IDG News Service - Microblog provider Plurk has won market share in Asia with the help of users around the world willing to translate it into dozens of languages outside of its main lingo, English. The company remains far behind Twitter globally and faces a challenge with Twitter's recent moves to include more languages, but a cofounder of Plurk is hopeful that an early lead will help his company fend Twitter off.
It's quite a challenge considering Plurk's small size. The whole team at Plurk is nine people, says cofounder Alvin Woon, spread around the world from Canada, where Plurk is incorporated, to Denmark, Poland, Taiwan, the U.K. and U.S.
Plurk ranks at the top of the microblog market in Taiwan, according to Internet researcher InsightXplorer, with Twitter in second place. Plurk also holds a large share in other parts of Asia where people can access it in their own language, such as Indonesia, and is even popular in places where English is common, like Singapore and Hong Kong, where it ranks second to Twitter.
Woon sat down with IDG News Service (IDGNS) recently to talk about how Plurk's language translation system works and what the future holds for the company.
How did Plurk get started? We've been open for over a year. One of the cofounders is in Canada and the company is registered in Canada but the whole team is spread across the world. I am in Taiwan, we have one guy in Denmark, U.S., Canada, England, Poland, that’s about it. We know each other from the Internet. We’ve mainly found staff members through open-source work they’ve done and stuff like that. We’d give them a trial and see how it went. I think you’ll see this kind of company, this kind of organizational structure more and more in the future, you know, where people just work from home and they meet online via Skype, have meetings, e-mail, chat, and they come out with a Web service.
We have three cofounders, including me. Another cofounder is from Canada and he's in venture capital. The other is in Denmark, he's a programmer. I’ve never met the cofounder in Denmark. It’s pretty crazy if you think about it, I’ve never met one of the cofounders of the company.
Do you plan to build a headquarters anytime soon? I think our HQ would be in Asia and not in Canada based on our growth. Venture capitalists kind of freak out when we tell them we’re spread all over the world. They’re like, "No, we want you to all be in one office, the same place." But right now, this works for us. Next year, we might bring everybody in and work in Taiwan. I think Taiwan would be a good place for our headquarters. Right now we’re number one in Taiwan, and also in most of Southeast Asia. In the U.S. and Canada, top five.
Free Insider GuideCopyright © 1994 - 2012 Computerworld Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Computerworld Inc. is prohibited. Computerworld and Computerworld.com and the respective logos are trademarks of International Data Group Inc.
