Waleed Abdulla is the founder of Ziizo.

Can you tell us a little about yourself and your service?

Sure. I'm a software engineer and an entrepreneur. I moved to Silicon Valley recently to start my new Internet startup, Ninua, Inc. to develop consumer Internet services. Before that I worked as a team lead, senior Web developer, and programmer in couple of big corporations. I also built some open source projects. I designed XRules, an XML business rules language and the engine that runs it, called DynamicDOM. My little brother, Rafid, helped me a lot in the implementation.

My Service is Ziizo.com. It's an online bookmarking and productivity tool. I built Ziizo because I tend to save a lot of notes and bookmarks and want to be able to access them from any computer. So, I built a bookmarking tool that's focused on speed and easy access to information.

In what ways does Ziizo differ from other bookmarking services that are currently out there?

In many ways, actually.

First of all, it's designed as a productivity tool rather than a sharing tool. Although, you can share your bookmarks, the main focus is on easy access to information and productivity. Also, you can save notes. Which is an important feature. I personally tend to save a lot of quotations, code snippets, and misc. notes that I need to keep for my records. Everything on Ziizo is private by default, which is important if you're using it to save your own bookmarks. You can share your notes and bookmarks by making a specific tag public. When you do that, all items tagged with that tag are shared on your public page.

Ohh, and don't forget the fast search as you type. It's a feature I'm proud of :) And, also the quick bookmarklet that lets you save bookmarks and tag them without a popup.

How large s the company and how many employees are there?

Ninua Inc. is very small. I'm the founder, the CEO, and the janitor. My little brothers help me on a part type basis on a few features here and there.

Where are is the company headquartered?

Redwood City, California. The city where the climate is best, by government test.

What programming languages and technologies do you use?

On the server side, I'm using ASP.NET. And, on the client side I use the Yahoo UI library for AJAX operations, and the Sarissa library for XML operations. Ziizo has a lot of AJAX features to allow the fast response time and the nice client side interface. So, the majority of the effort is actually on building the client side JavaScript and AJAX.

How long did it take to develop Ziizo?

I built Ziizo as a hobby and for my own use more than a year ago. It wasn't called Ziizo at that time. But, I decided to make it a public service recently. I spent the last few months finalizing it and getting it ready for a public release.

Why did you choose to name the service Ziizo?

Funny thing is, choosing the name was probably the hardest part of building Ziizo because all the good names are taken. I searched and listed hundreds of names and asked all my friends to help me choose. Ziizo turned out to be the one that most of my friends liked. It doesn't mean anything, it's just nice to say.

How much money did it take to bring Ziizo to this stage?

Not much out of pocket. There is the hosting fees and $200 I paid for the logo design. The real cost is the time I'm putting into it, which otherwise I could've been paid for if I was working for someone else.

How many users do you currently have?

Ziizo is almost public. Right now it's still by invite only so that we can handle any potential issue or feature requests easily. So, we have less than 300 users now.

What mistakes do you feel online services are making these days?

Hard to tell. The truth is, unless you put your service online and let users see it, it's almost impossible to judge weather people will like it or not.

How do you plan to make money with Ziizo?

It's going to be ad supported. We might expand and build premium team features that could be used by groups. But, there are no fixed plans yet. It'll depend on how the market receives it and how users end up using it.

Do you have any parting thoughts?

Thank you, Michael for this wonderful blog. I'd like to invite your readers to sign up for our beta program and let us know if there is anything we can do to improve their experience. Please use invitation code: folksonomy.