socialtalkr

 

[Summary]
Widgeo.us is a Singapore based startup, developing an amazing cross-channel communications platform (e.g. Message someone’s Widgeous ID and Widgeous will push the message via various channels, such as MSN/Twitter/Email/Widgeous Widget). Widgeous APIs are also open for application developers. Financially, Widgeous has received seed funding from the Singapore Govt, and is currently looking for series A.

Widgeo.us has a very competent tech team (it’s a pretty techie product after all). Find out how U-Zyn discovered the idea and how did he build from there? Find out how he managed to recruit a strong tech team for such a challenging project ? and how they didn’t get the product right the first time (important lesson here fellow entrepreneurs!). Read on to find out how and where they pitched to receive seed-funding in Singapore and how they are taking the first few steps to turn this “cross-channel” communications platform into a money making operation!

Read on to discover the Widgeous Team.

From Left: Kah Yee, Aen, U-Zyn, Ridzuan.
This interview was conducted during Barcamp Malaysia, a 2 day un-conference featuring an amazing mix of startups, veteran entrepreneurs, bloggers, media and VCs. Find out what Widgeous thinks about Barcamp Malaysia as well.

[SocialTalkr]
Guys, thanks for interviewing! J Now can you describe your startup in one sentence?

[U-Zyn]
Sure. Widgeous is a cross-channel communication channel platform for developers and users.

[SocialTalkr]
Can you give me an example of how a developer benefit would use Widgeous?

[U-Zyn]
Traditionally, for a developer to support cross channel communication, they need to decide which channel to support. They needed to learn the individual APIs for those channels, and they will have to follow up on any changes to the APIs that they have adopted.

Through Widgeous, developers will only need to integrate their existing or new applications once on our API, and immediately they will gain support for multiple communication channels that Widgeous supports and do not have to force users to make a change of their comfortable communication channels for what the applications eventually choose to support.

Currently Widgeous supports Twitter, Windows Live Messenger, email and web (Widgeous device) and in the near future, Widgeous is looking forward to extend the channels to more IMs (Google Talk, Jabber, etc) and also to social networks (Facebook chat, etc).

At the recent Barcamp Malaysia, Widgeous has also just opened up their developer’s API and announced a month-long hackathon. Do check out the details at http://widgeo.us/hackathon

[SocialTalkr]
How about a regular Joe like me. How do I and other end-users benefit?

[U-Zyn]
Widgeous is putting the power of communication back to users. Through Widgeous, end-users will gain access to information on-the-go. Imagine with only 1 number where end-users can SMS to learn about the new movie timings in the city, or to find out what a certain word means.

On top of that, Widgeous can also be used as a direct user-to-user communication interface. Instead of the initiator deciding how a message should be sent to a user, through Widgeous, the receivers get to decide how a message should be received (which device it should be sent to). Imagine having a conversation which one party is on Facebook chat and the other party is on Windows Live Messenger. This is made possible via Widgeous.

To try out Widgeous, end-users can go to http://widgeo.us to try out some of the existing available applications available.

[SocialTalkr]
OK J. Let’s get to the interesting parts, tell me how did the idea of Widgeous come about?
[U-Zyn]
Widgeous idea came about from myself about a year ago, when Twitter has just announced its API. I built a few applications on Twitter API during the early days and I was thinking to myself at that time, why an application should suffer a limit of reach simply because of the boundary of the different communication devices.

Hence, I was thinking to myself how nice if there is a service that would allow application developers to not only extend the services out of the web, but also to support the various different communication channels without the extra work of needing to learn and integrate to different channels individually.

[SocialTalkr]
You came up with an idea to address a need, how do you execute the idea? Whats the next step?
[U-Zyn]
I presented this idea to some of my partners and friends, with a decision of either doing it alone like I did for Ping.sg or getting funding and starting up a company to handle the development and growth of this project. I would really like to thank Mr. James Seng (Thymos Capital) for not only motivating me to start the project, but also investing the seed funding for Widgeous under the Media Development Authority of Singapore (MDA) i.JAM funding scheme for S$55,000.

James also advised me to get a partner/director that would handle the business side of things, to complement my lack of experience in the business-side of things and also so that I can fully concentrate on the technical development work.  That’s when we got Ridzuan Ashim in as a CEO. Ridzuan has been a personal friend of mine for the last few years and I believe that he could do a good job in bringing Widgeous to the market, handling the funding of the company and everything non-technical.

[SocialTalkr]
Tell us more about the development process. Who is the team in charge of developing Widgeous and how did you recruit them?

[U-Zyn]
We have 3 technical team members, including myself , Kah Wee - the program analyst, and Aen - the design consultant.

Being a freelance programmer, I have worked with Aen on quite a few projects and I have always admired his design work and his ability to do some coding on top of his design. Believe it or not, Kah Wee was someone I met on Facebook. I was searching for a programmer for Widgeous and I randomly browsed through profiles on Facebook and I happened to encounter Kah Wee’s profile, which suited the job really well. We met up for an interview and found him to be really suitable for the job. Sure enough, Kah Wee is now an essential member of the Widgeous technical team.

I am basically the chief architect of Widgeous, designing the core of Widgeous with the idea of making it as plug-and-play as possible, ie. a new communication channel or a new feature can be extended to the core without having to alter much or any of the core. On top of that, due to the small size of the team, I am also the code monkey for Widgeous, splitting the work with Kah Wee on implementation of features.

Aen basically designs all the things visual on Widgeous, from our logo to layout to posters. He’s really amazing at coming up with designs that are really fitting.

[SocialTalkr]
Tell us some of the biggest obstacles that you guys have faced so far?

[Ridzuan]
Widgeous being a new startup has had to make decisions in areas where both founders have had very little experience compared the more established players in the industry. That said, we’ve had to make decisions to balance the need for developing for future trends with the need to build features that will help sustain the company today. I think it’s very well said by Derek Callow from Google when he gave a soccer analogy, “When do you run to where the ball is? And when do you run to where the ball is being passed?” One of the biggest learning points was when we tried to create a completely GUI driven IDE that would allow the layman to build applications intuitively. After spending about 3-4 months building it, we realized that we were in over our heads and had to shelve the development of that in the interest of our short term goals.

In terms of team management, it was also quite an experience because no one in the team had prior experience in working on a platform of our nature. This really translates to everyone spending many hours trying to design workarounds and developing new and robust systems for implementation.

On my end, I’ve come to learn that pitching for funding for a platform, as opposed to a software or a service, is somewhat a challenge because many of the financial decision makers are not deep into the technical fields. This means we would have to craft such technical details in a manner that is easy to understand yet does not oversimplify the potential of the Widgeous platform.

[U-Zyn]
Starting up Widgeous is not all smooth-sailing at all! I started Widgeous with the motto that ‘any layman can design widgets/applications without having any technical knowledge’. With that motto, we embarked in the development process on September 2007 by spending a great deal of our time trying to come up with GUI-based application design interface that was done in Adobe Flash. It went through about 3 full revisions, before we finally decide to scrape the idea totally and only fully concentrate on our core – making communication works and getting communication to cross the channel boundary. The change of direction came about 4 months since the start of our development work.

Even though it was almost a complete change of direction, I would not call it a total waste of time. Throughout the process, we have finalized the real goal of Widgeous, to create a multi-channel communications platform, and finally concluded that a completely user-friendly GUI that really works required much more effort from us and required more, way much more research, not mentioning also the vast amount of experience and lessons we have learned.

It was really tough trying to make a programming GUI that is simple enough for non-technical people to use and yet not lacking features for real programmers and not complicated enough that it would be an impossible task for new users to learn the interface.

For now and in the short foreseeable future, our goal would be to create a complete core that helps enhance application developers (especially web developers) in getting their apps to be extended outside of the limitation of the Web, and for end-users, an easy enough experience to communicate and retrieve information on the go.

[SocialTalkr]
Sounds like a careful balancing act J. Ok let’s talk about your initial Launch & Marketing efforts. How does a startup like Widgeous market its platform?

[U-Zyn]
Widgeous site was first launched at the Singapore Barcamp on 21 May 2008 with basic features and the intentions of getting the public to try out Widgeous as users.

Ever since the launch, we have met up with quite a few companies that are interested to use our solutions. We ended up providing a few solutions for some companies and still in the talk with some. One such example would be Widgeous powering the registration Singapore Symposium on Computational Biology (http://symbio.rsg.sg/registration).  If the talks go through, Widgeous might be powering the communication arms for more sites that are soon-to-come.

After the Singapore Barcamp, Widgeous has also given quite a few presentations and talks on various events in Singapore.

Today is the first time that Widgeous is presenting outside of Singapore and it is also the first time that Widgeous is opening up our developer’s API to the masses. With that, we are also announcing the launch of our month-long hackathon with the objectives of getting more applications to be developed for the Widgeous platform and also for us to improve on the Widgeous core, based on the developers’ feedback and questions that we hope to be getting out of this.

[SocialTalkr]
Ok Ridzuan this would be more your domain. Tell us about the current financial stage of Widgeous and & future plans?

[Ridzuan]
Widgeous has received pre-seed funding from Thymos Capital under the iJam funding scheme to basically create a basic launch of the Widgeous service. From here, we’re faced with the bigger challenge of bringing this to market. Because of the nature of our service - we are a platform – we really face a chicken and egg problem with the value of the platform only realized if there are enough applications that are built to take advantage of the platform on one end while developers have no incentive to build applications if there isn’t a large enough pool of users.

For now, our strategy of solving this dilemma is really to take a two prong approach of getting organizations and SMEs to adopt the platform(and thus bring in large number of users) while at the same time engaging the developers to work together with them to create an ecosystem that encourages developers to start building applications that are powered by the Widgeous platform. We believe that growth would really pick up as soon as either the developer or user adopters on our platform reach a critical mass.

We are presently currently actively looking for another round of investments to take the company to the next level.

[SocialTalkr]
Thanks for interviewing and thanks for coming to Barcamp Malaysia!

[Ridzuan]
I think it’s a breath of fresh of air having attended Barcamp Malaysia. Having attended many tech unconferences back in Singapore, this session was filled with a lot of fresh ideas. To me, the most distinct positive experience is how the Barcamp Malaysia participants are a lot more relaxed and focused on asking questions and focusing on collaboration. It’s actually very interesting that there are many developers here who are attempting to do projects that are being attempted back home while there are startups here that seem to have a very strong foothold where Singaporean startups are still struggling to stabilize.

If anything, I would most definitely want to attend more of the Barcamps here just to hear the diverse perspectives that the developers have here.  I think it would also be awesome if they could come down to Singapore for future events as well. There is so much room for collaboration and innovation to happen.

[Links Summary]

 

View the Team’s Profiles
Ridzuan Ashim -  http://www.linkedin.com/in/ridz84
U-Zyn Chua - http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=706830922
Aen Tan - http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=570211067
Kah Wee Teng - http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=852815625

Visit Widgeous – http://widgeo.us
Email Widgeous – ask@widgeo.us
Interested in investing in Widgeous? - http://www.slideshare.net/thamkengyew/widgeous-executive-summary/
Read about Widgeous – http://blog.widgeo.us
Widgeous Hackathon Competition - http://widgeo.us/hackathon