Barely a year after graduating from the Singapore Management University (SMU) with a Bachelor of Science in Information Systems Management, the two alumni from NP's School of InfoComm Technology plunged headlong into developing an application for Facebook, one of the most popular social networking sites in the world.

Their Famous Market Exchange, or Fame for short, is a virtual stock market where users can trade their friends to make profits.

The pair stumbled across the idea of developing Fame when they were both interns at Standard Chartered Bank during their undergraduate days. During their time there, they worked on prediction markets, which are online trading sites where people try to make a profit by betting on what is going to happen in a particular event.

'This concept is usually intended for a niche market, but we wanted to bring it out for everyone,' Mr Ng, 27, explained.

So, not only can users actually trade their friends, they can also speculate on celebrities and various events around the world. As of June this year, Fame is a bustling community with over 2,000 active members, and the number is growing every day.

Fame is also the only Singaporean application among fbFund 2009's top 50 finalists. fbFund is a seed fund for promising applications on the Facebook platform.

However, Mr Ng and Mr Widjaja admitted that the progress was initially slow, especially financially. Being part of the scheme greatly helped in getting things into full swing, and they were even leased an office space for free. But before that, the pair had to do everything by themselves.

This was where their grounding in software engineering came in handy, thanks to the knowledge that they picked up while pursuing their diplomas in Information Technology at NP.

'When you jump into an IT business, you cannot expect to just hire people who are technically-inclined and ask them to do all these things for you. You don't have the financial power to do that,' said Mr Widjaja, 26.

'So what you see on Fame is what we've learnt at Ngee Ann, from the coding to the graphics - everything.'

It was only three months after they started Swoozh that they were awarded $50,000 by Athena Innobator under the Media Development Authority's (MDA) i.JAM (IDM Jump-start and Mentor) Microfunding Scheme, which gives budding entrepreneurs a chance to start their own businesses.

Being part of the scheme greatly helped in getting things into full swing, and they were even leased an office space for free.

Their small office, consisting of a few cubicles and a dartboard, is a hive of activity as the six-man team - the majority are interns and part-time staff - are hard at work. Complex coding fill their screens as they find ways to improve Fame.

In the near future, Mr Widjaja and Mr Ng hope to take Fame beyond the realm of Facebook.

'We hope that Fame can be a brand name, so that it comes to mind immediately when people talk about Facebook games,' said Mr Ng.

Added his partner: 'Say five years from now, we want people to remember us as Fame. We don't want people to remember us as a Facebook game.'

The writer is a third-year mass communication student at the School of Film & Media Studies, Ngee Ann Polytechnic