I’ve met Alex and Claudiu of WIP on a Friday evening in late October 2008.  It was the first formal meeting that the local online community had organized and I was eager to meet new people, listen to them talking about new projects.

We live-streamed the event through Qik and I remember being quite excited. As I’m always eager to learn about interesting local projects I’ve asked for their business cards and I was to follow up with them quite soon.

I’ve followed them closely for the past year and when I first decided to do a few startup showcases they were the first to pop into mind. So I sat down with Alex and had a little chat with him regarding WIP; what follows is the result of this.

WIP is short for Work In Progress. The company was founded back in 2004 by Alex Bejan and Auras Dumanovschi, in the south-eastern town of Galati, Romania. Now the company employs four outstanding people; apart from the co-founders they have some fresh talent: Claudiu Antohi and Mihai Dumitrache. Back in the early days (2005) they developed todom.ro, an online multiplayer strategy game which was nominated as the best Romanian project back then. These guy were only 17 at the time, so this was quite an achievement.

I’ve asked them why the name Work In Progress. Alex acknowledged it’s indeed a strange name, but truthfully answered:

Progress is part of our work. Also, you can look at this name from another point of view, maybe we are always fully booked and so we get some good rates

Fast forward to more current times. WIP is now working on three main in-house projects:

• twip.me – A communication gateway between IM clients/SMS & Twitter.
• paipto.com – It’s the technology behind twip.me; basically a communication gateway for developing apps that interact over IM and SMS
• mudjo.com – A status and location-aware social network (co-founded with Dan Berte)

Their main focus at this point is developing Paip and build a few iPhone, iPad and Android applications on top of it.

The company is fully self-sustained. They do freelance and outsourced work to sustain WIP, but are in negotiations for their first round of seed funding, which apparently will happen quite soon.

I recommend keeping an eye on them, WIP is one of those startups that have all the potential to make it big. they have at least one product with amazing potential.