Social Network Movie -- Luis Buenaventura (Part 2)

To read the previous part of the story, please check Part 1.


If in Part 1, Luis Buenaventura was weaving webs of social sites left and right hacked during holidays when everyone is getting cozy. At this part, we could see Luis got entangled more in the webs of building start-up companies than producing social networks. So you might see more company names than product names in this post. Just like the Part 1, all things written here are from my imagination and interpretation so please do not take them as facts.

PandoraSquared

With Luis' factory of social sites, he got the attention of a Web 2.0 company PandoraSquared -- think 37signals. Probably after a lot of wooing, PandoraSquared was able to convince Luis to be part of their team. Luis then became part of a Philippine revolution -- Web 2.0 revolution here in the Philippines which was PandoraSquared's goal.

Though, I could say that, with his social network factory, Luis already started one without consciously knowing it. Maybe Luis should get the Father of the Philippine's Web 2.0 revolution.

MobiousLive.net

Just like it's name, it's hard to guess what MobiusLive.net was. This product started as one big secret, and mixed with dramas down the road.

Unlike with his previous projects where Luis usually openly shared in his blog what he'd been working on even before the release, he did not share much information in his blog. This was a signal that MobiusLive.net was something really big to happen in the Philippine history. He was mostly secretive about this one except for a few bits of hints here and there.

But even before he was officially part of Pandora Squared, he already dropped a hint in his April 2006 post that the next industry he would conquer is music after highfiber (web programming), oKs.ph (digg-ish), gibbity (gaming), filmcrowd (movies).

Then, a month before they opened it to public, Luis posted another hint,

Work on our next major project has been slowly unwinding; I’m not sure exactly how much of it I can write about without breaking our pinky-swear NDAs so I’ll just say that we’re putting together a very big Filipino social network focusing on one of my favorite things (no, not poker).

It was by Semptember 2006 when they had finally shared it to public their top secret project -- a local / 3rd world equivalent of iTunes, MobiusLive.net. Leaping from Kevin Rose to Steve Jobs, Luis Buenaventura made it look like it's an easy task.

As described by him, "MobiusLive.net is a social network focused on local independent music."

MobiusLive.net offered Php 20 per music track. And as Luis style, he could always start big even at the start. They were already able to feature popular local bands -- Greyhoundz, Chicosci, Valley of Chrome, Queso, and Narda.

Syndeo Media

Just like in the movies, some drama had to happen. Just right after they made the first Filipino iTunes / social network for music made publicly available, they called it quits for their PandoraSquared company. But it looked like more of renaming their factory name to Syndeo Media, than quitting. With new name came new strategy:

syndeo::media exists to build its own, internally-spun web
products, but we’ve come to the conclusion that our current resources
will not be sufficient to properly support all our ideas. The strategy
now becomes fairly obvious: over the next few months, we continue
looking for client work and refining our process. Once the appropriate
resources present themselves, we can apply all our learnings to our own
brands.

And, a hint that they would welcome 3rd-party investment. With their reputation, it would not be hard. So was it money matters?

Lesson learned: With revolution comes drama (sweat, bloods, and tears?).

Watch out for the next part. Would he be back to building corporate websites, or be chased by investors?

Part 2.5 is now available here.