original executive summary for kiko from early 2005

v 10.0

BUSINESS PLAN FOR:

KIKO SOFTWARE INCORPORATED

CONTACT:

JUSTIN KANKIKO SOFTWARE INC.(206) [email protected]

4/8/2023 Kiko Software Incorporated Business Plan –

CONFIDENTIALITY AND DISCLOSURE AGREEMENT

THE INFORMATION PRESENTED IN THIS BUSINESS PLAN IS PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL. IT MAY NOT BE REPRODUCED OR COMMUNICATED IN ANY MANNER, VERBALLY, ELECTRONICALLY, OR OTHERWISE, WITHOUT THE WRITTEN CONSENT OF KIKO SOFTWARE INC. IF YOU HAVE AGREED TO RECEIVE THIS PLAN, YOU SHALL BE DEEMED TO BE IN AGREEMENT THAT THIS INFORMATION IS PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL, AND FULLY UNDERSTAND AND AGREE TO REFRAIN FROM TRANSFERENCE OF SAME TO ANY OTHER INDIVIDUALS OR BUSINESS ENTITIES.

IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE BOUND BY THIS AGREEMENT, PLEASE RETURN THIS DOCUMENT TO KIKO SOFTWARE INC. ADDITIONALLY, THE BUSINESS PLAN IS COVERED BY U.S. COPYRIGHT LAWS. THEREFORE, REPRODUCTION OR DISSEMINATION OF CONTENTS MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW.

THIS DOCUMENT HAS BEEN PREPARTED BY KIKO SOFTWARE INC, SOLELY FOR INFORMATIONAL AND PROJECTION PURPOSES. THIS IS NOT AN OFFER TO SELL STOCK OR SECURITIES. THIS BUSINESS PLAN WAS WRITTEN FOR INDIVIDUALS TO MAKE AN EVALUATION OF THE SUBJECT MATTER CONTAINED HEREIN AND TO ASSIST THEM IN DETERMINING THEIR DESIRE TO PROCEED IN PROVIDING SUPPORT TO THE PROJECT. WHILE THE INFORMATION CONTAINED HEREIN IS FROM SOURCES DEEMED RELIABLE, KIKO SOFTWARE INC., HAS NOT INDEPENDENTLY VERIFIED IT. KIKO SOFTWARE INC., MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, THAT ACTUAL RESULTS OF THE PRODUCT(S) OR COMPANY WILL CONFORM TO RESULTS PROJECTED HEREIN. THIS DOCUMENT IS SUBJECT TO REVISION, WITHDRAWAL, OR MODIFICATION.


Executive Summary

Kiko Software Incorporated is a startup software company whose primary product, Kiko Calendar, will provide free scheduling and networking available through the internet. Revenue will be generated through unobtrusive context-sensitive advertising displayed to user calendars.

Market

The online calendar market currently remains unconsolidated despite the existence of several players. A web-based calendar is inherently better than an offline calendar because data is more securely stored and is user-accessible from any computer. While browser-based email clients have become widespread, the market for browser-based calendar programs has not become as large or established. Market research suggests these reasons: when compared with native calendar software applications, browser-based calendars are 1) slow and difficult to use, 2) have reduced functionality, and 3) cannot easily interoperate with other users’ calendars.

Product

Kiko Calendar has been designed as an answer to these needs. Kiko Calendar will allow users to easily coordinate events and appointments among groups and other individuals, by maintaining customizable group lists and allowing appointment invitation by a simple drag-and-drop process. By maintaining all users’ scheduling data in a central server, Kiko Calendar will enable users to view their own and their friends’ calendars from any computer. Although browser-based, Kiko Calendar will run as seamlessly as native software by utilizing the existing DHTML framework to push processing to the client-side.

Kiko Calendar will generate revenue through advertising sales, allowing advertisers to target their audience at very specific resolutions. Kiko Calendar will allow advertisers to purchase advertising based on user information. For example, a company that wanted to promote a recruiting information session could choose to have their ads displayed to users who listed themselves as graduating seniors at a certain university. Context-sensitive advertising has been recently demonstrated by Google’s AdWords program to be a highly profitable revenue model for online services.

Strategy

We plan on initially promoting Kiko Calendar through several sites that have already agreed to link to Kiko, including reddit.com and paulgraham.com. The product also has a viral growth aspect: when a Kiko user invites a non-Kiko user to an appointment through the system, an account is automatically created for the non-user and an invitation email is sent. We expect that after the initial launch the product will continue to grow virally.

We believe Kiko Calendar will get media attention on many blogs, news aggregator, and tagging sites including del.icio.us and Slashdot.org because it is a very advanced a unique


AJAX application, which is of particular interest to those communities. This may also provide another significant initial seed population of users.

Investment

Kiko’s scalability, combined with a minimal amount of initial capitalization required, makes Kiko an economically viable answer to the demand for effective online scheduling software. Given the low-cost of starting up and the high potential provided by viral network spreading, we believe Kiko provides a sound investment option for capital.

An investment total of $200,000 is required to fully develop the product and operate the company for one year. Equity ownership in the company is offered in exchange for capital investment.


Terms of Financing

Kiko Software Incorporated is currently seeking capital for the continued development of our calendar software application and to position us for an initial launch. Equity shares will be sold in Kiko Software Incorporated in order to raise $200,000 to $500,000 for this development phase.

We believe the most likely future liquidity event would be an acquisition of Kiko Software Incorporated by a large company in the web-services / portal market (Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google) to add Kiko Calendar as an offering among its own services.

Company Summary

Kiko Software Incorporated is a Delaware C Corporation registered in June of 2005 by co-founders Nathaniel Justin Kan and Emmett Shear.

Kiko Software Incorporated’s primary product is Kiko Calendar, an interpersonal planner offered on the web at www.kiko.com.

Products & Services

There are currently two main options for a customer who wants to maintain a software calendar: a desktop application, such as Microsoft Outlook, or a web calendar, such as MSN Hotmail calendar or Yahoo! Calendar.

Outlook, which dominates the desktop app calendar market, is a good solution for users in a large corporate environment that can afford investing in the necessary support infrastructure: a server running Microsoft Exchange and IT staff to maintain it. However the majority of users cannot afford to make this investment, which is required to use any of the group scheduling or remote access functionality.

The much more accessible alternative is to use a web calendar. Both Yahoo! and Hotmail provide their calendars to users for free. Unfortunately, current web calendars have significant barriers to use: making an appointment often requires paging through several different screens, there is no functionality for coordinating several different groups or sets of individuals through a single calendar, and there are often too many features presented at a time, confusing the interface. Many times it is simply easier for a potential calendar user to send an email to schedule an appointment.

Product Description

Kiko Calendar is a new kind of web calendar built around the idea that current web calendar offerings leave too much to be desired. While designing Kiko Calendar, we wanted to make sure we kept familiar interface elements from desktop applications, kept the interface simple and clean, and made it intuitive and easy to use.

User Interface1. Ease of Use

http://www.kiko.com/


2. Accessibility and IntegrationSocial Features

1. Interpersonal Organization2. Tags

Advertising Model1. Processes

User Interface

Kiko Calendar has been designed to take the best parts of desktop application calendars, while maintaining the accessibility of any web-based product.

1. Ease of Use

a. Create appointments with a single click – Like desktop app calendars, users can create appointments by just selecting or double-clicking areas of the calendar—there’s no need to use dropdown boxes or enter times.

b. Click everything, drag everything – Almost all elements of the calendar can be interacted with intuitively by clicks or drag and drop: appointments can be moved to a different time by dragging, labels can be applied to appointments by dragging, and contacts and groups can easily be invited to an appointment by simply dragging them onto it.

c. Discoverability – The calendar uses tooltips and right-click context menus to keep a lot of information and functionality “just around the corner,” leaving the interface simple with just the information you want to see.

d. See everything at the same time – Users can manage groups, create and label appointments, and invite contacts all from the main page, allowing them to always see their calendar.

e. Speed – The application is almost entirely written in Javascript, allowing the majority of the work to be done on the client side and reducing server trips, making the calendar much more responsive than traditional web applications.

f. Meeting attachments – Files can be attached to particular appointments, allowing attendees to easily access the required documents for a meeting.

2. Accessibility and Integration

a. Accessibility – The web-based platform enables people to access the calendar from any internet-connected computer with a browser. This means remote access requires no setup, unlike desktop app calendars.


b. Mobility – Users will be able to access their calendars from remote devices, including PDAs, cellphones, and Blackberries.

c. Reminders – A user can automate appointment notifications to be sent via SMS, instant messenger, and email.

d. Import/Export – Existing schedules can be imported from and exported to Microsoft Outlook and iCal.

Social Features

Kiko Calendar surpasses social and group planning functionality in both desktop app and web calendars.

1. Interpersonal organization

a. Groups – Users can create groups which allow them to easily view and organize multi-user appointments. Groups and contacts can be managed from the main calendar page. Groups can be owned and controlled by multiple authorized users.

b. Invitations – Kiko Calendar automatically generates invitation emails to invitees during appointment creation. Invitations to email addresses of users without a Kiko account will automatically prompt Kiko to invite those users to create Kiko calendars as well.

c. Locator – Users are given the option to indicate their current and future locations on their schedules. Kiko Calendar allows users to view locations of other users in their social network. This lets users easily keep track of all their friends, relatives and coworkers, and to organize meetings if happenstance places them in the same location at a particular time.

d. Availability – It is often difficult for busy people to organize a meeting involving a large number of people. Kiko includes the ability to automatically find a timeslot in which all attendees are free for a meeting.

2. Tags

a. Labels – Users are able to label and colorize their appointments by custom tags.

b. Events database – Users will be able to submit and tag events, and then search through the database by tag. Later, we plan on making event recommendations to users based on what they have previously tagged.


Advertising Model

Kiko Calendar’s advertising model is unique. It aims to benefit both advertisers and customers by providing only relevant ads to interested customers. The amount of information provided by a Kiko user’s account and schedule allows advertisers to not waste their time with disinterested customers. Conversely, customers are likely to be more receptive to an advertising system which displays events and products in which they will actually be interested.

1. Processes involved

a. Gathering of information – Information is gathered from a user’s personal information and existing schedule. Thus information usually will contain the age, occupation, location, personal preferences, and free time of a particular person.

b. Calibration to targeted customers – This information is then used to search the most suitable advertisement. Advertisements will usually be event and time specific. For example, sports games, club events, concerts, shows, will appear on the bottom right hand corner of the screen.

c. Customer Involvement – The targeted ad can simply be dragged and dropped by the user onto his or her schedule. This provides useful information for both the advertiser and the user. Advertisers can target the most receptive potential customers. Customers are less likely to be bothered by irrelevant ads, and can easily remind themselves of important events by simply dragging them onto their planning schedule.

d. Pricing model – Advertisers are charged per ‘drag’ (number of times an event is dragged and dropped onto a user’s schedule), a much more powerful metaphor than by click.

e. Privacy – No user information will ever be sold or distributed outside our organization. Information will be algorithmically processed to provide user-targeted ads, but will not be read by any human.

Technology and Patents

In the past year, the emergence of several internet services (Gmail, Google Maps, Flickr, etc) has demonstrated the power and flexibility of AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XMLHTTPHeader) web applications. This power and flexibility has been able to take customers away from established web services (Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail) and bring them to applications that offer a superior customer experience (Gmail). Kiko uses the AJAX platform with the JSON data interchange format to provide a web calendar that runs much closer to a native application than any current web app.


We are currently filing provisional patents on certain methodology aspects of our advertising system we believe are novel and non-obvious. Preliminary searches of filed patents and prior art indicate that time-based context-relevant advertising and drag-and-drop advertising are new patentable ideas. Patent protection on our intellectual property is an important part of the Kiko plan.

Future Products

Online Booking Tie-ins

As Kiko’s user base reaches a critical mass in specific metropolitan areas, we intend to make strategic relationships with online booking companies in a variety of markets in order to offer booking services through Kiko, bringing reservation services to the end user all from the convenience of one piece of software with integration into a personal organizer. We see possible tie-ins between the calendar and sales of flights, hotels, car rentals, cruises, restaurant reservations, and time-based purchases.

Market Analysis

Market Segmentation

Kiko relies on three market segments: personal calendar software users, business calendar software users, and online advertisers.

The personal calendar software user market is primarily composed of users who have a Yahoo or Hotmail email account and use the free calendar that accompanies it. Of the 340 million total users of both Hotmail and Yahoo, it is estimated that less than 5% of accounts utilize their calendars, leaving the number of users who use a web calendar at around 17 million.

The business software market is dominated by Microsoft Office, and the business calendar software market is in turn dominated by Microsoft Outlook and Exchange Server. There were over 300 million Microsoft Office users in 2003. Of these roughly 35 million users use Outlook on a regular basis. We can expect the market for standalone planners in 2005 to be at least 40 million users by 2008 (Figure 2).

The online advertising market is a large and rapidly growing market. eMarketer currently estimates that $9.4 billion was spent in online advertising in 2004, up 33% from 2003. Furthermore, trends suggest that targeted advertising encompass a greater share of the whole internet advertising market each year. At the end of 2003, 37% of internet ad spending went towards performance based advertising, up 16% from the previous year.

Competitor Analysis

Kiko's main competition for personal users will come from other online planners. Companies that currently compete in this space are mainly large web-based email services which provide calendar features, the two largest being Yahoo! Calendar and


Microsoft Hotmail. Both Yahoo! and Microsoft are currently in the process of attempting to leverage their email user base into a calendar user base. Kiko has a distinct competitive advantage over these companies because their current infrastructure inhibits them in several important respects. Unlike current online planners, Kiko will run quickly, be easy to use and be a reasonable alternative to digital planners. In addition, certain aspects of both Microsoft and Yahoo!'s larger businesses interfere with their ability to effectively develop and operate an efficient online calendar.

We do not believe that Microsoft will ever offer a free online calendar that will run as well as a native application because that would directly compete with its Outlook product. Sales of Microsoft Office family products account for a substantial portion ofMicrosoft's revenue, and offering a free alternative would compete with their overall Office business plan.

Yahoo! currently offers a multitude of online services, and allows users with a Yahoo Account to access all of them with one username. This model has certain disadvantages: new users have to go through a complicated signup process in order to use the calendar. Kiko does not and will never attempt to serve as an internet portal and will offer a simple, fast and unobtrusive signup service. We believe that this strategy will encourage users who are looking specifically for an online calendar to choose Kiko over existing calendars.

Competition for business users provides a much greater challenge. This market is currently strongly dominated by Microsoft Outlook. Outlook can be used from the web with Outlook Web Express, and gains limited interpersonal scheduling capabilities when combined with Microsoft Exchange Server, which is the currently dominant organizational server software. However, Exchange Server requires a company to run its own servers on a local network, and does not provide functionality for users outside of this network without extraordinary measures. Additionally, Microsoft cannot offer a free, complete web application without cannibalizing its own very profitable Outlook and Exchange market.

We believe that small and medium-sized business will be much more receptive to Kiko because of its low cost (due to the lack of a need to maintain an Exchange Server) and ability to communicate on the worldwide Kiko network.

Kiko will also face competition for online advertising clients. The largest and most successful context-relevant advertiser is Google. We believe, however, that because of its unique relevant advertising structure, Kiko will have a distinct advantage among advertisers who are selling time based goods, such as tickets to events. Because of the wealth of user data that Kiko will have access to Kiko is a more attractive advertising solution for many companies who are tired of paying for thousands of random eyeballs.

Market Analysis

The market for online calendar software is currently vulnerable to a free, online community software entrant. Scheduling software is the only personal information application that does not currently have an online community presence. Other similar


applications combined with social networking features, such as an address book, have worked well in generating regular users (plaxo.com has 5 million regular users).

Kiko will have a definite first-mover advantage as the first company to release an online interpersonal calendar. Because of the viral-marketing invitation system of adding new users, once the number of users reaches a critical mass they are unlikely to switch services: we predict a relatively low churn rate.

The Team

Emmett Shear—Founder

Mr. Shear technical background includes experience in application design as well as database design and implementation. Mr. Shear spent the past two summers working at Microsoft, first at Office New Markets where he wrote the spec for and built a prototype of a new type of metadata design tool, and more recently at Hotmail on the Backend teamwhere he was responsible for writing the spec for and creating a comprehensive statistics gathering program for Microsoft Hotmail. Mr. Shear has programming experience in ASP.NET, SQL and C#, and graduated from Yale University in 2005 with a BS degree in Computer Science.

Justin Kan—Founder

Mr. Kan has worked on innumerate programming projects in the past eight years. Most recently he has developed several websites in ASP.NET and JavaScript. He also served as a technology consultant to the 2004 Rob McKenna for WA Attorney General Campaign, where he advised on, developed and launched the campaign website. Mr. Kan also has experience with programming non-internet based applications and database maintenance. He spent several summers at Forsberg & Umlauf, P.S. administering the firm's SQL databases and writing applications that interoperated with both MS Office and SQL Server. Mr. Kan graduated from Yale University in 2005 with a BA degree in Physics & Philosophy.

original executive summary for kiko from early 2005

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