Two students from the University of New South Wales are taking on the global Web services market with an innovative new site, BookmarkBox.com, that allows users to store their Web bookmarks online.
The two students, Niki Scevak and Mike Cannon-Brookes are both 19-year-old Business Information Technology students who developed the site to allow users to order their personal and business information in one central location
The service is part of a wider trend towards Web based applications that allow users to store data on the Internet instead of their PC, allowing them to access and use that information from any location. It's a trend that has already paid big dividends for free email companies such as Hotmail and is starting to take off in other areas of the net with services such online diaries and data backup.
According to Scevak, the service will appeal to people such as students who want to centralise their information, travellers, family members looking for their privacy and university researchers who want to share their bookmarks with their colleagues.
"If we were having the same problems trying to use bookmarks on the Internet then surely everyone would be experiencing the same difficulties," Scevak stated. "We believed by offering the service free of charge to the users we could help everyone have access to a very useful tool."
Since its launch in February, the site has taken on around 1000 users and accumulated about 95,000 bookmarks.
Scevak says that the most difficult issues involved in starting the site were technical and financial. The site was developed by Cannon-Brookes using Allaire's Cold Fusion. Funding was obtained through a group of private investors.
"Financially we were able to obtain equity financing through a small group of investors," Scevak remarked. "The money we have received will allow us to market our service and grow as a company in a shorter period of time. The finance also helps us offer a service of a higher quality which otherwise we would unable to provide."
