Thirteen people crowded around a large round table…
…in a private back room at Hunan Taste on the 13th of April 1999. Each brought to that Chinese restaurant their talent, ambition, and determination to make the dream of being an entrepreneur and part of a startup a reality. Thingee was launched!
Their initial focus was in developing a web service. The team agreed to self fund the product, to keep control and outsider influences to a minimum. But while building and building and tweaking the initial phase for 0.1 launch, the telecom bubble burst; rendering the partners’ Fortune 50 stock options virtually worthless. The team quickly realized that if Thingee was to continue to fund product development it needed a steady revenue stream. Q: What is Thingee’s core competency? A: multimedia services. So with thoughts of software dominance always in the back of their minds, the initial full-time partners began selling their expertise.
The first client came accidentally, via an overheard conversation in the checkout line at a CompUSA store. The first project was a CD-ROM business card. The first check? bounced. But eventually paid, other projects followed, and there was enough work to warrant obtaining dedicated office space — moving from the dining room table to the basement in Grandma Lomauro’s house.
By the end of 2002, Thingee’s revenue grew enough to support 4 people full time, and within the next year the remaining partners left their jobs to turn Thingee into a fully staffed operation. As the team grew, so did their success, moving from Grandma’s basement to Denville, and then in 2004 designing the current studios in Parsippany.
Thingee’s financial success and extensive Web development experience enabled its programmers to refocus their efforts on building Web-based software applications again. The company currently runs its financial and project management operations on its unique, proprietary software, which has generated interest for a future product release. In late 2007 Thingee launched is first web 2.0 application Linkee, a simple set of tools for social sharing, tracking, and link shortening.
With personalities that defy complacency, the Thingee team is busy mastering the next wave of technologies the public is just hearing about, leveraging the proliferation of mobile devices; as well as capitalizing on the demand for high definition content and the popularity of social media/social networking.
Stay tuned, the newest thingee may be just the Next Big Thingee your customers will be clamoring for tomorrow, next week, or next year.