JEFFREY NG, CEO AND FOUNDER OF ZORPIA.COM
SUBJECT:
CROSS-CULTURAL ANALYSIS OF TECHNOLOGY-BASED EDUCATION IN EARLY YEARS OF CHILDHOOD
INTERVIEWER:
DARLA SUIT,
STUDENT AT SAINT LEO UNIVERSITY CENTER FOR ONLINE LEARNING
MAJOR: BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION, MANAGEMENTSPECIALIZATION
Interviewer: Hello, Jeffrey. I want to thank you for taking the time for this interview. I know you are very busy. Your company which you founded in February 2003 is Zorpia.com. I’ve always seen it as an international social networking site. You hit a big milestone in 2011 - 20 Million registered members, correct?
Jeffrey Ng: Yes.
Interviewer: How many do you have today?
Jeffrey Ng: Around 24 million registered members now.
Interviewer: How many countries does that include?
Jeffrey Ng: All the countries you can name.
Interviewer: Now, you were, at one time, a Program Manager Intern at Expedia and a before that a Summer Intern at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications?
Jeffrey Ng: Correct. NCSA is the computer department of university of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. They are basically the beginning of the internet, Netscape and many other internet technologies were started there.
Expedia is a spin off from Microsoft, having interned there allowed me to learn how things worked in a large internet corporation.
Interviewer: You got your start with programming pretty early. How did you develop that interest?
Jeffrey Ng: I started my first Japanese music website when I was 13 years old. It started with my love for a Japanese celebrity Namie Amuro, who is still very popular in Japan now. My music sites grew and so I decided to write a music search engine to search for music files on the internet. In order to do that I had to rewrite some open sourced search engine and eventually picked up coding on my own. At the beginning I wasn't able to understand any computer programming books so I just jumped into the code, started modifying what other