“You can build, customize and deploy mobile sites in just a few steps.”

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Derek Ang is the CEO and Co-founder of Morces. Derek has over 7 years of experience in web design and development. He’s passionate about the web and opensource frameworks like WordPress. Having an entrepreneurial spirit since a young age, Derek started Morces with a mission to help business go mobile. Prior to starting Morces, Derek worked as an intern in Lucasfilm, Singapore and was involved in a project with Land Transport Authority of Singapore while he was studying in Nanyang Polytechnic Singapore.

Bryan Wong is the COO and Co-founder of Morces. Inspired to be an entrepreneur, Bryan gave up his full-flagged scholarship to pursue a Bachelor degree in National University of Singapore with a belief to gain early industrial exposure and solve real life problems through personal engagement. Not only can Bryan absorb more learning points, his personal experience will be a valuable asset to any company in future. While he carves out his business career at Morces, Bryan hope to influence a culture of innovative, freedom and fun like he experienced as an intern in Cisco Systems

Morces is a platform that empowers businesses to put their existing website on mobile.

MO: How did the two of you meet and what inspired you to start a company together?

Bryan & Derek: Morces is not the first startup project for us. We met in the same unit when we serve our National Service in Singapore. Prior to knowing each other, we are both aspiring entrepreneurs. Derek is doing freelancing for web development while Bryan is managing his private tuition business. It is a series of projects and interactions that allow us to realize each other’s potential and decided that we could do actually something together. So we tried working on a facebook social game, but unfortunately the game failed to launch due to some unforeseen issues. Nevertheless, it was not a wasted effort like many people would have thought. We believed that the experience and skills that we acquired allows us to better manage a project together in future. Not long after the social game project, we came together, conceptualize and begin our exciting journey with Morces.

MO: Most parents dream of their children securing a full-ride scholarship….and then actually accepting it. How did your parents react to your decision to decline your scholarship?

Bryan: Like most parents, my mother is skeptical about this idea. She wanted a safe and secure career path, thinking someone will groom me some day as long as I put in consistent effort. At the same time, she had never seen so much passion in me before and now she could only trust me in making the right decision. Morces could be the best idea that we could ever imagine, and if I were to give up this chance, I will live with regrets. With vision and right planning, Morces is only a matter of success.

MO: Why are you so passionate about the web and opensource frameworks like WordPress?

Derek: I started developing for the web when I was 15 – 16 years old. I am the kind of person who loves the feeling of creation. It just feels so extraordinary that you can build something from scratch via a computer. I guess my passion about the web grows as I came to realize how powerful the web can be. Looking back, the web has resulted in emergence of web titans like Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Paypal, Facebook and so many others more.

Well, I am a fan of Open source. I have created many websites using open source software like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Sharetronix etc. Open source has created many opportunities for startups and it has many benefits like quality, customizability, flexibility and freedom. Do you know that during the start-up phase, Facebook uses open source like Apache, Mysql too?

MO: You’re both clearly passionate about entrepreneurism. Who or what were the early influences that inspired you to pursue the road less travelled?

Bryan & Derek: It is a series account of success stories and achievements done by people that inspire us. It could be a simple question such as “how a man build an empire with a simple idea?” or “why can’t I be like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs?” that drives our interest to experiment it. The part where every step determines the next path makes the whole entrepreneurship journey challenging and exciting. The more important factor is about making a difference and working on something that can have an impact.

MO: What was the development process behind Morces? How does it work?

Bryan & Derek: Morces is developed with PHP as the core language. It operates on a custom framework and uses open source technologies like Jquery, MySQL, and Apache. Development for the Morces took about 6 months to fine-tune and complete.

Morces works in a really simple way. User creates a Morces account and gain access to a control panel. In this control panel, they click on a “mobilize” button to start creating a mobile site. After so, Morces system will be generating all the necessary files on the background process and within seconds, their mobile site will be created. Every mobile site comes with a 2nd level credential assigned by the account holder. This is designed to suit corporations of different style. Each account may create up to 5 mobile sites and only authorized personnel with 2nd level credential may customize, configure and deploy their mobile site at any time.

The main idea of the Morces platform is to simplify the mobilization process and eliminate unnecessary actions required by the users. Inspired by Google & Facebook, we made Morces platform really simple at the front end, yet sophisticated at the back.

MO: Why are you are on a “mobile mission?”

Bryan & Derek: Mobile is next “in” thing as consumer behavior changes. We strongly believe that Mobile is the next era. It was researched that in 2015, the number of users who surf the net via mobile devices will exceed desktop users. However, there is a problem. Many businesses or websites are still not optimized for mobile. They are still not prepared for the mobile era. This makes retrieving information and interacting with the businesses through a mobile device extremely difficult.

In Morces, our mission is to enhance interactivity between businesses and consumers via the mobile web. To do that, the first step that we need to do is to put those businesses on mobile. This explains why we are on this remarkable mission.