CONTACT:
JUSTIN KAN
KIKO SOFTWARE INC.
(206) 931-5807
justin@kiko.com
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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
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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.
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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
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 Interface
1. Ease of Use
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2. Accessibility and Integration
Social Features
1. Interpersonal Organization
2. Tags
Advertising Model
1. 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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
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
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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.
Future Products
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
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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 of
Microsoft'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.
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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
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.