Connecting people with Velvet Puffin

The developers are looking beyond social-networking functions, writes GRACE CHUA

IN the beginning, there was Myspace. Then Friendster and Facebook were created. Now social-networking application Velvet Puffin is going global, and parent company Radixs' CEO R Chandrasekar claims it will revolutionise the networking-service landscape.

Instead of a webpage, the Velvet Puffin service is cleverly disguised as a sleek instant-messaging application similar to Trillian or Gaim.

Besides messaging friends on the Velvet Puffin and other networks like MSN or AIM, users can blog, upload photos and video, and poll their friends, all through the instant-messaging interface.

The application is based on Java, Flash and C++, and does not need to be downloaded to a desktop. Instead, users sign on to the website, and the application window pops up entirely independent of the browser.

Velvet Puffin also comes in a mobile version which offers phone users the same functions as computer users.

Mr Chandrasekar said, 'You have YouTube for videos or Flickr for photos, but we bring all of this into a unified single environment. . . And no one has used an instant messaging interface to do social networking like we do.'

The idea for Velvet Puffin was conceived in January 2006, and work started on it in April 2006.

But why the odd monicker? Velvet Puffin's creators wanted to 'ensure that the name invoked a sense of curiosity and wonder. . . we got the mind-share that we were looking to achieve with the name', Mr Chandrasekar explained.

Velvet Puffin runs on the mobile operating system Motion eXperience Interface (MXI), which is licensed and built on open standards by Radixs.

Vice-president of product development Guy Belanger noted that Velvet Puffin is only the first of many potential MXI applications.

'We are only using 20 per cent of MXI's capability right now,' Mr Belanger said.

When Mr Chandrasekar and former schoolmate Sam Hon, now both 26, founded Radixs in 2002, the company had just seven people and $500,000 in funding from seed money and angel investors.

One challenge the young entrepreneurs faced was attracting venture capital for their start-up.

'Culturally, we are not a very technology-oriented environment compared with the US. Here, there's a need to follow existing patterns rather than think out of the box (when it comes to investment),' Mr Chandrasekar said.

Today, Radixs employs 63 people, about 45 of whom are developers, and has received $16 million in funding from institutional and private investors in Asia.

Within the next three months, it plans to set up a small office in Silicon Valley to handle design, competitive analysis, marketing and architectural technology.

And now that the technological foundation of Velvet Puffin has been laid, the company's main focus is building a subscriber base.

Since Velvet Puffin's soft launch in March this year, 7,500 unique users have signed up for the service, while 30 per cent of the 150,000 instant messages sent so far have been from mobile devices.

This proportion, Velvet Puffin believes, is set to grow to 50 per cent within nine months, as mobile data-and-Internet packages become more affordable.

While most Velvet Puffin users are from Singapore, some are from the US, China and India.

And after Mr Chandrasekar attended San Francisco's Mashup conference on youth, technology and marketing last month, new users have signed up at the rate of over 120 a day, up from 20 a day before the conference.

Several influential technology blogs, including TechCrunch and WebWare, have reviewed the Velvet Puffin application, and WebWare mentions that the application hogs computer resources and memory. However, Mr Chandrasekar says the resource-hog issue will be fixed in upcoming releases within the next few weeks.

At present, Velvet Puffin has partnered SingTel to offer the mobile service exclusively to the latter's subscribers, but plans to engage in tie-ups with other regional and global telcos within the next three months.

Mr Chandrasekar said that Radixs and Velvet Puffin are expected to be revenue-generating by the end of this year.

Velvet Puffin's business model, said Mr Chandrasekar, will depend on three revenue streams: contextual ads, where advertising is specific to individual users' usage patterns; licensing the service to mobile operators; and royalties from device manufacturers who pre-load the Velvet Puffin client on mobile phones.

In future, the developers of Velvet Puffin are looking beyond basic social-networking functions like blogging, video- and photo-sharing and polling.

'Imagine running a Powerpoint application over the network and sharing and collaborating in real-time with your friends,' Mr Chandrasekar said.

'We truly believe that we have the technology and innovation to be the next YouTube or the next Google,' he added.

SingTel to offer free LBS service in Singapore

By Damian Koh 2007/08/03 20:34:02

Singapore telco Singtel is rolling out a location-based search service in the island-state and this will be available to all its postpaid mobile customers with a GPRS or 3G/3.5G-enabled device.

Dubbed *MAPS, the new location-based service (LBS) allows users to view their current location on a map from their handheld device. They can also search for services, events and promotions happening in their vicinity. This includes "a directory of shops, restaurants and essential amenities".

The telco plans to develop the LBS service to an all-encompassing view of things that are happening in the user's area in the near future. Customers can look forward to booking movie tickets or even find out about discounts at nearby restaurants.

The search service is free and available to all postpaid SingTel mobile users with a GPRS or 3G/3.5G handset. According to the press release, after users dial *MAPS (*6277), they will receive a WAP push message with a link to a map of their current location. From there, they can access the various location-based services. Prevailing traffic data charges, however, will apply.

*MAPS will also be available on the telco's Wireless@SG network by mid-August.

The Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) and Singapore Tourism Board (STB) launched a similar pilot project called Digital Concierge earlier this year at CommunicAsia 2007. The trial will run from June 2007 for a period of 9 months before going fully commercial in mid-2008.

Services Like Semapedia Could Make Everything Clickable

All the World's a Page

August 3, 2007

JAKARTA, Indonesia -- If you should ever pass a tree, wall or pillar with what looks like a badly thought-out company logo stuck to it, take a picture with your cellphone. You may learn something.

What you'd be looking at is a Semapedia tag, a printout containing something called a QR bar code. Software on your camera phone will read the bar code just as one of those scanners in a supermarket would, but instead of a price it would decode a link to a Web page on the peer-produced online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Your phone would take you to that Web page, which would contain information about the surroundings -- the street, the building, the town -- you were standing in. There are thousands of these tags around the world: A particularly popular one seems to be at the Buddhist temple of Borobudur in the middle of Indonesia's Java island, although no one seems to know who put it there (both the tag and the temple).

It's tied to what I wrote about a couple of weeks ago: ambient findability1, or the idea that anyone can find anything at any time. In that column I was talking about finding my car keys; here we're talking about finding information. More specifically, hooking up information -- what we want to know -- with connectivity: getting that information to us where we need it. As American Alexis Rondeau, 28, one of the duo who dreamed up the nonprofit Semapedia project in 2005, puts it: "The idea behind this is that we believe bringing information to the place or thing makes virtual information relevant beyond what we have experienced so far."

In fact, things like this aren't particularly new. Marketing companies have been trying to get us to click on billboards with Bluetooth phones for some years. We've been told that soon we'll be able to scan products in shops and figure out whether we could get them cheaper down the road, although no service like this is yet in place. And, at least in Japan, using phones to access additional information is already pretty commonplace, with cellphone-readable bar codes used to provide links to bus timetables, product and allergy information and details in magazine and billboard advertisements.

The idea is spreading. Keith Russell, Hong Kong-based business development manager for Scottish mobile ticketing company Mobiqa, says his company has seen the bar code take off in the U.S. as a device to deliver event tickets to cellphones. Singapore Press Holdings has launched a service in the city-state called ZapCode that allows people to access information via a colorful bar code -- whether it's on billboard five meters away or the address on a missing dog's collar. Mr. Russell describes the concept as "convenient, cool and very cheap."

But what I like about Semapedia (the "sema" is from the Greek for "sign," and the "pedia" is from encyclopedia, via Wikipedia) is that it isn't about advertising, or selling or buying stuff; it's about bringing knowledge to the place you're at. It's something any of us can contribute to and use. And, unlike its commercial brethren, it's an open standard, meaning anyone can peer inside it and use it. It's also pretty simple.

It works like this. Say you want to spread the word about a neighborhood landmark: You find the appropriate page on Wikipedia, copy the Web address, the line beginning "http:" at the top of the browser, into the special box on the Semapedia site (www.semapedia.org2). That will convert the link into a QR bar code and then into a document, split into eight identical miniposters containing the bar code and a message for people who see them, explaining what they are. Print out the document and you're ready to go.

To read one of these bar codes you need to have a camera phone and the right software. Semapedia offers links to the software for your model of handset; you may already find the software installed on your phone. Launch the software, and point your camera at the bar code. The software will take a moment or two to focus on the code and read it, but should soon throw up the message in the code -- in Semapedia's case, a link to a Wikipedia page containing the information about the place you're standing on/in/under/beside.

Of course, you need to be the kind of person who has a camera phone with an Internet connection, and who thinks "Ooh! I'm going out, I should download bar code-reading software in case I bump into a bar code on a lamppost." And, if you are that kind of person, you may just as well enter the name of the place or thing you're looking at in your mobile phone's search engine. But that's slower, more awkward (all those //s and .s) and, frankly, less fun (not to mention the fact that you may be looking at something you don't know the name of, either because you're not as bright as you thought you were or because you don't speak or read the local language).

Besides, a mobile encyclopedia is just the start of things. These bar codes make it possible for anything to be readable by your cellphone -- short encoded messages, telephone numbers, email addresses, links to your blog -- and for them to be put more or less anywhere (a cellphone camera can read them as easily on a screen as on paper). It's one small step toward what people are calling an Internet of Things. Or, as Mr. Rondeau puts it, it's "kind of like turning the world into a clickable Web page."

And, once you get the hang of it, it's pretty appealing. Semapedia co-founder Stan Wiechers discovered this recently when he was affixing a Semapedia tag to a public toilets sign in Beijing and an irate security guard tore it up. So Mr. Wiechers took out his cellphone and showed him what he was doing. By clicking on the bar code, he showed the guard, anyone could see the Wikipedia entry on the history of public toilets (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet#Public_toilets3 -- a compelling read, I assure you). The guard was impressed enough to call over some colleagues. The tag went back up. "Once he understood, he accepted the tag," Mr. Wiechers recalled. "It's a natural desire of people to want to know more about places." Even if they're toilets.

--Email me at jeremy@loose-wire.com4 URL for this article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118607066711486214.html

Hyperlinks in this Article: (1) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118486243657771817.html (2) http://www.semapedia.org (3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet#Public_toilets (4) mailto:jeremy@loose-wire.com