Harald Weiss, Cofounder, Wappwolf : Web application Workflow.

An idea that was born five months back in Vienna, Austria was showcased at the Demo Conference in Silicon Valley this year. Wappwolf stands for web application flow and the focus of the platform is on document handling. Wappwolf has postponed a grant they were offered by the Austrian government to work in Silicon Valley so that they can focus on the development in Austria. YourStory spoke to Harald Weiss, CFO to understand more about the application.Tell us more about your platform Wappwolf and what makes it unique?

Wappwolf offers a platform focusing on documents of any format. The handling of documents is always boring, reiterative and time consuming. Wappwolf saves time, money and turns doc handling into fun.

Matt Marshall, executive producer of the Demo Conference enthuses, “Wappwolf is raising the idea of ‘software as a service’ to a whole new level in the way it revolutionizes the interaction with individual solutions and, thus, saves private customers and businesses time and effort.”

In Wappwolf on one hand we have an app store where you can pick single web applications and combine them to a processing chain for your document handling - drag&drop and save&use.

And on the other hand it is enriched by social media, sharing of workflows & apps, sharing of experience, voting, tagging, ranking and the connection between the developer and the user community. We are not into Business process optimization which is internal oriented. Wappwolf is an open platform for communities, so there is the Developer side where developers can provide their applications through the platform and use Wappwolf as a sales channel for their product to earn money and then there is the user community and the two communities can interact and define supply and demand.

It is a connection of web applications to workflows enriched by social sharing and interaction of the community.

Are you from a technology background? How was the idea of Wappwolf born?

No I am a Finance guy. I have been in financial administration in global companies for almost 10 years now. I started my own business in early 2010 called MeinController.at which emphasizes on business consulting, business analysis and controlling. The CEO, Michael Eisler of Wappwolf and I have been friends for some years now and we just talked about business ideas in early April this year. He grabbed his iphone and showed me a businessplan dated 2007 with a basic description of the product. So I pushed him to just do it. Our CTO, Dieter Dobersberger and the CEO are running an IT focused company specializing in e-procurement and e-relation. The fourth cofounder, Christian H. Leeb is a serial entrepreneur and is backing us with social marketing expertise and his network.

How can developers and consumers benefit from this platform?

There is an increasing need of exchanging documents of all types on a worldwide scale and between an increasing number of individuals, both as private persons and as business people. This is true for all kinds of businesses in all countries, within each company and also between the demand and supply chains of our economy.We presented an image handling workflow at the Demo Conference. We showcased a workflow with a combination of some web applications- one embeds our Wappwolf logo, a second inserts a Demo Fall 2010 line and the third posts the image to facebook. Normally users have even more steps to go to improve their images (resize, rotate, improve quality, send by email, upload to flickr or file to dropbox). The user can decide how many applications he wants to combine and how. This can be applied to not only for private use but also various other processing chains like channeling of videos, invoice workflows, order solutions, contract handling etc. That is where our revenue will come from. There will be a freemium model for some basic workflows that can be upgraded with credits. It is a very transparent pay per use principle. Users pay for the applications they would want to use in their workflows. The developer will get a percentage. So the benefits are: you pay what you get instead of buying expensive software licenses. You save time and money and have fun with Wappwolf and the community.

Our goal now is to attract developers who can produce very specific solutions.

How do you plan to integrate social networking into your platform?

We want Wappwolf to be a very open and social platform. There are forums where users can post ideas or needs and developers can interact, discuss with them. People can also rate applications and discuss it in the forums. And of course you can share your workflows and experiences.

How can the developer community use this platform?

It is comparable to the itunes store concept. Our aim is to be the Number one platform globally for document handling. We plan to have developer programs and loyalty programs. The earlier the developers come on board the better are their returns.

Developers from all over the world can come on our platform. There are examples, descriptions, and demonstrations on our forum.wappwolf.com. Developers can come and go through the application ideas and submit their applications. (on appideas.wappwolf.com)How did you raise funding?

We have funded it ourselves until now. At the moment we start talking to investors to get 500k USD in a first round to scale up our operations. So we are open for money and support.

What is your message for the Indian developer community?

There are many coders and developers in India whom we would like to invite to use our platform. We are currently working on improving the usability of the platform and the social media integration. Parallel we are looking for developers who can build applications on our platform. The earlier they sign on the better it is for them as it will be one of the most used. Come on and run with the wolfpack ;-)

Connect with Wappwolf :

www.wappwolf.com, http://blog.wappwolf.com, http://forum.wappwolf.com, http://appideas.wappwolf.com, www.youtube.com/wappwolf, www.facebook.com/wappwolf