How It All Started

Most innovations stem from self-use and in this case it was no different. Victor, Founder and Chief Techie of NexLabs, realized he was wasting too much time surfing frequently to some sites for information. A self-confessed VCR addict, he wanted to create the VCR-equivalent for the Internet. "I wanted to 'tape' down new stuff from the Internet. I didn't want to miss a thing. After that, I could at least view new content at my leisure, or simply trash it."

At that time, he put together a few PERL scripts and a simple client tool called Web Secretary was born. "It was pretty simple, nothing sophisticated like the current TrackEngine, and since it was for personal use, it got the job done."

A university lecturer at NUS responsible for computer-based training recognized the usefulness of Web Secretary and commissioned Victor to develop a more comprehensive product that could scale to multitudes of users.

It was a product way different from Web Secretary, being much more powerful in terms of features, interactivity and database handling. NexLabs was born to cater to these commercial demands of TrackEngine, and the rest is history.

ComputerWorld magazine actually did a feature story on us a couple of months back. See ComputerWorld's version of the story.