The headline in the Union-Tribune newspaper says it all: "App makes it easier for geeks to socialize at events." The headline sums up the latest startup of CSE Prof. Yuanyuan (YY) Zhou and former students, as the company reports a key milestone for the maker of an app to foster event engagement and networking.
Zhou is the co-founder and CEO of Whova, a company that created an app for smartphones that can transform the way that researchers and other event-goers network with fellow attendees. In its first full year on the market, the Whova app has now been used at over 3,000 events in 80 countries. That means more than 350,000 conference attendees could use the app to network more effectively at trade meetings and academic conferences and events (including at CSE's 25th anniversary celebration earlier this year).
In the article, updated on May 9, professor Zhou told reporter Mike Freeman that Whova is "using geeky ways to help geeks like us to know how to socialize." The newspaper also notes that Whova has raised $6 million in venture-capital firms and angel investors -- enough funding to support an operation that has grown to roughly 20 full-time employees, including CSE alumni Jiaqi Zhang (Ph.D. '14) and Zhuoer (Joel) Wang (Ph.D. '14).
Like other mobile apps serving the event market, Whova conveniently incorporates a conference agenda and maps of each conference or exhibition area, but Zhou is particularly proud of the advanced features, including analytics technology, that Whova pioneered. The service gets the names and email addresses of registered attendees from the conference organizer, then uses its data analytics technology to generate a networking profile for each person based on all existing information about him or her on the Internet. Whova "provides event attendees insights about each other so that they can plan in advance whom they want to meet at the event," Zhou told the newspaper, which notes that the app also allows attendees to chat and send instant messages, or use the camera function to gather and index the business cards of other attendees.
Freeman also spoke with Whova co-founder Weiwei Xiong (pictured second from left after Zhou), a former visiting student in Zhou's group in CSE who also worked for her at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where Zhou taught before joining the UC San Diego faculty in 2009. "We focused on event engagement and networking and created a lot of unique features that competitors never had," explained Xiong, "and it is hard for them to catch up." Xiong worked as a student in Zhou's San Diego group for three years starting in 2009 even as he was finishing his Ph.D. at UIUC in 2012. Zhou and Xiong began developing Whova the following year, but they didn't begin charging for the service until late 2014. Another co-founder of Whova, Soyeon Park (far right), was a postdoctoral researcher at UIUC who followed Zhou to UC San Diego in 2009 to work in her group prior to joining Whova full-time, as did another co-founder, Tianwei (Tim) Sheng (second from right), who was a postdoc in Zhou's CSE group until joining Whova in late 2013.