Have you heard your parents reminiscing about how it was like living in the kampong? Where neighbours grew up as close friends, with little chicks running amok amidst yells from mom to come into the house for dinner?

The “Kampong Spirit” has been revived and fitted into the technological age of the 21st century. In this internet era, interaction has indeed evolved and www.wholivesnearyou.com is a shining example of human connections.

We speak with Jeremy Foo, one of the founders behind this initiative, about the business of people connectivity and his current social standing.

:: The vision: Bringing people together ::

Idea generation is not an activity strange to Jeremy. It is about breaking the norms, thinking out of the box and materializing wild thoughts into reality. WhoLivesNearYou was an idea borne of imagination some four years ago and is riding on some excellent social networks it has to date.

Inspiration struck Keith Ng, who is Jeremy’s partner in this online initiative, to network people by neighbourhoods. Surely in our built-up industrialised nation, there still exists a need for interpersonal relations and knowing who lives next door. That is exactly the basis of this innovative site. This revival of the “kampong spirit” was also a feature in the Straits Times some years back.

Developing a propriety system of identifying postal codes in Singapore, WhoLivesNearYou is able to group its members into areas and notifying them of others who lives in the same neighborhood. Other similar sites in the United States utilise a Global Position System tracking technique to determine the exact geographic location of its members.

Through the virtual platform of WhoLivesNearYou, verified members are able to participate actively on forums, display their wares on the Garage Sale, elevate the social standing of their pets on a dedicated page and even visit their friends’ neighborhoods!

Peer to peer connections have been around since the advent of the web and it is charting the progress of business, Jeremy believes. However, on the local business landscape, the take-up on the peer-to-peer (P2P) concept is near non-existent. Sentiment is that P2P networking generally works on a personal level and corporate entities have their own entrenched business models. Jeremy’s take is that with the recent increase with user-targeted sites globally, it is apparent that there is a power shift towards users. It is they who are creating content for sharing with other users while companies provide the basic platform for such interaction.

:: 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration ::

The journey to creating wholivesnearyou.com was not without its trials and tribulations. A self-professed skeptic who sees situations in perspective, Jeremy was concerned if this idea would create an impact on the youth community at all when his partner put forward this concept. It was after some discussion and time that Jeremy saw the potential in making this site a success and decided to put in effort to making this portal work.

From the onset, there were difficulties in obtaining funding to purchase the required equipment, technical issues to grapple with and servers which were unable to handle the amount of traffic to the site which the founding partners were able to jumpstart from the beginning. As Jeremy recalls the sleepless nights worrying about all the problems which existed at the start, the site has indeed come a long way.

Making this dream a reality took a lot of hard work and endeavour. Taking advice and feedback from users and friends, the WhoLivesNearYou team consisting of Jeremy, Kevin and freelancers, kept improving the site with fresh ideas and functions.

Anyone met Chocolate the news-doggy yet? Chocolate the dog is the prime symbol of the newsletter the team has conceptualised, bringing updated news from the site to its members. There is also the function of adding all MSN Messenger contacts to the friends’ list on WhoLivesNearYou instantly, making it more convenient and fun for members.

With the current member base of 300,000 and counting, WhoLivesNearYou is the place to be seen and heard in cyberspace if you reside in Singapore! Post pictures, participate in forums and join the social gatherings both online and offline! Jeremy mentions night cycling trips organised by the youth living in the west, the sunny personality of the young in the east, as well as the excitement and buzz that is firing the site all over.

The ambitious team is keen to expand their local member base and push more frontiers, smashing the traditional modes of marketing and even move beyond the shores of Singapore.

:: The tough gets going ::

The world is Jeremy’s oyster. With youth on his side and a fiery passion to boot, success will definitely be on his side. There were surely times where the going was tough for the lad, so we asked if he felt like giving up. His response was a rather resounding “Of course! Numerous!”

He shared that at the startup stage, he will be worrying about how users will respond to the site, how people would think of the concept, how to get funding and whether the servers could handle the traffic, amidst the concerns of family commitments. This project seemed to contribute much to his troubles but taking it from another perspective; he felt that he has grown simply because of the decision to take this on.

Taking life by its horns is Jeremy’s way of dealing with challenges. Admittedly, he takes his breaks to get away from the problems he’s trying to solve and come back to it after a breath of fresh air, fully charged to take on the difficulty again. It is his way of regaining passion and moving onwards constantly to improve.

Sharing some advice to budding technopreneurs, Jeremy cites passion as the most important ingredient to making their ventures a success. It could be effortless to write ideas on paper, but to have sufficient passion and belief to execute your plans and pull through is a daunting task.

He puts forth two ideas of starting a business. The first is to identify a need in the market with a mass market, and move towards fulfilling that need. However, his preferred style is the second concept, which is to put as much passion as can be mustered into doing something one likes and just do it. And doing what he likes is exactly what he did.

:: Getting personal ::

Jeremy gets a little cheeky as we discuss the motivations of starting this website. “Fame, fortune and girls,” was his cheeky quip to the question. Of course, with the ever-increasing member base on the website, it is the place to improve one’s social standing.

On a more serious note, Jeremy represents the youth ideal of making one’s mark in the world. In life, amidst the masses, one is a “nobody” until one takes the extra step into making a difference to the world.

Encouraged by support from his family and friends, making his unique mark in cyberspace is how Jeremy will be changing the local business landscape and the world at large. He looks forward to continuing studying and engaging in technology practices to further improve his skills and perspectives.

Purposefully mentioning his admiration for a top man in the tech business, Steve Jobs, Jeremy notes a comment made by the man in a Harvard address: “you wouldn’t know what you learnt in life till you look back ad see what made you.”

Life has indeed brought Jeremy to this stage and he has embraced every bit of it. Perhaps one day in the not-so-distant future, Jeremy will be off armed with a medical degree making a difference in the lives of others in a third-world nation.