending)
Eric Frampton - Minnesota Vikings (site pending)
Anthony Simmons http://proathletebusinessgroup.com/
Clint Richardson - Philadelphia 76ers - Prostate Cancer (site pending)

The network will be called the '8D Network' and part of our business model will include doing auctions in conjunction with the network. Specifically, there will be a somewhat symbiotic relationship between the two where the auctions promote the network and the network promotes the auctions. As such, we will be marketing the auctions through the conventional sports memorabilia channels as well as the sites that make up the network. In addition, a portion of 8D's profits will be allocated to supporting the causes within the network. While this is a for profit venture, our end game is to help as many people as possible through the 8D Network. We anticipate this will likely allow us to generate interest in some main stream media as well.

The inaugural 8D Auction will be this fall and we are about to begin accepting consignments for the auction. In fact, we will be set up at the National in the booth with JO Sports and we will be accepting consignments there. We will have a few representatives of 8D that will be at the event (our CTO and our auction director) but I will not be there personally. Along with a commitment to celebrate my wedding anniversary with my wife the week of the National, I, along with the 8D COO, will be participating in a separate athlete conference around that time.

We will be providing more information in the coming days but I wanted to let you know what was going on in case anyone is interested in meeting with us at the National or potentially consigning items to a major auction. We believe we will be able to provide enormous visibility to items in our auctions and consignors will do very well. We already have a number of great pieces consigned to us from people who know what we are doing as well as some of the athletes we are working with. We anticipate the auction to be a great event and hope we will have the privilege of representing some of your items. As for the GUU site, it will continue to provide free content and communities features to our members and will be completely separate from the 8D entity.

If you are at the National we hope you can come by and visit us at the booth. If you won’t be attending, please feel free to contact us directly with any questions.

Sincerely,
Chris