Wantgo Launches As a Social Hub For Locals and Tourists to Find Events in Singapore

Singapore is a place where there’s always plenty to do. That has inspired a startup to launch a social events finder site called Wantgo. Rather than having to delve through newspapers or read through Time Out, Wantgo wants to give users a personalized view of events they might like to see thanks to it tying up with your Facebook account.

Wantgo is made by a startup spread across Singapore and Tokyo, but Wantgo launches today exclusively for the Lion City, with plans to expand the events listings to other Southeast Asian countries later this year.

Taichi Sugiura from Cinra, makers of Wantgo, says that the site also plans to sell tickets later once it has grown to have at least 50,000 users. For now, the site is focusing on getting its personalization engine right so it can find the kinds of events you and your friends want to see. Taichi explains the startups different approach to that of its media rivals:

Compared with Time Out, I-S Magazine and YourSingapore, we are focusing on searching, not reading, so that users don’t need to follow our website everyday. They can use this site and find interesting events more easily and any time. I think the new form of ‘editing’ is not recommendations directly from an editor’s subjective interests, but filtering huge information by user’s interests.

And that’s how the site hopes to win the battle to curate events and be more relevant to its initial users in Singapore. He adds that the startup’s primary target is foreign people who live in Singapore, and the secondary target is local, young people and tourists who are interested in music and the arts. The site will also monetize from very targeted ads.

The plan is for Wantgo to have mobile apps for iPhone and Android by October of this year, and the mooted expansion across Southeast Asia will happen one month after that.