MalaysiaGIS.com

Source: New Straits Times

People make contributions to the development of many things. Some may contribute historically while others, although less profound, nevertheless contribute significantly enough to make changes.

Andrew Ooi, who's presently evangelising Toon Boom Studio, an inexpensive yet practical two-dimensional (2-D) animation software, may one day be remembered by local cartoon producers for helping them see that there is an alternative technology in making cartoons.

Presently, Ooi says, the majority of Malaysian-made cartoons are designed using old technologies that render jagged graphics. "We hope to create a cartooning culture among Malaysians who have an interest in the field as it will no longer be a costly venture and promised better results," says the director and founder of Tourific Sdn Bhd, Toon Boom's local distributor.

The 31-year-old Ooi is a Klang-born graduate with a Bachelor in Science degree in housing, building and planning at Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang, in 1995. He pursued his Master's in Science degree in town planning in 1996.

As an undergraduate, Ooi got a feel of computers as he was the one who gave computer lessons and did troubleshooting for his housemates. His interest in computers developed so much that his degree project was on graphical information systems (GIS). His MSc research, he recalls, also involved GIS.

Ooi worked as town planner for three months in Penang and was not happy with the job. When offered a job as a demo jockey (or what product specialists are referred to as sometimes), Ooi moved to Kuala Lumpur in 1997 to work with a software company that was selling computer-aided design/computer-aided manufacturing (CAD/CAM) solutions.

"Bentley Systems, which offered me the job had a GIS-related product that they wanted to promote and since they were targeting it at architectural firms and as I had the skill of drawing buildings models, I guess, I was the candidate they wanted," recalls Ooi of his first job in the information and communications technology (ICT) line.

"I acquired a lot of experience through roadshows in Southeast Asia, Thailand and the Philippines. When a colleague left, I took over the GIS product."

How it began
"A friend of mine, C.J. See, who was out of job, was helping another friend working on a dotcom business. Then See (now co-founder and partner of Tourific) and I decided to start our own company." Having had the experience in mapping, Ooi thought of starting a dot-com business focusing on online mapping.

"But that didn't work out, so we focused on our engineering consulting business. I managed to get some clients from my previous consulting work and worked on document management and GIS-related projects. We also worked on doing Web designs," he recalls. That, he says, was how Tourific was formed in December 1999.

"Although it had nothing to do with tours, we named it so because we felt our struggle was a journey or an endeavour that will be terrific," he says.

As they worked quite a bit with Macromedia Flash, a multimedia and software application, they received numerous requests about the software's potential.

"Some clients realized that Macromedia Flash could be used as an alternative enterprise GIS product. So we thought of selling Flash and evangelising the product. We unofficially nominated ourselves as Macromedia evangelists and preached of Flash's capabilities. The distributor here and Macromedia in Singapore know what we were doing," he says.

Being so involved in the product, Ooi signed up to be a Macromedia Flash beta-tester, testing out new technologies in Flash as they were developed.

"I tested it to see if it could interact with Toon Boom Studio because we had signed up with Toon Boom Technologies based in Montreal, Canada, as its distributor."

And as both software could interact well, Ooi says, they tied up with Macromedia Flash and Toon Boom, as well as with Apple, to evangelise the solutions.

Challenges
The biggest challenge in running the business, Ooi says, is coping with piracy. "Pirated software definitely affects the business and organizations that just purchase one or two licenses when they need more than one is also an issue that we need to address," he says.

Another challenge, he adds, is educating people, especially local cartoon makers who are still using the disk operating system (DOS) platform, to move away from working on a DOS platform to the Windows operating system.

"We also look out for any shortcomings in the software and given feedback to Toon Boom Technologies on what features users want to see/add on to the software," he says.

As he loves toying around with computers, Ooi feels that his job is like a hobby.

"I am happy on the job, and will be happier when the sales figures are better," says the soft-spoken cartoon and movie lover.