We discovered Woobius — a file sharing and online collaborative tool — a few weeks ago and have since had the fortune of delving a little deeper with Bob Leung and Daniel Tenner, the founders of this UK-based tech start up that serves the architectural, engineering and design community. Leung is an architect with Make Architects and previously with Foster + Partners, while Tenner is the company’s CTO and the two answered some questions about the process of starting Woobius.
Woobians at work (Leung in the center)
How did the idea of Woobius come about?
BL: I am an architect and I have discovered in my work that all the file sharing programs that are currently in popular use are extremely complicated, with more functions than architects, designers and even engineers need. Most of them were developed 10 years ago and through the years have become more and more bloated. In the construction industry, the major projects are large ones, and these programs were “ultimate plan” tools that were developed from the top down for these huge projects. Generally, architects hate working with them.
We developed Woobius from the bottom up, with users in mind. So what we ended up with here is reflected in our slogan “Simply Simple.” A powerful solution that is easy to use.
DT: There are a few user-friendly, less industry-specific file sharing tools out there, but Woobius is distinguished in the fact that it allows file sharing and collaboration from company to company, not just individual to individual.
How did you take the idea and make it real?
BL: We have been friends for a long while, Daniel and my brother are good friends, and we started talking about it about 6 years ago, and started actively developing it in November 2007.
DT: We were so naive and thought that we could just test it in-house, and realized that this was impossible for a collaboration tool. So we started using it with some friends, and it has grown organically from about 15 people in February 2008 to currently about 3,200 users. Up until 9-10 months ago, we didn’t even have a home page, and finally, around 6 months ago, we realized that a home page might be a good idea. The official launch was just 3 weeks ago.
What are you goals for Woobius?
BL: Construction in the UK is a £100 billion industry, 10% of which is spent on personnel. 10% — if not more — of this workforce’s time is spent on collaboration. If you run the numbers, one could put a £1-2 billion price tag on the cost of collaboration. This includes time and energy as well as money. Woobius has a goal to make collaboration as affective and efficient as possible.
by Jean Lin
