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the Free CMSWire NewsletterThe recent release of Wiggio 2.0 by Boston-based software company, Wiggio, hasn’t caught just our eye. In the last year over 400,000 users have turned their attention to a suite of online collaboration tools to help them manage the increased social activity that being engaged in social networks has spawned.
Learning from Facebook
Much like Facebook’s original target audience was educational institutions — bringing the social experience of college to a web browser near you — Wiggio (site) followed suit, focusing, however, on a certain subset of your college experience: Your extracurricular activities. In the last year it's expanded its reach, moving beyond the educational market and amassing users from varying sectors ranging from political campaigns and non-profits to book clubs and community organizations.
Keeping Pace with Your Social Life
What Wiggio shows us is that there are more ways than ever to use frustration as a catalyst for great ideas. No gimmicks here, Wiggio was born out of a need for individuals to manage their involvement in groups. In our fast-paced world of social media and constant networking, staying connected and filling up one’s event calendar isn’t a problem — the challenge comes with managing our involvement in these activities across multiple social platforms, interfaces, email accounts, phone calls and text messages.
Co-founder and CEO of Wiggio Dana Lampert knows this, spending part of his own college experience analyzing the habits of his peers and assessing the number of clubs, organizations, teams and groups that each belonged to and then figuring out how to add value to one’s social activities by creating tools that alleviate the stress of getting involved. With the average number of organized groups an individual belonged to hovering around eight, juggling your after-school (or after-work) life can become a full-time job.
Lucky 7s: 70% Increase, 700,000 Users, 7 Employees
Not surprisingly, the idea has been well received and Wiggio has seen a meteoric increase in its user base, experiencing a 70% increase in one year. At 700,000 users and counting, the 7 employees who make up Wiggio are staring squarely at 100,000 customers each. Rather than being daunted by this ratio, the company is committed to receiving as much feedback as its users can dish out, allowing it to adapt and improve the usability of its applications, keeping it "dead simple" to use.
Just how simple? Well, you can learn a lot from a fourth-grader, as this demographic has played a recurring role in Wiggio's usability research (although Lampert is the first to admit that there are some "very technically savvy" fourth-graders out there).
Beyond the Classroom
Fortunately for us, the feature set of Wiggio 2.0 expands well beyond a fourth-grade classroom and addresses collaboration needs that can be applied across multiple sectors and age groups. Things we like?
Scale up or down — No need for your friends to join another network; you can communicate and collaborate in a “one-off” or “ad hoc” manner, allowing you to include (or exclude) individuals as necessary even if they are not part of an established group.
Audio and video conferencing — Wiggio provides classic group collaboration functions — sharing files, calendars, messaging — but where it really shines is by making everything beyond those standards accessible. When you’ve got a group in front of you and a start conference option within mouse reach, it’s a no-brainer.
Polling — Come on, who doesn’t love a show of hands?
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