8 MB - University of Toronto Magazine

All About
Alumni
In the next 10 years,
the whole notion
of the book is going
to change
Allen Lau has a vision for
the publishing industry
p. 50
Wattpad’s
Allen Lau
Digital Prophet
Wattpad co-founder Allen Lau predicts
a book publishing revolution
If Allen Lau’s career as a software entrepreneur ever falters,
he’ll have a brilliant future as an oracle. His CV reads like a
digital prophecy. When Lau was just 12 years old, he designed
his first computer program, a puzzle game, a few years before
Tetris captured the public’s imagination. As an electrical
engineering student at U of T (BEng 1991, MEng 1992), he
wrote his thesis on maximizing the capacity of cellular networks
– back then, cell phones were as large (and as heavy)
as pound cakes, and much less common. In 2002, five years
before Amazon unveiled its Kindle e-reader, he created an
application that would allow people to read text on their
mobile devices.
And, in 2006, Lau co-founded Wattpad, a company that
promises to do for online publishing what Facebook did for
social networking. Simply put, Wattpad allows anyone to
publish online, for free, their own writing – anything from
pop-band fan fiction to the next teen vampire blockbuster –
for others to read, comment, and even contribute to that
writing. While such technology’s been around for a while,
Wattpad’s friendly, intuitive interface has proven extraordinarily
popular: the site currently has nine million monthly
visitors who each spend an average of three-and-a-half hours
on it every month. More than six million stories have been
uploaded, with 700,000 new ones added each month. The
company’s been quick to capitalize on the consumer shift
from desktops to handheld devices – 70 per cent of users
access Wattpad’s content through their mobiles.
Lau, who’s 44, was born and raised in Hong Kong, and
immigrated to Canada with his family just as he was about to
attend university. At the time, U of T didn’t offer computer
engineering so he studied the next best thing, electrical
Photo: Fernando Morales/The Globe and Mail
Autumn 2012 49