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.
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