Mr Hew Joon Yeng (centre) with Mr Lyon Lim Yu Tian at InnovFest 2011 event organised by NUS Enterprise. On their right is Mr Eduardo Saverin, Entrepreneur and Co-founder of Facebook, who was the inaugural speaker at the event's Global Entrepreneurial Leadership series.

PigeonLab has created an application to enhance the interaction between attendees and speakers during live seminars and events by simplifying and streamlining the question-and-answer (Q&A) sessions.

The idea for the program – Pigeonhole Live – resulted from a personal observation of the chaos that tended to ensue whenever a Q&A session began.

“Q&A sessions are often the most valued time in any event, a golden window of opportunity for the audience to connect with the speakers, and vice versa,” noted Mr Hew Joon Yeng, who co-founded PigeonLab together with Mr Lyon Lim Yu Tian. “However, we must have attended countless number of conferences where many people love to hog the microphones and start airing their own views for a good five minutes before fielding a coherent question, or sometimes multiple questions. We were frustrated about not being able to enter the conversation and felt there had to be a better way to handle this.”

This led to the development of Pigeonhole Live, a program which allows attendees using just about any smartphone or notebook to log into the system and pose their questions online. The system not only lists the questions but allows participants to vote on the questions they want answered. It also allows moderators to review the questions before assigning them to the appropriate panellist to address.

“Pigeonhole Live is built for creating meaningful conversations at the events,” said Mr Hew. “Given the limited time and high audience to speaker ratio, Pigeonhole Live enables everyone to ask their questions and taps on the collective editorial intelligence from the audience in prioritising the more important questions for the Q&A sessions. In this way, precious time at the Q&A sessions can now be spent addressing questions that concern most attendees, instead of the traditional hit-or-miss approach.”

Pigeonhole Live in action at the InnovFest 2011.

Currently available only for users in Singapore, the company expects to launch Pigeonhole Live worldwide in the near future. “We are gearing up for the official worldwide launch as we have been receiving many requests from international parties who have witnessed Pigeonhole Live in the events held in Singapore,” said Mr Hew.

In addition to a wider geographical presence, PigeonLab also foresees a broader scope of applications for its flagship product in one-to-many information sharing settings such as conferences, lectures, seminars, annual general meetings, and classroom sessions.

“There is immense potential for Pigeonhole Live to grow this niche market,” Mr Hew said. “With the rapidly increasing adoption of mobile smartphones globally, we are confident that Pigeonhole Live can scale more effectively to meet the needs of the global events market compared to traditional solutions like SMS-based systems where attendees text their questions to a given number.”

PigeonLab, which was set up in October 2010, is supported by SPRING Singapore's Young Entrepreneurs Scheme. The funding from the scheme helped kickstart the company, enabling it to hire key personnel in product and business development.

“The ecosystem that we enjoyed under SPRING Singapore and NUS Enterprise Incubator provided us with valuable opportunities to connect with potential clients, as well as bringing in experienced mentors to advise us as we built the company,” said Mr Hew.