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Advertise your job ad on Bizcommunity Single job ad Prepaid discount package Recruiter package. When enterprising Wits University computer science students Alan Wolff and Ashley Peter decided in to come up with a cellphone-based website to organise their class schedules, they did not imagine it would lead a few years later to them founding a company, called 2go, which now runs the largest instant message service in Nigeria.
It all started on campus, when they were trying to set up a site to inform students which lecture was taking place at what venue and whether there were any late class cancellations. After some months trying to make the scheduling site work, students' need to interact with each other led the pair in a new direction. As Wolff puts it: "We thought it would be nice to have the students chat to each other. Whereas an SMS would cost as much as 80c, their service would set its users back only 1c. Most of the messages are free and the only ones they charge for are those sent in their chat rooms.
Peter and Wolff say this arose partly by design and partly through luck. The idea was to roll out the service in a developing country with a large population, high cellphone penetration and high charges for SMS messages. Nigeria met all the criteria. But when they wanted to set up shop they found to their surprise that their 2go service had already spread to that country. It turned out that some Nigerians living in SA liked it so much, they introduced it to their compatriots back home.
The five-year-old firm has chalked up notable successes. These phones were the readily available phones then for phone user and in its own unique way introduced phone users fully into world of online interaction through chatting and making friends online. The word 2go is used in texting, food, slang, meaning to go, takeaway. Alan Wolff and Ashley Peter co-founded 2go in when they were studying computer science at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.
The app first started as a mobile timetable for students who were struggling to find which lectures to go to next on campus, a problem experienced by Wolff and Peter. What was meant to be a three month project became 2go, an easy to use app that offers one-on-one private messaging and mobile chatrooms.
It currently has around 20 million registrations, with over 10 million active users. In , two of the founders left, leaving Alan Wolff and Ashley Peter behind. Under their management, 2go moved away from the students-only model by targeting developing markets in Africa.
In June , 2go for Android was released on the Google Play Store and has, as of December , reached over 2 million monthly active users on Android.
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