Wattpad Powers Mobile User-Generated Content

Here's a high-tech company offering an innovative mobile ebook reading application.

FOUNDER

It's not surprising that Allen Lau's latest endeavor is Wattpad, a mobile ebook reading application. It's the second such venture

"Because I have a mobile background, we wanted to work on a mobile ebook platform for both consumers and publishers," says Lau, noting that he and Yuen were also inspired by YouTube, which was acquired by Google in November 2006 (shortly before Wattpad launched with its own form of user-generated content). "We wanted to build something similar to YouTube, with the content focused on ebooks," says Lau. "We built a platform we call YouTube for Ebooks.'"

STARTUP FACTS

Lau says he recognized the fact that publishing an ebook or even a mobile ebook was a very challenging task for a writer and that his goal was to create technology that could make the job easy. 'We wanted to make it very easy for the writer," says Lau. 'You just go to our website and upload your work. From the consumer perspective, we want them to discover the works from different publishers very easily."