Imagine you need to buy a friend a birthday present. Upon reaching a shopping mall, you can’t find what you want. To solve the difficulties faced by shoppers, Wong Hong Ting and fellow National University of Singapore course mate, Zhou Wenhan developed an innovative new tool – SG Malls. This is a location-based application for the iPhone that lists the store directories of over 100 shopping malls in Singapore. Maps help users to navigate to the shop of their choice or search for the nearest retail outlet, if it is not in the mall they are at.
Within a month of its launch, SG Malls became one of the most popular downloaded applications from the iTunes Apps Store in Singapore, with over 70,000 users. With the success of SG Malls, Hong Ting and Wenhan set up 2359 Media, as a turnkey mobile publishing platform. The company allows content publishers and advertisers to easily distribute content on smartphone platforms. Besides Singapore, 2359 Media has launched its Malls applications in Sydney and Toronto and plans launches in other major cities over the next few months.
Driving the mobile revolution
“We chose our company’s name, ‘2359 Media’, as it represents a minute before the dawn of a new day. This reflects our belief that the mobile application space is at the cusp of a mobile revolution and we aim to be a key driver of this revolution. It is this belief that makes me wake up everyday, feeling excited about going to work,” said Hong Ting.
To enable organisations to take part in this mobile revolution, 2359 Media provides consultancy, and develops new applications for mobile platforms that are customised to formats, functionalities and marketing campaigns. By being innovative and nimble, 2359 Media is able to apply its software to other industries, offering its benefits to a new range of customers. This has further fuelled Hong Ting and Wenhan’s passion to bring 2359 Media to the next level.
“We were fortunate enough to receive SPRING Singapore’s $50,000 YES! Startups grant, which helped us to start up 2359 Media. We are now focusing on significantly ramping up our development capabilities. In addition to bringing our Malls application to other geographic locations, we are also looking at expanding to other smartphone platforms. Another key challenge for us will be to find innovative ways to grow our monetisation model, allowing us to boost revenues and grow the company,” explained 25-year-old Hong Ting.