Today me and Alex went to Student Stores to try to get a textbook listing; they're just in the process of getting the data input into the system and told us to come back next week.

We also started to go through the bureacracy to try to get the grade distribution report for the school; this should have a listing of all the professors and their grade distributions.

We've decided that this data is crucial to the success of the site. If we can get a full textbook listing (so we know exactly what is being used and at what price), we can incorporate this directly into the site. Removing the barriers for the full flow of information is really how prices become inflated in the first place; our goal is to abide by the laws of free market and to push the prices lower by pushing the flow of information.

But of course, all websites need a 'hook.' Although we would love to push the product itself, we also need something that people will immediately attach to. And that thing is the pickaprof-type system. Full grade distribution reports on the site for all professors, with the ability of comments will replace the need for any UNC-CH students to even use pickaprof.

But how do we ensure this site remains free? Many people are becoming more skeptical about the viability of free sites (with good reason). It's important that you make clear to your audience that certain features will be free for life.

CampusExchange has never intended on making money off of the professor grade distribution data. We want to make money from textbook exchanges (and classifieds in the future).

In essence, CE is revisiting the old portal era (remember the pre-Google days when every search engine tried to be your one-stop portal?). These companies failed because they failed to realize that portals should be local. Their options tried to reach too many people and therefore were too broad.

CE has a very focused market: students of UNC-CH. Nobody else. Everything transpires within the sleepy town of Chapel Hill.

The advantages of this are two-fold:
1.) Because the success of this site relies on word-of-mouth advertising, this spreads much quicker in a smaller group setting. Look at Tabulas as a case study of how slow word-of-mouth spreads on the Internet. CE should in essence be launched and have a strong following within two weeks. And it's not unreasonable if we target student organization listserves as our primary method of advertising.

2.) The focus of the site is more determined. We know our demographic. They are upper middle-class students. This is not a hard task to pull off. Granted, there are different demographics within our school, but we all have the same goals for the next four years: study, graduate, and save money for partying.

CE is simply serving as a platform for eventually becoming a UNC portal. We will eventually incorporate a better class search engine than the UNC one ... couple this with the professor search engine and the textbook search engine, and CE becomes your one-stop for the registration process.