Proposal - noted/noted GitHub Wiki

My goal for capstone is to create Noted, a web-based tool to aid students and instructors with researching and collaborating on projects. This innovation project aims to help students with note-taking and source-citing process, which is now considered tedious, time-consuming work with existing products in the market such as NoodleTools and EasyBib. I will be creating the entire website, including programming, design, branding, and marketing. In the end, I plan to have built a self-sufficient web project. It will pay for itself, and perhaps even fund further projects.

Like many Internet startups, this idea arose out of frustration. Existing products are, by and large, not well-received by the school population. For an instructor to teach it to a student for the first time, it takes several class periods—this is a major issue. Removing this problem will also help with poor usability, terrible design, and difficult data entry, etc. Collaboration and sharing is also difficult with existing products—so rather than keep all projects private by default, everything will be public (with plagiarism deterrents) and collaboration will be as easy as asking the author for access.

I have been creating sites for several years, since making basic, one-page websites in sixth-grade to professional, large-scale websites at an internship at Fanzter, a startup, last summer. I aided them in creating and supporting a large, social website, several iPhone apps, and an internal tool. I have a similar amount of experience compared to web professionals in the field right now. The only technical aspect I will struggle with is handling a lot of people visiting the site at once. I’ve never really worked on a high-traffic site before. Making the website so it can handle thousands of visitors at once will be a new experience for me. Overall, technical aspects and building of the website is not very difficult for me; it’s the marketing and business aspects that will represent a learning stretch for me. The website is simple for me to build, but making it profitable is another story. The service will have a payment plan that is competitive with other products on the market, but to initially fund the project, I am considering “crowdfunding” the project through Kickstarter—a website where people can see and contribute to your project in return for services after the project is created. For advice, I can turn to the CEO at the company I interned at—he has several year experience with business at large and small web companies. Hopefully I can take experience from this course and apply it to life after college. This project is ambitious in its scale, but achievable in that I have previous experience in the web industry.

I need to begin by planning out who my customers are and what exactly they need in a research tool. So, I will be surveying potential customers (students, librarians, and administrators) to see what they want, and then plan out those features for the site. Then I’ll need to begin branding—logos, marketing materials, etc. Mr. Procko, my advisor, has expertise with this aspect. I also know several experts in the field that can give me some advice and help. Then I’ll begin development work and actually making the site. After, I’ll design the site and apply it to the code I made. At this point, this site will be fully functional and I’ll hopefully have some classes at Farmington High School test the site on some projects and compare it to existing products. After working out the final kinks, I’ll release it with to the public. Afterwards, I will be providing customer support for users of the product and release new features as students begin to use and give feedback.

This project is one I have been wanting to do for a long time. It’s only now with the resources that capstone offers and the connections I’ve made is it possible.