Tuesday, July 15, 2008 King of his own virtual world By Jill Beltran
TO "SHRINK the world" and make one nation for all races, one man created a virtual channel for the entire humankind.
Jeffrey Ng has always desired to conjoin people from different parts of the globe. Impossible as it may seem but he successfully did it, simply through his invented electronic nation -- Zorpia.
Zorpia is a social networking website formulated to connect different people from different parts of the globe, which as of now, as per Jeffrey has 10 to 40 million registered users.
"I came up with the idea of Zorpia when I was a sophomore at the University of Illinois in 2003... I basically wanted people to make friends in the world. I wanted to make it easy for people to make friends and be close to each other," the affable Zorpia CEO shared during his recent visit in Manila.
Jeffrey said Zorpia started as a repository of photos where people can upload unlimited number of their own photographs.
"I thought photos would be become a way for people to connect but then I realized that one needs to share photos and check other peoples' photos as well so I added other features like the friends feature and blogging," he said.
And then an idea came to him to turn his website into a social networking website. Hence came Zorpia "same time with other infamous social networking site Friendster and Myspace".
According to Jeff, he coined the term Zorpia as it sounds like a country where people can sign in and forget about their national identity calling themselves Zorpian.
What makes Zorpia distinctive is its intention to connect strangers who shares common interests unlike other networking sites that focus on uniting people who already know each other.
Zorpia is also the only networking site that renders royal membership upgrade where people can privately check the people in their homepage, customize it and have unlimited messaging capability.
Jeff's nation originally started in Hong Kong. It proliferated in Singapore and the Philippines. It is getting wider not only in Asia but also in the West and other continents.
To give 100 percent pleasure to all registered Zorpians, Jeff with the help of his team assigned in different cities across the globe, carefully monitor the website weeding out unwanted and irksome users like spammers and people posting appalling photos in their site.
As other networking sites nowadays come up with innovative features for their sites, Jeff proudly launches the new face of Zorpia called Zorpia 2.
He said Zorpia 2 will even make easier and faster for Zorpians to customize their page.
In Zorpia, people can change any color they want of their homepage and they can add any widget that they want.
Now Jeff said "We want that feature to upgrade better so we came up with Zorpia 2. With the drag and drop homepage and other features coming along for example, you can check your friends' list alert and many pages were changed to be more it looks exciting."
For years to come, Zorpia "will still be focusing on international networking and more features will be added for the users to enjoy."
Jeff added that they will "also have systems where people can earn money through Zorpia."
Zorpia is not the first website made by Jeff. When he was 13 years old, he did a "Japanese music website, a music search engine which became the number one website in Japan."
Out of the money he earned from the site, he went to the US for college but still stuck his fingers on clicking computers and doing his own homepage.
What led Jeff to become what he is at this moment was his passion. He continues to work each day.
