Website wigix.com Type of business Privately held company | Founded March 2007 | |
Industry Online C2C and B2C Marketplace Key people James Chong, CEO & Founder
Bob Lee, CTO & Founder
Albert Loh, CFO & Founder Headquarters Oakland, California, United States | ||
Wigix launches an ebay for passive sellers
Wigix, also known as Wigix.com, Wigix.cn, and Wigix, Inc., is an online consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer (B2C) online marketplace whose model mimics financial trading platforms. The company name is an acronym for "Want It Got It eXchange". Along with Wigix.com, the company also owns China-based ddku.com as a wholly owned subsidiary.
Contents
Wigix on the rachael ray show
Founding and early history
The company was founded in Oakland, California, on March 28, 2007, by James Chong, Bob Lee and Albert Loh. Invitations to the private beta started on June 5, 2007. After six months in private testing, the service opened up to the public (still in beta) ten weeks later, on April 29, 2008. There was a general release on February 5, 2010.
From its inception, Wigix was designed as a marketplace to sell goods in the similar fashion that stocks are sold. Each good/product has a single page, called an "Item Detail Page," within the "catalog." On that page, sellers can list their own item as a "Sell Order." Buyers can view the open sell orders and agree to a price, or list a "Buy Order" at a lower price for sellers to view.
Community-driven online marketplace
This system rides on a structured catalog that is built by page submissions from its members and managed by specially appointed members, called "Category Experts". Members that submit pages own their submitted pages and become "Page Owners" (called 'homesteaders' at launch). Both Page Owners and Category Experts make the marketplace "community-driven" and are monetarily compensated for their work. The use-cases for the Wigix service are: to buy, to sell, to build a portfolio for asset tracking and evaluation and to contribute to the Wigix catalog for monetary compensation.
As a part of its community, social networking and Web 2.0 efforts, the service includes the ability to find and invite "friends". This enables typical social website functions, including being notified on friends' activity, and read-access to friends' portfolios, watchlists and gift registries. Other community-based features include the ability to post blogs participate in discussion threads.
Key features
Key people
James Chong: a Founder, CEO, chairman of the board. Prior to Wigix, James was founder and CEO of Cyanea Systems, a venture-backed company that was sold to IBM. Prior to Cyanea, James was also CTO of PlanetRX, a public e-commerce company, and Vice President of Architecture and Planning at Charles Schwab, where he built Schwab's 1st and 2nd generation web trading platforms.
Bob Lee: a Founder and CTO. Prior to Wigix, Bob was Vice President of Product Management at Cyanea Systems. Bob was also Vice President of IT at Epoch Partners/Goldman Sachs and Vice President of IT at Charles Schwab.
Albert Loh: a Founder & VP Finance and Operations. Prior to Wigix, Loh was head of IBM's Project Management Office. He has also been CFO for the Guangzhou Jianlibao Group's Southeast Asian Region.
Tim Draper: board member. Draper is Founder & managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, known for advancing "viral marketing". He is also a member of the board of directors at The BizWorld Foundation, Singapore's Economic Advisory Council, Ukraine's Orange Circle, U.C. Berkeley's Haas School of Business, Glam, Tagworld, SocialText, Kyte.tv, Chrome Graphics, Meebo, and Increo.
Bill Burnham: board member. Burnham is Managing General Partner of Inductive Capital, that focuses on leveraging private-market insights to improve public-portfolio management. He was managing director at Mobius Venture Capital Inc., an early stage investment company and at Softbank Capital Partners, a late-stage investment company, and held management positions at Booz, Allen & Hamilton, Credit Suisse First Boston, Deutsche Morgan Grenfell and Piper Jaffray.
Nick Donofrio: board member. Donofrio is a Fellow, and an Executive Vice President INT Alumnus of IBM. He is also a member of the board of directors at the Bank of New York Mellon, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the Council for the United States and Italy, and the Genographic Project. He was Executive Vice President, IBM Corporation, responsible for a worldwide organization of 130,000 employees in research, global manufacturing & procurement, governmental programs, corporate community relations, as well as On-demand technologies.
Funding
Worldwide operations are funded by venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, based in Menlo Park, California. The firm has a previous reputation of funding successful technology companies, including Hotmail, Skype, and Meebo.