Interview with Tony Wong, CEO of ZiiTrend

Ziigo Technology is a technology company based in Vancouver B.C. Our first product or service is ZiiTrend.com which we launched on September 25th. This is what we call a social prediction platform. The goal is to bring together useful information and users together to help predicting the future.

We want to build a user driven community for making future prediction. At this point the service is free to all consumers. We are a big believer of crowd prediction or what we call social prediction, in which a collection of users predicting together would be more accurate than any individual expert can.

Well, for one thing, predictions are very difficult. The reason is because there is so many potential information to be aggregated together to anticipate the future. By putting together different people from, let’s say, a different part of the country with different expertise, crowd prediction is able to aggregate all those useful information together to predict the future.

In addition we use what we call the neuro network approach in which each participating individual is like a neuron in the brain. The system is able to remember the accuracy of that person over time for future predictions. As a result, if we continue to run the system, the system is going to improve its accuracy in predicting the future.

That is correct.

About a year ago, my co-founder, Arthur Chui and I found a series of prediction market sites. And we were very excited about the problem of predicting the future in the Internet environment.

So we started studying the prediction markets that were available and we discovered that although the prediction market is very interesting and it does solve a lot of prediction problems, that it requires a lot of trading knowledge and the learning curve is quite high.

We thought that this would be an opportunity for us. We ended up deciding to go for this idea and developed ZiiTrend.

Currently, people are interested in the United States Presidential election, and that is what people want to see or talk about. And on the other hand, if Britney Spears just makes some big news in the media, then that is what people want to know what she is going to do next. Our goal is to have a platform for the general public.

We have also discovered that the nature of the topic on the platform is very specific to a particular geographic or language market. For example, if our website is ZiiTrend.com and if most of the users are located in North America, it is obvious that most of the topics are going to be about the NFL or the U.S. Presidential elections. That is more specific to a particular local market.

That is very hard to say because when people look at the prediction result, they would also have to look at a number of participants in a topic. Of course when you say critical mass, what we have in mind would be at least 100 people within each topic that would have a more accurate result.

We are not there yet. We are at a stage where we are trying to build a critical mass. At this point we are pretty happy with the technology and the platform itself although we are continuously refining it.

What we really want to work towards right now is to have better content to attract users so that we can reach the critical mass, and exactly the space you describe in which each topic is going to have a certain number of users that it is going to produce the result that is going to be accurate.

When we planned for this project, one of the possible revenue models was a subscription model. That’s what a lot of the prediction market sites are doing which for us is a possibility because we see the strength of our platform. It is easier to use compared to traditional prediction market sites.

I am glad you asked this question because we were being approached by several small to medium size companies, inquiring about the possibility of licensing our technology for their company to use internally.

We don’t want to talk about a hundred people participating in a hundred topics. We want about 10,000 people participating in a mass amount of topics. In order to do that, a subscription model is not going to work for us. That’s why you have to go for a free service for the end users, and at the same time we prefer to go for the advertising model in this.

Yes. But, we are not ruling out the possibility of having a subscription model. It is just not what we are focusing on at this point.

Of course, while we are working on the platform we also participated in it as well. I would say personally I am very interested in product prediction. Which I think that is another possible revenue model for us as well because if our site is going to have a lot of product or future product predictions or something that is going to be released next, there is a lot of potential in affiliated sales.

For example, if someone comes to our website and predicts: Will iPhone 3.0 be popular?

If we happen to have a lot of users participating in the same topic, then there is a chance to have other companies sell their product on our website.

Well, continuing to improve the accuracy of the platform is very essential for us. At the same time we want to seek a balance and make sure that the topics on our platform are also useful and attractive enough for the end user.

First of all, we believe that our algorithm of our neuro network is accurate, and it will be able to continuously improve itself. That’s the important part. In order to do that, what we have to do is make sure that the users will not just find our topic useful and come back once; we want to make sure that they continue to come back and find our platform useful.

As I said before, each individual is like a neuron, and the system has to remember how accurate each individual is. So if they are not coming back then the algorithm will, of course, fall apart.

I think it has to do with why Arthur and I came together and decided to start our own business or have our own startup company. It is because we believe in owning a company that continues to push out innovation, no matter what innovation it is. The first idea with the best potential we found was ZiiTrend.com, and that’s what we decided to focus on as our first service. The reason I put it this way is because in the future we do have the potential of introducing other services.

Well first of all, both of us have a technical background, and we have a lot of passion in solving technical problems. We have worked together for a number of years. In the beginning I was working as a developer, then later on moving to custom software design and project management. As I started to get more business side experience, I got more interested in starting my own business. Also, Arthur has similar background, and we came together and decided to start the company.

For sure, one thing is the technical knowledge we got from our previous job experience does help us a lot in making sure that we build a platform in a timely manner. For one thing, because of my project management experience, I have been making sure that the project goes smoothly and at the same time, Arthur also worked in a dot com company before this, too. That actually helps us a lot technically in making sure that we are able to scale out and making sure our website is going to lead up to a standard.

Whenever we found a unique idea that there were a number of companies doing it for at least a year already. The key is to not let that bother us because sometimes even though somebody else or some other companies are doing the exact same idea, there are probably gaps to be filled, and there are probably other geographic or language markets that they haven’t tapped into. Do not assume that your idea is so innovative and unique.

It is very important to launch with a very simple concept. As we developed the product we found that it was way too complicated. From that point on we have continued to simplify it and refine it to make sure that the idea stays simple.

Lastly, we are big believers in pushing out the product as soon as possible and then try to get feedback ASAP, instead of polishing the product to a point at which we think it is perfect. Then when we pushed it out, we found out that a lot of things just didn’t work.

Well, when we first started the company, the Canadian dollars were not that high so… Talent here is relatively cheaper and more affordable than the talent in the United States. Being on the west coast, we do have a lot more IT companies here so doing networking, doing training or getting talent, we believe is relatively easier.

At the same time it also has something to do with often hiring graduates only if they lived in Vancouver. We never thought about the possibility of setting up the office somewhere else even if the talent we are looking for is located somewhere else.