Wiggio
Encyclopedia
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 Jr., and Derek Doyle as a company
with a self-described focus on group collaboration
, initially focusing on the college market.
Lampert is a 2008 Cornell University
graduate who developed the business concept with Cornell's Student Agencies Entrepreneurship Lab (Elab).
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 Beta 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.
TechCrunch reports the company received a second round of financing bringing in 2.1 million from New Atlantic Ventures.
According to the company, Wiggio currently has over 500,000 users.
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.
To-Do - This feature allows you to create To-Do lists for your group. Group members can check events as done when they complete them and Wiggio will tell everybody who checked them off.
There used to be a Links section, where group members could post useful and relevant links to their Wiggio group page, but that tab has been outdated and is no longer in use.
Web application
A web application is an application that is accessed over a network such as the Internet or an intranet. The term may also mean a computer software application that is coded in a browser-supported language and reliant on a common web browser to render the application executable.Web applications are...
company based in Cambridge
Cambridge
The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...
, Massachusetts
Massachusetts
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...
, United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
. The firm was co-founded in 2008 by CEO
Chief executive officer
A chief executive officer , managing director , Executive Director for non-profit organizations, or chief executive is the highest-ranking corporate officer or administrator in charge of total management of an organization...
Dana Lampert, Rob Doyle Jr., and Derek Doyle as a company
Corporate law
Corporate law is the study of how shareholders, directors, employees, creditors, and other stakeholders such as consumers, the community and the environment interact with one another. Corporate law is a part of a broader companies law...
with a self-described focus on group collaboration
Group collaboration
Group collaboration software provides tools for groups of people or organizations to share information and coordinate activities. IBM Lotus Notes, developed originally by Lotus Corporation, is considered one of the first commercially successful group collaboration tools. Many other applications and...
, initially focusing on the college market.
Lampert is a 2008 Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
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
Web 2.0
The term Web 2.0 is associated with web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web...
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
MacPublisher
MacPublisher was the first Desktop Publishing program for the Apple Macintosh, introduced in 1984, the same year that Apple introduced the Macintosh...
, introduced for the newly introduced Apple Macintosh
Macintosh
The Macintosh , or Mac, is a series of several lines of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. The first Macintosh was introduced by Apple's then-chairman Steve Jobs on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a...
computer in 1984, while he was an undergraduate at Brown University
Brown University
Brown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...
. Derek Doyle is the main programmer and developer at skyBuilders.com, where he works with his father, Bob Doyle.
Wiggio Beta 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
CNET
CNET is a tech media website that publishes news articles, blogs, and podcasts on technology and consumer electronics. Originally founded in 1994 by Halsey Minor and Shelby Bonnie, it was the flagship brand of CNET Networks and became a brand of CBS Interactive through CNET Networks' acquisition...
described Wiggio as "the best new Web 2.0 collaboration" company after TechCrunch50
TechCrunch50
TechCrunch50 was a conference held at the Design Center Concourse in San Francisco, California on September 14-15, 2009, hosted by TechCrunch and Jason Calacanis. Its aim was to find the best Web 2.0 start-ups and launch them in front of the industry's most influential venture capitalists,...
.
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
TechCrunch
TechCrunch is a web publication that offers technology news and analysis, as well as profiling of startup companies, products, and websites. It was founded by Michael Arrington in 2005, and was first published on June 11, 2005....
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
Yammer
Yammer is an enterprise social network service that was launched in September 2008. Unlike Twitter, which is used for broadcasting messages to the public, Yammer is used for private communication within organizations or between organizational members and pre-designated groups, making it an example...
and Basecamp
Basecamp (software)
Basecamp is a web-based project-management tool developed by 37signals and launched in 2004. The Ruby on Rails framework was extracted from the Basecamp project.-Features:...
, but targeted to college student dynamics (academic, extracurricular, social, committees, sports teams, music/dance, religious, charity, etc.) They say Wiggio uses Zoho and Scribd
Scribd
Scribd is a Web 2.0 based document-sharing website which allows users to post documents of various formats, and embed them into a web page using its iPaper format. Scribd was founded by Trip Adler, Tikhon Bernstam, and Jared Friedman in 2006...
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.
TechCrunch reports the company received a second round of financing bringing in 2.1 million from New Atlantic Ventures.
According to the company, Wiggio currently has over 500,000 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.
To-Do - This feature allows you to create To-Do lists for your group. Group members can check events as done when they complete them and Wiggio will tell everybody who checked them off.
There used to be a Links section, where group members could post useful and relevant links to their Wiggio group page, but that tab has been outdated and is no longer in use.