Kakule, Inc.

Business Plan


Amber Fang
Anhang Zhu
Ian Anderson
Nima Rahnemoon


1641 Lachine Drive
Sunnyvale, CA 94087
Phone: (408)306-3947
Fax: (408)481-9531
Email: ir@kakule.com
Website: www.kakule.com




August 2011


Proprietary and Confidential


This is a business concept and not an offering of securities.
This document is confidential and has been made available to the
individual whom it is addressed strictly on the understanding that its
contents will not be disclosed or discussed with any third parties
except for the companys own professional advisers. Investment in
new and small business carries high risks as well as the possibility of
high rewards. It is highly speculative and potential investors should
be aware that no established market exists for the trading of shares
in private companies. Prospective investors are advised to verify all
material facts and to take advice from a professional adviser before
entering into any commitments. This plan is strictly for information
only and constitutes neither a prospectus nor an invitation to
subscribe for shares. Projections in the plan have been compiled by
the promoters for illustrative purposes and do not constitute profit
forecasts. The eventual outcome may be more.

Published by
Kakule, Inc.





Statement of Confidentiality


This information in the business plan is confidential and proprietary.
It has been made available solely for consideration and evaluation of
this information. In no event shall all or any portion of this executive
summary be disclosed or disseminated without the express written
permission of Kakule.


2011 Kakule, Inc. All Rights Reserved
1.0 Table of Contents


































2.0 Executive Summary


Kakule, Inc. was founded on the premise that collecting real-world data and distributing
personally-relevant portions of the data to individuals, will lead people to make better-
informed decisions. The major difficulty in accomplishing this mission is that there is a
potentially unlimited amount of real-world data. In order to simplify this daunting task,
Kakule is currently focused on a specific niche market: travel. By providing travellers with
pertinent data, Kakule will enable users to plan their trips better, leading to a more pleasant
travel experience.

Kakules main product is a travel planning web application. Given a location, we help users
find transportation, events, points of interest, insurance, meals and people to add to their
trip. The user can add different results to his itinerary. So, unlike most other travel
websites, transportation is not the only concern. Furthermore, users have profiles, which
will contain personal data that can be used to improve search results.

There is also a social aspect to the travel-planning product. Because most people travel in
groups, our product offers a feature in which users can share their itinerary with friends, or
make their itinerary public. Once the itinerary is shared and edit permissions are enabled,
users can plan their trips collaboratively.

Furthermore, once the itinerary is complete, a printable long-form itinerary will be included
which will contain all the handy information the user will need during his trip. This long-form
itinerary will include extra information depending on specific information within the users
itinerary. For example, if a user is driving his car, driving directions will be included in the
long form itinerary.

The main business model consists of commission fees from flight, hotel, cruise and car
rental bookings. We dont have any plans to add conventional online advertisements to our
website; however, we plan to eventually offer promoted search results, specifically for events
and meals.

Online travel is a $760 billion market, worldwide, with $255 billion coming from North
America. As developing countries continue to accumulate wealth, there will be more
travellers, leading to market growth worldwide. Kakule is currently focusing its efforts on
becoming a competitive player within the North American market, but we plan to launch our
product internationally once weve established ourselves.

Our target customer consists of technology-driven casual travellers and our marketing
channel will be comprised mainly of promotional pricing, technology-orientedpress, and
online advertising. We will leverage our competitors as advertising partners and thereby
efficiently redirect niche traffic to our application.

We currently in the late stages of development and we are preparing for our launch in
September. In order to pay for server costs, advertising costs, and employees, we are
looking to raise $5 million. Currently, we are partnering with Expedia to generate
commissions; however, the rate of return is often less than 10%. We will use the funds to
pay for a GDS system, thereby making direct contact with the airlines, hotels and rental
companies and increasing our profitability. We estimate that we will be cash flow positive
within one year.










































3.0 General Company Description



Mission Statement

To empower people with personally-relevant real-world data,
enabling them to make better-informed decisions.



Introduction

Kakule aims to be the leader in aggregating and analyzing real-world data and making
personally-relevant portions of that data accessible to users. Essentially, one could draw the
relation that Kakule is to real world data as Google is to virtual data. Our goal is to
eventually provide one unified application through which users can interface with real world
data. To begin with, Kakule will be competing in the online travel market.

The Market

The online travel market is particularly fruitful for a number of reasons:

1. Homogenous product offerings

Nearly all the market players offer the same basic functionality; they can be classified
as transaction-engines. Their main focus isnt to guide customers through the travel
planning process, but rather to sell travel-related products and services. Kakules
main priority is to build a product through which users can seamlessly explore
different travel ideas and collaboratively plan their trips. Monetary rewards are a
side-effect of an amazing product, rather than being the focus of the product.

2. Scale of the data

The travel industry is filled with opportunities to collect data, the limits of which are
boundless. This potentially unlimited amount of dynamic data creates interesting
computational challenges. Engineers at Kakule have a passion for building solutions
to such difficult problems continuously inventing breakthrough algorithms to make
real-world data as pertinent as possible to the users needs.

3. Technology stagnation

The number one website that travellers use to plan their trip is Google; this is a clear
indicator that travellers are not finding what theyre looking for on other travel
websites. Products in this field havent changed much in the past ten years. Kakule
wants to be the Google for real-world data with an emphasis on travel. Our engineers


are designing systems to scour the Web for real-world data and building systems to
acquire real-world data that is currently unavailable on the Web. Were inventing new
algorithms to make this data more applicable to users.

The online travel market is worth $760 billion worldwide and is rapidly growing, particularly
in developing countries. Given the large size of the market and the lack of technological-
advances, this market is ripe with opportunities for Kakule.

The Technical Process

In order to build our systems, we follow an intricate process to provide our users with useful
real-world data. As a broad high-level overview, this complex process can be broken down
into three basic steps:

1. Aggregate data from around the Web and build systems to generate data that was
previously unavailable.

2. Run algorithms on different sets of data to make the raw data useful to customers.

3. Provide an intuitive, yet feature-rich, interface through which users interact with the
data.

Its important to note that this basic outline is a core component of our company and is not
exclusive to our travel-planning product. These are the basic steps that make Kakule run.

Milestones

Although Kakule is still in its infancy stage, we have a number of milestones that we have
set and we are working vigorously to achieve them.

September 2011:

y Estimated number of users: 10,000
y Estimated number of employees: 4
y Launch the website in private beta with an invite-only structure. The product will only
contain basic core-features:
o Search interface for transportation, events, points of interest, meals and people
o Basic collaboration system (not real-time)
o Itinerary generation
o Facebook, Google, and Twitter registration/login
o Booking flights, hotels and car rentals through Expedia.

y Acquire $5 million in funding:
o Use Amazon EC2 servers
o Search for new employees
o Move into an office space
o Incorporate

October 2011:

y Estimated number of users: 20,000
y Estimated number of employees: 5
y Move system to using GDS systems rather than using Expedia for flight, hotel and car
rental commissions
y Add real-time collaboration and chat
y Build more user-friendly filters in search
y Implement internal tools
o Democratic product features voting system
o Backlog of Tasks
o Peer code review system

November 2011:

y Estimated number of users: 50,000
y Estimated number of employees: 6
y Modularize the backend in preparation for scaling
y Public release in time for the holiday season.
y Release native applications for Android and iOS
o Itinerary on-the-go
o Real-time notifications e.g., traffic updates, flight delays, etc
o Chat and location updates
y Double the amount of data we offer from September

December 2011:

y Estimated number of users: 200,000
y Number of employees: 8
y Release travel log: a blog for travel
o Use public travel log data for reviews
o Add options to auto-update Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Tumblr and Wordpress
o Location check-ins
y Launch marketing campaign:
o Advertise through competitors websites
o Press relations
o Promotional pricing

January 2012:

y Estimated number of users: 400,000
y Estimated number of employees: 10
y Release real-time notifications
o Traffic data
o Flight delays
o Local offers
y Add business listings dashboard
o Implement business-owner verification process
o Update events, meals, etc.
o Add other data: menus, pricing, offers/coupons, etc.
o Analytics

February 2012:

y Estimated number of users: 800,000
y Estimated number of employees: 14
y Add internationalization (specifically starting with Europe)

September 2012:

y Estimated number of users: 6,000,000
y Estimated number of employees: 30
y Estimated yearly revenue: $20 million

Core Competencies

There are over 10 major market players within the online travel market arena; the major
differentiating factor between Kakule and the rest of the competition is that Kakules
product is a true web application rather than simply being a transactional engine. Our main
goal is not to sell tickets, but rather to help our customers plan their trip.

The fundamental feature that we offer our users is categorical search on real-world data; the
flow of our product gives users a sense of exploration (an experience more akin to surfing
the web), rather than a booking service. Our data has been aggregated from many different
sources and is presented in an easy-to-consume manner. After searching and determining a
basic travel plan, we generate a full itinerary for the user a service that is unavailable on
the web providing smart recommendations and pertinent information; as a result, we
maintain interaction with our users beyond the point-of-sale. Furthermore, we will eventually
provide smart real-time notifications for flight delays, traffic, local offers, etc, making our
service more personally-relevant.

Furthermore, after realizing that most people travel in groups, we provide users with a travel
planning collaboration platform a simple, yet novel idea. Through this feature, we provide
users the ability to synchronize and democratically determine what their travel plans are; as
a result, by making our application social, we have embedded an outlet for virality within our
product.

Weve also provided a niche online location for users to record their travel experiences,
which we call the travel log. Users can connect their different social identities to Kakule and
update their friends and family on their fun activities. Because the travel log is linked to the
users itinerary, we can extract reviews and comments about different locations,
restaurants, events, etc; in this manner, we are generating useful data for future travellers
without bugging previous travellers to write reviews.

From a product perspective, Kakule provides a more integrated experience than any of its
competitors. On the other hand, from a technical perspective, Kakule is very well-equipped.
Most of Kakules competitors use technologies that are outdated and complex; we use
simple cutting-edge technologies that enable us to build better products, faster.
Furthermore, our engineers are adept at rapid prototyping and continually iterating until the
product is perfected.

Legal Aspects

We plan to incorporate Kakule once we acquire funding. Specifically, we will incorporate in
Delaware due to its friendly, well-established laws as a C corporation, because it is
favored by investors and is the most scalable.

Kakule has four main founders: Amber Feng, Anhang Zhu, Ian Anderson and Nima
Rahnemoon. The company is currently a partnership between the four founders with
ownership divided equally.




























4.0 Products and Services

TODO: Add pictures of the product

Introduction

Kakules product consists of a number of different features: search, social collaboration,
itinerary generation, real-time notifications, and profiles & travel logs. Within each of these
features, we have implemented novel algorithms that personalize the data and add
intelligence to each system. Currently, our applications interface is a web application with
different components for each feature; eventually, we will integrate all these services into a
more unified platform, which is discussed in the Future Plans section.

Search

Our search feature provides data for transportation, lodging, events, points of interest, and
meals given a certain location. If no location is provided, the data for each of these fields is
populated with results that it believes you would like, with no one specific location. A user
can use different filters on each of the fields to provide better results. The data is generally
sorted by the most popular result; however, once the system learns more about you and
your friends, the results become personalized.

Location

Location is the main search element because all the other search categories are
dependent on it. When a user enters a location, information is returned about that
location; specifically, the results page displays a short description of the location
from Wikipedia, different pictures from Flickr, reviews aggregated from users and
news snippets from Google News. If a user doesnt enter a location in the search
box, the default is to show the user a number of different locations that our
algorithms believe would interest the user. The same results wont appear more than
once because our service remembers what locations the user has seen. We collect
data on a number of different criteria that go into making our search better; for
example, when a user clicks on a location, our algorithms will favor showing similar
locations rather than purely random locations.

Transportation

Transportation is key to any travel website; in fact, most of our competitors focus
purely on transportation. We take a more whole-hearted approach by offering less
conventional forms of transportation as well as the common methods of
transportation. For example, if a user is searching for transportation between
Sunnyvale and Mountain View, we offer results for buses, Zipcars, bicycle rentals and
taxis; because users user our website to plan their entire itinerary, we know more
about the user than most conventional websites. We use this information to
prioritize the types of transportation depending on information from the itinerary. For
example, if a user has an event for lunch in San Francisco, and another event for
dinner in Los Angeles, with no events in between, our algorithm will most likely return
a bus/train combination of transportation as the first result and flight as the second
result. We take into account a number of different factors in prioritizing our results.
These factors include, but are not limited to: price, convenience, previous search
history, previous itineraries and popularity. Furthermore, we have a unique Surprise
Me option for transportation. If a user has filled in his/her itinerary, but does not
want to go through the hassle of finding transportation, he can click the Surprise
Me button and our service will automatically determine the best method of
transportation and add it to the itinerary; of course, the user would still have to book
flights and pay for car rentals himself. Also, if a user has added a flight or car rental
to his itinerary and the price is lowered, we automatically send the user a notification.
If a user is looking for a particular type of transportation, he can add this extra search
filter to get better results.

Lodging

Similar to transportation, lodging is another important part of any travel experience.
Unlike most of our competitors, we not only offer hotels, but we also offer more
unconventional forms of lodging; e.g., if the user is looking for lodging for only one
hour in the middle of the day, our algorithms will most likely recommend the closest
business center. We also offer lodging from Airbnb, Craigslist, and other p2p lodging
web-services. Similar to transportation, if a user wants more specific results, he can
add filters to his search.

Events and Points of Interest

Currently, there is no website that shows popular events around the world
independent of location. We believe a lot of times, a user doesnt have a specific
location in mind, but if there is some cool event that interests the user, that could
cause the user to travel to that location. If a user hasnt provided a location, we use
information from a number of different sources to recommend events around the
world that we believe the user would enjoy. In doing so, we help a user determine
what location he would like to travel to. For example, if Im logged into Kakule
through Facebook and my profile says that Im interested in Celine Dion and
Leonardo da Vinci, and Celine Dion is having a concert in Paris and of course the
Louvre has da Vincis Mona Lisa, Kakule will probably put Celine Dions concert as
the number one search result. Once I click on the result for Celine Dions concert,
there is a side-pane that displays other things within Paris that might interest me,
such as the Louvre Museum. Of course, if a location is specified, personally-relevant
results within that location will appear. We obtain our search results from a number
of different events web services such as Eventful and Eventbrite.

Meals

This is another important differentiating factor between Kakule and its competitors.
Kakule prides itself in being a travel planning website as opposed to just selling
different forms of transportation and lodging. This is especially useful for our mobile
application users, because they can use our service while they are travelling to find
the best places to eat. The beauty of Kakule is that it can be used however the user
wants to use it; if a user wants to plan everything beforehand, they can; if not they
can use it as a search tool and a blogging tool to keep track of what they did during
their trip. We obtain our search results from a variety of sources, including Yelp,
Google Places and offer deals from Groupon, Living Social and Google Offers.

Social Collaboration

Travel, whether leisurely or for business, tends to be an inherently social process. The
founders of Kakule believe that this is the main feature that is lacking in all travel websites.
It is through this basic feature that the idea was sparked into reality. On Kakule, when a
user builds an itinerary, they have an option to share that itinerary with other people, or
make the itinerary completely public. Similar to the mechanics of a Google Docs, each user
has permissions that determine how much they are allowed to modify the itinerary. As a
user edits the itinerary, other users can see the real-time changes. Of course, if a user
doesnt like the changes someone makes, they are able to fork (a.k.a. make a copy of) the
itinerary, which they can edit on their own. Furthermore, users are able to chat with one
another, both regarding a specific itinerary and also just to talk about anything. Each
itinerary has a discussion thread so users can discuss their plans, but there is also a main
chat utility that is built into the main website which allows you to chat with any of your travel
buddies similar to Facebook chat or gChat. There is another aspect of social collaboration
on Kakule that involves a user sending status updates of the trip either to the public or to
specific friends; however, this is discussed in greater detail in the profiles & travel logs
section.

Itinerary Generation

Once the user is fairly satisfied with his itinerary, we offer a service that generates a long-
form version of the itinerary that contains in-detail information about all aspects of the trip.
The long-form version of the itinerary contains all the events in the users itinerary, driving
directions (if necessary), printable tickets, and anything else the user may need during
his/her trip. The generated long-form itinerary can be downloaded as a pdf and is printable.

Profiles & Travel Logs

Each user, upon registering, has a profile that contains information that is either publicly
accessible or accessible by that users friends. This information can include itineraries, a
wish-list of places the user would like to go,status updates, pictures, reviews, and any other
personal information the user wishes to share. The travel log is the main feature on the
profile page and will contain status updates public or private and other relevant data
from the users trip, such as pictures, videos, etc. The travel log can also be connected to
other social networks so whatever is posted on Kakule is transmitted to all the other social
media distributors. In essence, Kakule would like to have the reputation as the place you
go to see updates from your friends trips. Furthermore, because we know where the user
is based off their itinerary and also because mobile updates are geo-tagged, we will use
their public status updates and pictures to enhance our business pages, which will thereby
enable us to provide the user with better search results.

Business Model

Our business model is fairly dynamic and goes through a number of different iterations as
our business grows. An important aspect of our business model is that it is invisible to the
front-end user; that is, our revenue-streams will never come directly from charging a
frontend-user for a service. Instead, we obscure the source of our income within the
transactions that users make. In doing so, we open our service to a broader audience we
dont detract our users from doing what they came to our website to do: using our amazing
product.

V 1.0

Currently, Kakules business model is v1.0. The basic model consists of receiving
commissions from Expedia through the Expedia Affiliates Network program. Kakule
receives 50% of the net proceeds from hotel bookings and car rentals, but we dont
receive any commission for airline bookings. Clearly, this is cause for concern,
because the majority of our sales are from airline tickets. Nevertheless, Expedia
provides a good starting point for Kakule to begin generating revenue.

V 2.0

Starting in October, we will be using various GDSs (Global Distribution Systems) to
provide more competitive prices and to also increase our net income. GDSs are
collaborative systems in which a number of airlines, car rental companies, hotels and
other transportation-related companies collaborate to provide prices for their
products and services. We will begin by using Amadeus and Sabre, the two GDS
industry leaders, but we will continually add different GDSs to provide better prices to
our customers. Rather than rely solely on GDSs, we will continue to use Expedia and
other web services as a comparison tool to find the lowest prices. Our priority is to
provide users with the best prices, independent on whether or not we make money
on the transaction.

V 3.0

In January, once we have a secure revenue-stream, we will begin to move over to a
merchant model, similar to Expedias main business model. Rather than acting as a
middleman in serving transactions, we will purchase seats in bulk from airlines. In
doing so, we will lower prices for our users while increasing our revenue. As always,
we will continue to strive to provide the lowest possible price to our customers,
whether or not we get commission on the sale.

V 4.0

While continuing to collect more pricing data from different sources, we will assess
the benefits and costs of expanding our portfolio of business models. Some of the
possible sources include:

y Adding promoted results to our search; the promoted results will be kept separate
from the organic results.

y Adjacent to using Yelp and other business data sources, we can allow businesses
to claim their listing on our website. We can provide analytics for the business
and furthermore allow the business to promote deals on our website. Instead of
taking a Groupon-like approach of directly communicating with the business, a
business will be able to set a deal by itself using the online dashboard. Kakule
will either charge the business for a portion of the proceeds or there will be a
fixed price for promoting the deal.
y Similar to the previous bullet-point, we can add functionality for businesses to
place their menu within their listing, allowing users to order/pay for foods and
goods online.

Future Plans

Kakules short-term plans are outlined in the Milestones segment of Chapter 3. As a
company, we are focused on achieving our near-term goals before deciding on more long-
term goals. The reason we cannot set our long-term goals is because we are not sure how
our customers will use our applications. For example, if there is a lot of enthusiasm in using
our application as a mobile application to discover their environment, then we will add more
on-the-go features that might interest users, such as building connections with businesses
and allowing them to offer spur-of-the-moment deals. However, if we determine that people
are using the web application to plan their trips, as originally intended, we will focus on
aggregating more data from new sources. Although the Board of Directors are the ultimate
deciders on what direction Kakule takes, the employees of the company play a large role in
this respect as well.
















5.0 Marketing Plan

Market Overview

Target Customer

Competition










































Generul Informutlon
1


Address:
333 108
th
Ave., NE
Bellevue, WA 98004

Webslte:
www.expedlu.com
Phone Number:
(425)679-7200
Emull: lr@expedlu.com

Employees: 8,900
2

Revenue Breukdown
3











Geogruphlc Revenue
3


Cur, Crulse
& Other
14%
Advertlslng
& Medlu
10%
Alr
12%
Hotel
64%
Internutlonul
35%
Domestlc
65%
Product Anulysls













Key Feutures
4
y Fllght
y Hotel
y Cur
y Actlvltles
y Crulses
y Other
o Purtnered wlth Groupon (Deuls und Offers)
o Best Prlce Guuruntee (S50 Refund)
o No Soclul Integrutlon (except for Llke
button)
o Moblle App
o Insurunce
Web Trufflc Stuts
5

Averuge Tlme on Slte: -5 Mlnutes
Averuge Puge-vlews/User: -5
Number of Unlque Vlsltors Per Month: 73+M
Number of Countrles Served: 60+
Number of Sltes Owned: 160+













Flnuncluls
3


Stutus: Publlc (EXPE)
Murket Cup: S5.4406B
Outstundlng Shures: 273.95M

Net Income: S421.5M
Net Sules: S3.3481B
Totul Assets: S6.6510B
Totul Llubllltles: S3.9785B
EBITDA: S759.0M
Key Advuntuges
3

y Lurge lnternutlonullzed lnfluence
y Merchunt Model
o Buy tlckets ln bulk ut wholesule und
resell
y Vlrtuul tours und truvel oplnlons
y Key struteglc purtners
Key Dlsudvuntuges
3


y Outduted technology
y Luck of new feutures/slow to
progress
How Kukule Is Addresslng Expedlu

y Offerlng more feutures und lnteructlvlty, whlle mulntulnlng slmpler UX
y Provldlng better truvel oplnlons through user truvel logs
y Purtnerlng wlth Expedlu, through the Expedlu Afflllutes Network, to uttuln the low
prlces thut Expedlu offers due to thelr merchunt model (see Advuntuges) wlth
eventuul pluns to swltch over to u dlrect merchunt model.
y Uslng TrlpAdvlsor, un Expedlu-owned webslte, us u mu|or source of udvertlslng.
y Better soclul lntegrutlon

Web Trufflc Stuts
5

Averuge Tlme on Slte: -4 Mlnutes
Averuge Puge-vlews/User: -3.5

Key Advuntuges
3

y ITA Purtner
y Truvelport (GDS) owns
mu|orlty of shures
y Orbltz Prlce Assurunce
lf un Orbltz customer gets
u lower prlce, you get un
uutomutlc relmbursement
for the dlfference
Key Dlsudvuntuges
3


y Hlgher Prlces
4

y Outduted
technology
y Luck of new
feutures/slow to
progress
Product Anulysls













Key Feutures
4
y Fllght
y Hotel
y Cur
y Actlvltles
y Crulses
y Other
o Deuls und Offers
o Best Prlce Guuruntee (Full Refund + S50)
o No Soclul Integrutlon (except for Llke
button)
o Moblle App
Generul Informutlon
1


Address:
500 W. Mudlson St., Ste. 100
Chlcugo, IL 60661

Webslte:
www.orbltz.com
Phone Number:
(312) 894-5000

Employees: 1,400
2

Revenue Breukdown
3












Ads/Medlu
7%
Vucutlon
Puckuges
Cur Rentul/
Crulse/Insurunce/
Etc.
15%
Alr
36%
Hotel
27%
Hlstory
3

y Formed ln 2000 by
o Amerlcun Alrllnes
o Contlnentul Alrllnes
o Deltu Alrllnes
o Northwest Alrllnes
o Unlted Alrllens
y Acqulred ln 2004 by
Cedunt Corporutlon
o HotelClub
o CheupTlckets
o Truvelport
y Cedunt ucqulred by The
Bluckstone Group ln 2006
y IPO ln 2007
o Bluckstone Group
=>Truvelport und ls
mu|orlty shureholder






















Flnuncluls
3


Stutus: Publlc (OWW)
Murket Cup: S319M
Outstundlng Shures: 102.65M

Net Income: -S58.237M
Net Sules: S757.487M
Totul Assets: S1.2167B
Totul Llubllltles: S1.0269B
EBITDA: S61.105M
How Kukule Is Addresslng Orbltz

y Offerlng more feutures und lnteructlvlty, whlle mulntulnlng slmpler UX
y Provldlng users wlth lower prlces by purtnerlng wlth Expedlu und eventuully uslng u
dlrect merchunt model
y Better truvel updutlng system (e.g., notlfylng users of deluyed fllghts)
y Better soclul lntegrutlon colluborutlve trlp-plunnlng
y Mulntulnlng better brund repututlon Orbltz hus hud muny legul troubles ln the pust
y Focuslng on ulgorlthms und product experlence Orbltz uses fulrly outduted
technologles

Web Trufflc Stuts
5

Averuge Tlme on Slte: -4 Mlnutes
Averuge Puge-vlews/User: -3.5

Key Advuntuges
3

y ITA Purtner
y Truvelport (GDS) owns
mu|orlty of shures
y Orbltz Prlce Assurunce
lf un Orbltz customer gets
u lower prlce, you get un
uutomutlc relmbursement
for the dlfference
Key Dlsudvuntuges
3


y Hlgher Prlces
4

y Outduted
technology
y Luck of new
feutures/slow to
progress
Product Anulysls













Key Feutures
4
y Fllght
y Hotel
y Cur
y Actlvltles
y Crulses
y Other
o Deuls und Offers
o Best Prlce Guuruntee (Full Refund + S50)
o No Soclul Integrutlon (except for Llke
button)
o Moblle App
Generul Informutlon
1


Address:
800 Connectlcut Ave.
Norwulk, CT 06854
Webslte:
www.prlcellne.com
Phone Number:
(203) 229-8000

Employees: 400
2

Revenue Breukdown
3












Ads/Medlu
7%
Vucutlon
Puckuges
Cur Rentul/
Crulse/Insurunce/
Etc.
15%
Alr
36%
Hotel
27%
Hlstory
3

y Formed ln 2000 by
o Amerlcun Alrllnes
o Contlnentul Alrllnes
o Deltu Alrllnes
o Northwest Alrllnes
o Unlted Alrllens
y Acqulred ln 2004 by
Cedunt Corporutlon
o HotelClub
o CheupTlckets
o Truvelport
y Cedunt ucqulred by The
Bluckstone Group ln 2006
y IPO ln 2007
o Bluckstone Group
=>Truvelport und ls
mu|orlty shureholder






















Flnuncluls
3


Stutus: Publlc (OWW)
Murket Cup: S319M
Outstundlng Shures: 102.65M

Net Income: -S58.237M
Net Sules: S757.487M
Totul Assets: S1.2167B
Totul Llubllltles: S1.0269B
EBITDA: S61.105M
How Kukule Is Addresslng Orbltz

y Offerlng more feutures und lnteructlvlty, whlle mulntulnlng slmpler UX
y Provldlng users wlth lower prlces by purtnerlng wlth Expedlu und eventuully uslng u
dlrect merchunt model
y Better truvel updutlng system (e.g., notlfylng users of deluyed fllghts)
y Better soclul lntegrutlon colluborutlve trlp-plunnlng
y Mulntulnlng better brund repututlon Orbltz hus hud muny legul troubles ln the pust
y Focuslng on ulgorlthms und product experlence Orbltz uses fulrly outduted
technologles
Hipmunk:


General Information:

Address:
1550 Bryant St., Suite 500
San Francisco, CA 94103


Website: www.hipmunk.com
Phone Number: N/A

Employees: 10

Financials:

Status: Private
Funding: $5.22M

Product Features:

Flight
Hotel
Other
Good Marketing
Mobile App












































Travelocity:



General Information:

Address:
3150 Sabre Dr.
Southlake, Texas 76092

Website: www.travelocity.com
Phone Number: +1 682 605 1000

Employees: 1,070

Financials:

Status: Private (Owned by Sabre Holding)
Funding: None

Product:

Flight
Hotel
Car
Cruise
Activities
Other
Deals and Offers
Best Price Guarantee (Full Refund and $50 Coupon)
No Social Integration (Except for Like and +1 Button)
Travel Guides








































Hotwire



General Information:

Address:
333 Market St., Ste. 100
San Francisco, California 94150

Website: www.hotwire.com
Phone Number: +1 415 343 8400

Employees: 295
4

Financials:

Status: Private (Acquired by IAC)
Funding: None

Product Features:
Hotel
Cars
Flight
Cruises
Activities
Other
Deals and Offers
Best Price Guarantee (Full Refund and $50 Coupon)
No Social Integration (Except for Like and +1 Button)










































Kayak
1


General Information:



Address:
55 N. Water Street, Ste. 1
Norwalk, CT 06854

Website: www.kayak.com
Phone Number: +1 203 899 3100

Employees: 153
4


Financials:

Status: Private
Funding: $223M

Product Features:

Flights
Hotels
Cars
Other
Deals
Price Comparison To Other Websites
No Social Integration (Other Than FB Login)
Mobile Flight Status
Mobile App














































TripAdvisor



General Information:
1


Address:
141 Needham St.
Newton, Massachusetts 02464

Website: www.tripadvisor.com
Phone Number: +1 617 670 6300

Employees: 617
4


Financials:

Status: Private (Acquired by IAC)
Funding: $12M
3


Product Features:

Flights
Hotels
Restaurants
Activities
Cruises
User Data
Other
Social Integration
Forum =>TripAdvisor Media Network
Mobile App

Web Traffic Stats

Average Time on Site: ~4.25 minutes
6
Average Pageviews/User: ~4
6

Number of Unique Visitors Each Month: 40+ Million
7

Number of Registered Users on TripAdvisor Media Network: 20 Million
7

Number of Countries Served: 24
7

Number of Sites Owned: 18
7




































6.0 Operational Plan

Introduction

At the time this business plan was written, the main focus of the company was on
developing the product; we hope to continue this trend of putting an emphasis on
engineering and reducing the number of disruptions that we put in the way of our engineers.
At Kakule, we try to keep business operations and engineering tasks isolated from one
another, with executive management being the only bridge between the two. Our hypothesis
is that the less business management there is to distract engineers, the more productive the
company will be as a whole.

Culture

Like most tech companies, Kakule has a very hands-off policy; there is no time-card system;
there is no dress code; we dont needlessly charge our employees for things that the
company should pay for. The companys duty to its employees is to keep them happy so
they can be productive. As we grow, we continuously aim to improve our working conditions.

Furthermore, Kakule strives to have a very close-knit culture. Every Friday after work, we
plan on inheriting the TGIF and Beer & Demos traditions started by Google by having a
company-wide meeting to discuss progress and democratically decide on the future plans of
the company. The company was founded by four undergraduate college students and
therefore has a college-like feel to it. It is likely that a lot of our employees will be fresh-out-
of-college and we want to make the transition to the corporate-world as easy as possible.
Eventually, we have hopes of establishing our own company housing (aka dorms), which will
further promote our culture.

Location

Kakule is strategically located in Mountain View for a number of different reasons. Although
companies like Google, Intuit and NASA have claimed large portions of land in the area,
there is still a lot of unclaimed land and therefore there is a lot of room for expansion.
Furthermore, our company has a lot in common with Google and by strategically locating
ourselves, we believe Google can become a very important tactical partner, both from a
talent and business standpoint. Although our exit-strategy is to have an IPO, we believe that
Google could eventually acquire Kakule due to our commonalities.

In the near future we are looking to move into an office space that is less than 2,000 square
feet, preferably near the 101 freeway for easy access. We will attempt to find an office in an
office park to reduce shared facilities costs, such as parking and security. We will not house
any servers in our offices because we will be using Amazon EC2 servers and therefore dont
require any special power or other utility setups. The office will be open to employees 24
hours a day and will be accessible through a badging system. The estimated costs of the
office will be about $7,500/month, including rent,maintenance, utilities, and insurance (see
Chapter 9: Financials for more information).

Production

Currently, our production methodology consists of a single team of developers working on
building the application; the developers handle all business needs as they arise. For
example, if a developer needs to use an API, the developer will have to contact the company
and deal with requesting permission. In this way, we aim to prevent employees blocking one
another from accomplishing their work. Upon launching, we will setup a system for handling
customer service inquiries in which employees rotate on taking poor bastard duties. Poor
bastard duties include handling customer service inquiries, maintaining the servers and
databases, and fixing reported bugs.

As a method of quality control, all code that is pushed to production is required to be
reviewed by another software engineer. Furthermore, all new employees are required to
pair-program with a senior software engineer their first two weeks until they understand the
basic etiquettes and protocols that we follow. We use a revision control system, namely
Perforce, to ensure that fatal bugs can be reversed easily.

Legal Environment

Because Kakules product is primarily software and algorithms, the founders do not want to
patent any of Kakules intellectual property, especially until the company is large enough.
There are a number of reasons the founders take this stance. We believe software patents
in the United States are not as easily protectable as other types of patents and could end up
becoming a liability rather than an asset. Furthermore, our algorithms use heuristics that
are continuously changing based on the feedback we receive from users; as a result, a
patent last month might not be relevant anymore. Similar to the previous reason, by publicly
disclosing our algorithms, it can give our competitors ideas of similar algorithms to use. For
all these reasons and more, Kakule wont actively seek software patent protection.

Although we acknowledge that there are benefits to incorporating pre-funding, we would
much rather leave this unessential task to legal professionals once we have funding. The
time spent researching and going through the process of incorporating would be much
better spent developing the application. We also plan to trademark Kakule once we
incorporate the company and purchase the domain name, www.kakule.com. Once we
receive funding, we will purchase workers compensation insurance, business liability
insurance (aka, directors and officers insurance) and errors and omissions insurance in
order to protect the company from legal problems.

Community Outreach

An important part of Kakules culture is that we pride ourselves in giving back to the
community. We would like to build a reputation of benevolence among the community; after
all, all our employees are members of this community. Currently, our main form of
community outreach is sponsoring hackathons at local high schools to encourage young
people to pursue software engineering as a career. We attempt to host one hackathon a
month. Furthermore, we encourage our employees to participate in fundraisers for good
causes.

Key Partners

Our current list of key partners is primarily based on companies that provide us with data;
this list specifically includes: Eventful, Eventbrite, Yelp, Expedia, Flickr, Wikipedia and
Google. Expedia is particularly important because our business model is based off of
revenue that we receive from Expedias Affiliate Network program (see Chapter 4: Products
and Services). We will also have advertising partners, which will primarily be a source for
new traffic; this list specifically includes: TripAdvisor, Kayak, Travelocity and Google. Our
main marketing plan consists of using advertisements on our competitors websites to
redirect niche traffic, but we will also use Google Adwords for SEO (see Chapter 5: Marketing
Plan). In the future, these lists will grow a lot, particularly because our mission is to
aggregate real-world data.

Accounts Receivable

Our current business model consists of receiving commissions through the Expedia
Affiliates Network. EAN pays 10% of the price of hotel and car rental bookings as
commissions. Under the EAN system, the accounts receivable are paid on a monthly basis.
Unfortunately, EAN does not pay any commissions on flight bookings. We are actively
working on attaining access to a GDS, such as Sabre or Amadeus, which would provide us
with all the wholesale flight, hotel, car rental and cruise prices; once we have this data we
can pull price data from our competitors and add a premium amount to the wholesale price,
while still maintaining a lower price point than our competitors. (see Chapter 4: Products
and Services, Business Model). Attaining GDS access is fairly complicated, as it requires
Kakule to have ARC accreditation and meet other requirements.

Accounts Payable

<Should Complete As We Approach Closer to Launch>

















7.0 Management and Organization

Key Personnel

TODO: Short Bios

Amber Feng

Anhang Zhu

Ian Anderson

Nima Rahnemoon


Professional and Advisory Support

<Will Include Mentors, Lawyers, Accountants, Etc>

Organizational Structure

Our founders believe that the number one deterrent to progress is interruptions; for this
exact reason, it is our companys culture to minimize the amount of management. The
structure of our organization can be compared to a P2P network; i.e., each employee has a
set of peers that he/she can ask for help and advice. Tasks are separated in order to
minimize the amount of dependencies between developers.

In the future, we will build tools to moderate the progression of our product. There are three
systems that will be put into place to organize the basic workflow within the company:

1) Democratic Product Features Voting System:

When an employee, independent of status or position, has an idea, he/she can post
the idea with a brief description to our Democratic Product Features Voting System.
Every Friday, there will be a casual company-wide meeting to discuss the
development on current in-progress product features and depending on the amount
of work left on the backlog, employees will have the opportunity to share their ideas
and partake in a Socratic seminar-like discussion to determine what features should
be added next to our product. At the end of the meeting, employees will vote on the
idea they believe is the best for the company to pursue. The feature will then be
specified in full detail and broken up into tasks and added to the backlog.

2) Backlog of Tasks:

This will consist of a prioritized list of tasks that have either been assigned to an
employee or are unassigned. When a developer finishes a task, the task is set as
done and the developer will choose a new task to work on from the backlog. The
purpose is to manage the division of work within the team.

3) Peer Code Review/Repository Management

As a form of quality assurance, any work that is done must be reviewed by at least
one other person before it can be pushed to production. We will use a repository
management system like perforce to manage the push to production and code
reviews.

Hiring Plans

<Re-elaborate on employee count as described in milestones>
<Include Job Descriptions>




































8.0 Startup Expenses and Capitalization



9.0 Appendix