Wiggio

Wiggio

File:WiggioBetaLogo.jpg
Type	Privately held company
Founded	2008
Headquarters	Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Industry	web development
Products	web applications
Employees	4 (2008)
Website	wiggio.com

Wiggio is a privately held Web application company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. The firm was co-founded in 2008 by CEO Dana Lampert, Rob Doyle, and Derek Doyle as a company with a self-described focus on group collaboration, initially focusing on the college market. Wiggio also produces a blog.

Lampert is a 2008 Cornell University graduate who developed the business concept with Cornell's Student Agencies Entrepreneurship Lab (Elab).

History

According to the website's About page, Lampert says, "As seniors at Cornell, we started Wiggio out of our own frustrations with unnecessarily clogged inboxes, using five different websites for five different functions, and all the other hassles associated with working in groups. We were tired of sending eleven emails back and forth just to set a meeting time. We were tired of that guy who just never knows where and when to be there. We were tired of list-servs, contact lists, phone-chains and incompatibilities. We wanted everything to be in one place, and we wanted it simple. So we created Wiggio."

Lampert teamed up with Web 2.0 program developers and brothers Rob Doyle and Derek Doyle, following an introduction by Marc Lampert, Dana's father. Rob Doyle worked as a consultant to Lampert's firm, Pharmaceutics.

Rob Doyle was one of the developers of the first desktop publishing program, MacPublisher, introduced for the newly introduced Apple Macintosh computer in 1984, while he was an undergraduate at Brown University. Derek Doyle is the main programmer and developer at skyBuilders.com, where he works with his father, Bob Doyle.

Wiggio was introduced to the Cornell campus in Spring 2008 and attracted about 1500 users.

VentureBeat says Wiggio has raised $450,000 in angel funding. XConomy.com says the small group of angel investors are family and friends, including Bob Doyle.

The public beta launch was September 15, 2008. Wiggio had about 5000 users as of September 17, 2008.

CNet described Wiggio as "the best new Web 2.0 collaboration" company after TechCrunch50.

EContent Magazine said Wiggio is not another social network but a productivity tool for students who are asked to work in groups by professors who hope to instill teamwork skills.

TechCrunch reported that Wiggio had come out of beta in February 2009 with a new look and features such as a Twitter-like message stream for group members, a group list-serv, a shared calendar, mass text and voice messaging, file-sharing (including online docs and spreadsheets), polling, and more. They compared it to Yammer and Basecamp, but targeted to college student dynamics (academic, extracurricular, social, committees, sports teams, music/dance, religious, charity, etc.) They say Wiggio uses Zoho and Scribd for shared document viewing and editing, and has partnered with Rondee for the teleconferencing. All other features were developed in-house. They reported that Wiggio has 45,000 users, about 80 percent of which are college students and faculty members.

According to the company, Wiggio currently has over 250,000 users.

Software

Wiggio's interface includes six basic toolsets (Note that one Wiggio account can create multiple groups, which can be viewed separately or combined, in the calendar, for example):

Calendar — A fairly simple shared calendar that allows you to manage group events. There's no easy way to add this calendar to whatever time management system you use, but you can set up an automatic email whenever a change is made to the calendar (or any other part of your group). Gmail can translate those emails into Google Calendar events without an issue. You can also export this calendar to Outlook, Yahoo! or iCal calendars.

Folder — You can upload most file types to Wiggio groups. You can edit documents and spreadsheets within Wiggio and get version-tracking automatically. A group member can download the file, change it and re-upload it. He/she doesn't need to change the file name or anything for Wiggio to recognize it as a new version. Old versions are still available. You can view photos and videos, and listen to audio files from within the Folder.

Meeting — Wiggio offers three types of meetings for users: in-person, conference call and chat rooms. For conference calls, Wiggio uses Rondee, a free conference call service. Wiggio will also host chats for a group.

Poll — Wiggio's poll allows you to get a quick consensus of your groups members. You ask questions, and get the responses back aggregated in a chart format

Messages — Through Wiggio, you can send and receive messages in three different ways: text message, email and voice note. Each group has its own email address. When anyone in the group mails in to that address, it gets redistributed to everyone in the group, according to their delivery preference. Emails from non-group members are blocked to eliminate spam. Subgroups support communication with a subset of the group without having to choose all their names.

Links — The link tool is simply a place to paste in links so that your group has a shared set of bookmarks, videos and resources.

See also

• Web 2.0

External links

• Official site
• YouTube video on Wiggio
• Wiggio blog
• Wiggio Interview with Josh Chandler