Who knew that the largest company in the world doing online content moderation is based right here in Winnipeg?
The multimillion-dollar company is called ICUC Moderation Services, and its CEO, Keith Bilous, is up for an a global entrepreneur of the year award from Mashable.com, a web source for news in social and digital media, technology and web culture.
ICUC has 150 employees -- 50 in southern Manitoba and the rest of them scattered across all seven continents -- all hunched over keyboards making sure the more hateful and rude online comments don't make it onto your website.
Bilous got the idea for ICUC in 2002 when he was doing some early mobile text-to-screen events with his previous company called Captive Interactive at a Canad Inns nightclub. He realized there had to be monitoring of the texts before they went on the screen because some of it was clearly not good.
Soon after he got a call from MuchMusic to do the same thing for them for a contest they were running.
"I fell into the business really by necessity," he said.
A decade ago he was travelling around rural Manitoba and Saskatchewan marketing a pre-Twitter mobile texting service.
"Now I'm travelling to global headquarter of companies like Chevron and Starbucks," he said, mentioning some of his clients which also include the CBC, the Globe and Mail, Calvin Klein and Intel.
It's a 24/7 business completely operated online around the world. Any site that has user-generated content will have some level of moderation. Many companies do it themselves but increasingly it is being outsourced and ICUC is becoming the go-to service provider.
"We are a true virtual company," he said from his world headquarters at his home in Headingley. "Last week I did a virtual town hall with all 150 of our people on Skype."
And now he's among the top five in the running for a global entrepreneur of the year award with online voting at http://mashable.com/awards/votes.
"This summer I woke up and realized I have more than a 100 employees," he said. "I had to pinch myself."
-- -- --
Next to ICUC Complex Games may seem tiny, but the 10-person Winnipeg computer-games development studio is a bona fide local success story.
Noah Decter-Jackson, the founder and president, built his Winnipeg gaming studio from scratch over the course of the last decade and now has 10 employees.
Last week it won a Canada New Media Award for best web game for an interactive game that accompanied a CBC documentary mini-series starring David Suzuki and produced by Winnipeg's Merit Motion Pictures called One Ocean.
Decter-Jackson said they were "overjoyed" with the award.
Not that it is necessarily the biggest or even best thing his company has ever done, but it's testimony to the diligence and business savvy he and his team had to keep working at their dream.
"When we first started we had a huge game we were trying to do and after a year we realized there was no way we were going to be able to finish it and we had to refocus our business model," he said.
Now the company does interactive online projects for clients in various sectors using the specialized skills that his team has They include things like virtual tours for real estate companies, property developers and architectural firms and third-party serious games, simulations and interactive training demonstrations.
Those jobs help pay the development costs its own projects like a karaoke iPhone app for Sony called Music World and an action game for the iPhone that is about to be released as well as some Facebook apps.
-- -- --
Speaking of big computer game projects, Winnipeg's CubeForce Media, the brainchild of teenagers Sean Oosterveen and Graeme Borland and Sean's dad, Neil, have released to the world their online fantasy role-playing game called Aerrevan.
CubeForce is Winnipeg's only other computer-game company with at least 10 employees. They raised more than $1 million to put the project together and now hope to attract online players who pay a monthly fee.
martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition December 9, 2010 B6
No comments:
Post a Comment