What is YogaTag?
YogaTag is a mission. Our intention was to create a site for yoga teachers to connect with their students outside of the studio - and along the way we created a platform of tools to empower and encourage yoga teachers and yoga students in their practice.
We love yoga and the impact it makes on our individual lives, and we want to enable yoga teachers to cultivate their community of students.
Who uses YogaTag?
YogaTag is for people who love to practice and teach yoga - and who want to share their yoga experience to benefit others.
Yoga Students can find classes, teachers and styles in studios and retreats and workshops around the planet, as well as connect to friends and teachers to learn more and share their yoga experiences.
Yoga Teachers and Yoga Studios can present their yoga related schedules online, in real time, and keep closely connected to their student community everywhere, as well as the yoga community worldwide. YogaTag provides all the tools needed to publish and promote, workshops, trainings conferences and retreats.
Yoga Teachers can create comprehensive, easy to maintain online profiles with aggregated, up to date teaching schedule information. Add to this features like blogging, media galleries and customized social network features you have a platform where teachers can stay connected and promote themselves to their growing communities.
Who created YogaTag, and why?
For us, much of the awareness and strength that powers positive change in our lives comes from the practice of yoga and the many gifted and dedicated teachers we meet. In November of 2007 we had an idea about how we could be practical contributors to the yoga community. We plugged in our laptops, put our hearts, minds, love of yoga and technology together and created YogaTag, to better connect all of us, who, by practicing and teaching the art and science of yoga, make a positive difference in this world for ourselves and those around us.
Art in Laguna Beach, YogaTag founder, Customer Service
Art counts Eckhart Tolle, David Allen and Tim Ferris as his Gurus. This means he loves getting more stuff done NOW, while having the most fun possible doing it. Art is a Transaction and Customer Experience specialist who trained in the trenches of the corporate Information Technology world. In his next incarnation he found adventure helping game developers build online communities in the booming video game industry. A consummate world traveler, Art enjoys spending time in Vancouver, Berlin and Manila.
Now stationed on the beaches of Laguna Beach, he keeps everyone on track, on strategy, on the money and YogaTag's features and business processes closely aligned with what a yogi(ni) needs.
Art believes that Yoga is the ultimate human technology. That it is a path to integrating every aspect of our lives and connecting us to ourselves, everyone and everything. He loves the spectrum of variation that yoga has to offer and will attend any class you invite him to.
Chris in London, YogaTag founder, Technology
Chris spins music and codes with the same focused fervor. As a developer of derivatives trading software (we're still not sure what that is either), he's honed his hardcore coding skills and wants to bring the yoga world the simplest and most effective tools to connect people and support yoga activities.
Chris makes sure that all our code and systems are state-of-the-art, work flawlessly, serve a yogic purpose and that all data is totally secure. As a DJ, he regularly spins/samples/mashes and otherwise concocts totally addictive and highly dance-able mixes which provide the soundtrack to the evolution of YogaTag.
Like his mixes Chris likes his Yoga moving and grooving. He finds that Power Vinyasa is the best for doing this. Chris likes sweating it out in Power Vinyasa classes he takes in London.
Carmen in San Francisco, Marketing
Digital native Carmen De Jesus is a true INFJ - a mentat, a muse, a motivator, a marketing master, and a mominatrix. Her intuition is one of the sharpest tools in her diverse skill set, and informs her as she works to facilitate elegant user experiences and precise communications.
Carmen's parallel processes have included careers in high-tech advertising, PR and marketing with early stage startups as well as globally recognized brands, but more interestingly, professional musical theatre, hypnotherapy, NLP and vocal coaching. She enjoys esoteric learning of all forms, loves the full moon, is a gleeful fetishist, Discordian, sybarite, apopheniac and technophile.
She enjoys restorative, Anusara and Kundalini yoga, but really needs to work on her Crow. Carmen's yoga rituals are dedicated to the recursive expansion of the inner spiral, and learning strength in surrender. For more about Carmen, visit http://carmenleilani.com
Melinda in Milan, Design
Meli brings form, color and spirit to the YogaTag design. She loves numbers, apples, big walls and is powered by espresso.
She believes that at the intersection of imagination, connection and creation, there is a space that can be experienced through feeling - it is this philosophy that she follows when bringing her design to the screen. At YogaTag, Meli helps the YogaTag Elephant to stay in the right shape, giving him nice colors and fancy tusk.
She just started practicing yoga and she sees yoga as full of colors, and colors as full of yoga. For more about how Meli sees life, visit http://melindamauri.com
Lutz Versick in Berlin, Founding Advisor
Confirmed bachelor turned family man, ex-expatriate returned to his German roots after 15 years of highly agreeable culture shock in the Americas and Asia, he was CEO and co-Founder at City Yoga GmbH (http://cityyogaberlin.com) for 4 rich and rewarding years. Which is now Berlin's busiest yoga center. Armed with a background in technology and branding, Lutz' valuable insights have helped to shape the intention and form of how YogaTag can best serve yoga teachers, studios and students.
Andrew Lister in London, Design
In putting YogaTag together, we are most grateful to our collaborator and friend Andrew Lister of acclaimed http://slicedorange.co.uk Andrew defies common notions of left brain/right brain differentiation, and manages to be both, an outstanding creative designer and excellent ASP.NET application developer. Andrew is a talented photographer with a passion for LOMO.