Our Story
By Rey Marques
You may be asking yourself "Interactive BreadCrumbs is a great idea, yet so simple, how did you think of it?" Well they say "necessity is the mother of invention" and it's true. Reuben and I were working on a group project for an Entrepreneur class at C.S.U.F. Our group, five members strong, was required to meet with a live company, determine in what areas their business needed improvement (marketing, finance, accounting, etc.) then create a lengthy consulting report. This project was about 50% of our grade and would take the entire semester to complete (we had to do this four times to graduate as an entrepreneur; it was a lot of work).
We set off researching everything within our scope that could possibly help this company; most of it was done online. I found myself going to Google and doing five to ten searches on one topic then bookmarking various sites that I thought might be useful. Over the period of several months, I had performed hours upon hours of research and ended up with a huge collection of sites. As I compiled the report, I realized that some of the sites that I remembered being useful, weren't bookmarked (or I couldn't find them), others I forgot why I even saved them in the first place. It was a big mess.
I told Reuben about the problem and he expressed the same feelings. He said "It would be great if we track all of our group's activities, like email, dialogues, and even our bookmarks." We talked about the idea casually, then archived it in the back our minds for later use.
A few months later, for another class, I had to do a case study on any company of my choosing. So, of course, I chose Google. The first book I found during my research on Google was John Battelle's 'The Search: How Google and its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture". I eagerly read through the entire book very quickly, effectively rewiring my brain for everything search related. New opportunities seemed to jump out from every direction.
One day, soon afterwards, I heard about a site called Flickr and checked it out. It proved to be a unique site that allowed its users to interact around the sharing of photos. I liked it, so I played around with it for an hour or so until 'It' happened. The divine source of inspiration jolted my brain like a bolt of lightning thrown from the hand of Zeus, and suddenly everything clicked. 'Create a website that captures a person's 'click-stream', allow them to save it to a personal profile and create a social network around these 'click-streams' for the purpose of research.
I grabbed my notebook and feverously jotted down my flash of creativity. For two straight hours, I scribbled, scratched, and drew screenshots of the new site's look and function. Then I raced to the computer and transformed my drawings into non-functional, html mock-ups. For the next week I shut myself in my small garage/office and tweaked the pages, wrote thorough descriptions of the site's purpose, function, and navigation. I didn't go out and party with my friends, I skipped my classes, I even pushed back meetings and didn't mention a word of this to anyone until I was finished with the prototype.
Finally, with the mold ready for development, I consulted Reuben with my idea and he took the idea and ran with it. Adding marketing tactics, design concepts, additional functions, and networking opportunities. From there, we set out creating it, but that's a whole other story ;)
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