Wipley, Social Gaming Platform

Wipley’s entrepeneurship team accumulate several years of experience in R&D issues related to information access, semantic technologies, information filtering, data mining, machine learning, etc. In recent years we have participated in various relevant R&D projects, and in particular we have been part of MAVIR, a research network co-funded by the Community of Madrid under the Fourth Regional Plan for Scientific Research and Technological Innovation (IV PRICIT) and formed by a multidisciplinary team of scientists, technicians, linguists aimed to develop an integrated effort in the areas of research, training and technology transfer.. ”

And beyond participating in MAVIR, we emerge as a spin-off of the project and we form part of the group of companies that, with the universities of the consortium, are part of this research network. We had talked previously about MAVIR, but until this January, we hadn’t formalized our role as a spin-off company and as a participant in MAVIR, and we didn’t want to go deeper in this issue.

In short, we are happy to be a spin-off of a project as MAVIR, being in contact with R&D that is done in the universities (and we’re also doing) and being in a more than adequate for innovation. We appreciate the help that Victor Peinado gave to us in all the process of becoming MAVIR’s first spin-off.

Last friday, we had our first meeting with an investor. This time, we met Rodolfo Carpintier, who we got contact trying to get some investment in Wipley, but also to get in contact with american inverstors in order to take advantage of our next travel to California and Corea, where we will present part of our present research in CIKM 2008 e IDEAL 2008.

The meeting wasn’t as productive as we wanted, as we got no contact with any american investor. As Rodolfo told us, the american people has a huge market and they do not make investments far away from their own homes. Rodolfo criticised us some aspects of our actual business plan, most of them very useful to us in order to arrange the next “II Foro de Inversión de Madri+D”, where we have been invited, but some other critics seem to be in contrast with some topics we have recently read and we used to improve our presentation.

Next, I have posted a photo we took to us in a post-reunion meal in a McDonald’s, where we tried to relax before the meeting.

Until now, in the blog we have described Wipley’s goals, and some tools we have coded during the development of Wipley. But we had not presented to the enterpreunship team that is behind the project.

The enterpreunship team (and, until now, developers) of Wipley is formed by Francisco Carrero, Borja Monsajve and José Carlos Cortizo. Those people are lecturers at Universidad Europea de Madrid. From the academic perspective, they had a hughe experience of developing and managing R+D projects, including technology transfer and science difussion. They had formed part of more than 10 research spanish and european R+D projects that used technologies related to Internet, like contents filtering (spam and pornography), recommender systems, semantic web, etc.

Previously, and in some cases in parallel to their academic and research works, they had enterpreunship experience, as they had worked in several companies, and also have founded 3 technology start-ups in the last 10 years.

For more detailed information, each member of the Wipley crew are going to write a post about their personals trajectories and their vinculation to Wipley. We will link those post to this entry:

• Francisco Carrero
• Borja Monsalve
• José Carlos Cortizo

My friends from Wipley are working hard on developing the first prototype. I have been asking for trying some functionality but they don’t let me to go near their workplaces. At least, they gave me some previous designs that they are using to test ideas and select one for developing the final Wipley design.

Here yo have the 3 designs. I hope that you make some critics, tell me what you prefer from each design, etc.

Design 1: Inspired on Facebook. As Facebook is considered by Wipley crew as a reference Social Network, they have tried to modify the Facebook’s desing in order to adapt their colours and style. The design isn’t finished (some parts are cutted and pasted from Facebook) but it allows to see how it could seem.

Design 2: This design is more similar to standard social networks. It is inspired on Moterus and UGame.

Wipley developers says that the first design, as it follows Facebook’s philosophy, is centered on the interaction with your friends. The second one, is oriented to discover new contents not taking care about the authors (if they are friends/contacts or not). They have developed a mixed desing (design 3), with two areas that allows several kinds of interactions (with your friends, to discover new contents, etc.)

I already have my favourite design, so do you?

This week we have finished the design of Wipley business cards and we have sent it for printing to Vistaprint, an online printer that R4P crew recommended us.

We wanted to show some previous designs before in order to receive your feedback but we had no time. We hope to receive your comments about the business cards in order to receive feedback for future designs.

And, What is Wipley? Wipley is a project that is being developed since some months ago by some enterprising (Francisco Carrero, Borja Monsalve y José Carlos Cortizo). This project combines some topics we are really interested on: videogames, social networks and intelligent systems.

Wipley hopes to become in some kind of Facebook for ganers. A Social Network highly configurable and usable that allows videogamers to access all the information about their games, characters, groups, clans, etc. unified in a single site. But, we also look forward into a easier and more dynamic way to relate videogamers.

By the other hand, Wupley will not be a typical social network, it will incorporate several technologies to increase its usability, the information access and its interoperability, and it will also have some functionalities further than typical ones in social networks.

Where do we want to reach? We have decided to do not impose limits to ourselves. We hope the users guide the development of Wipley. For that, we have created this blog, to inform all the possible users about our advances, and where we hope to receive all kind of comments and suggestions that help us to improve Wipley.

Which is the actual status? By now, we are centerd on the business plan and working very hard in the first prototypes. We plan to release the first beta after the summer.

I like videogames. I was going to say that I spend over 10 hours per week in games like WoW, GTA, FIFA, . . . ot even SingStar, but it could seem I’m an addict :P. Besides, I spend some other hours searching for information about videogames, discussing in forums, or even having something for drink with people from my clan.

The truth is that I have just realised that I waste most of the time I am surfing the Internet. Having to read 30 blogs, log-in and review 10 forums, visit pages and pages of Google search results, access the web of my clan to see what’s going on, connecting to the messenger to see if anyone wants to play a fast game… I hope you don’t missunderstand me: the problem os not going through all that websites, but having to access all of them without knowing if there are upgrades, if my friends would have posted a message for me or if anyone would play that game with me.

I have already told to my friends from Wipley: “I want you to develop a unique web where I can find all that stuff about videogames, access all my clans, and searching for new friends to play with. I want a Facebook for videogamers.”

Said and done. They are working on it…