Online Contests and Narratives:Recordcup and Globme

Chung and Lee, both 29, were classmates at the Institute of Information Management. At the end of 2006, they and a former colleague from Yahoo! Taiwan, Lee Tzung-hao, took part in an entrepreneurship competition sponsored by the Industrial Bank of Taiwan, developing a wireless communications system that provides accurate short-range positioning. The three participants, who had intended just to try their hands at this, ended up receiving an honorable mention, seeding the idea of starting a business together.

(from left) Anderson Chung, Lee Ming-chiao and Lee Tzung-hao form an innovative trio, having built the websites Recordcup, where members can flaunt their accomplishments, and the Globme database, a platform where people can record their behaviors and those of their friends.

What is entrepreneurship? For these three young people with limited capital, the world of cyberspace, with its low costs and high creative potential, was the ideal platform for experimentation. While mulling over what kind of website they wanted to build, they caught sight of the Japanese eating champion Takeru Kobayashi beating an American contender in a hotdog eating contest.

"At that time we thought, 'What if there's someone in Africa who's also adept at eating hotdogs, but he didn't have the money to go compete in America?' If only there were some kind of online 'arena' for people to submit their favorite records and challenge each other. It would be a lot of fun," says Chung.

Billed as "a site hosting world records where you can create contests for people to challenge," Recordcup, a site for showing off your talents, was thus born. Chung led the way with the site's first record, challenging how many pushups can be done in a minute. Since "seeing is believing," he submitted his own video.

"My record was 48 pushups in a minute, but it was soon broken," Chung laughs.

Most entrepreneurs in Taiwan first target the local market, but these three set their sights worldwide from the very start, hosting their site in the low-tax US state of Delaware and building an entirely English interface for Recordcup.

Extraordinarily enough, with no promotion, Recordcup attracted the attention of a host of American and Japanese users within a month since its launch last July, even making the news on Yahoo! Japan. By October, a challenge called "Hardest Chinese Ever" was a big hit: users searched through the Kangxi dictionary and other ancient texts for obscure Chinese characters, evoking heated discussion. The webmasters were even interviewed for an article in Hong Kong's Mingpao News. In a flash, the site reached 80,000 hits in a day. The current champion is a a 60-plus-stroke ancient Chinese character meaning "exorcism."

To penetrate deeper into the Chinese market, Recordcup recently started featuring a Chinese version of the site, after which membership reached over 1,100. Nearly 500 contests have been collected on the site, in two categories: records the challengers themselves have submitted and those that users vote for. The featured contests are rich and varied, including "Most kuso computer game animation," "Most ridiculous picture in Africa," "What a boring fitness equipment" and "Collect coins by bazoom," most of them fun and entertaining. Members have submitted over 2000 picture and video files.

As for the future of Recordcup, there are plans to seek cooperation from brick-and-mortar companies to hold interesting competitions.

"For instance, we could work with Coca Cola to host a 'Who can drink the most bottles of Coke in three minutes?' competition, and present Coke as the prize. This would offer both thematic and advertising value, and would attract many young people who like to show off, accomplishing many gains with one stroke," says Chung.

This team of three's latest creation is the Globme website, launched this year.

Most personal websites, blogs and social networking sites are user-centric and employ a self-narrative style. Globme, on the other hand, emphasizes writing what happens to others in addition to oneself. "Others" includes friends, family, colleagues, celebrities, and even historical figures. Following the platform of Recordcup, the site serves as a place where people can check to see what others are doing: a so-called "twittering" site.

"We all know what happens to ourselves, but we don't necessarily care much about other's circumstances; we also don't know how others regard us. This website not only enables us to understand ourselves and our friends around us, but also tells us about things happening in today's world," explains Lee Ming-chiao.

To prevent people from spreading rumors or gossip about others, Globme is equipped with a locking and reporting mechanism. For example, if member A is worried that his friend B might spread information about him online that he doesn't want others to know about, he can place a lock on B on his buddy list, and B will be unable to write anything about A. Also, if a user is reported because of an erroneous submission about other users, celebrities or historical figures, the site administrators will immediately remove the report and ban the user to prevent the site from becoming a bastion of false reporting.

Globme also plans to utilize a "natural language search engine," which can discern the behaviors recorded by each user and sum them up into common keywords, compiling them into a behavior database for analysis. It can serve as important data for market research. But Chung stresses that users can choose whether to offer up their behavior for others to study, without exposing their private behaviors.

This team of youngsters was invited to demonstrate Globme at this fall's showing of the international new venture conference DEMO. Will they be able to follow the lead of Atlaspost, becoming the next "pride of Taiwan"? This we need to wait and see.