Prologue
The internet doesn’t have enough startups, so we (and note that this is the editorial “we”, not the royal “we”) at Jectiv have decided to step up and remedy this situation. So starting today, –
Actually, that’s not right at all. Jectiv isn’t starting today, it began in the summer of 2007 (6 p.b.*) and has been labouring furiously in the meantime to develop — wait, that’s misleading as well. Jectiv was born two years ago. It had bit of a misspent youth, wasting the many angstful months of its adolescence spinning its wheels, knowing it could never amount to anything, while it heard terms like Web 2.0 and social media whispered from the shadows, teasing, mocking.
In the summer of ‘07, though, an epiphany struck which reframed its entire life. In this new light, suddenly its ideas made sense — suddenly, its existence had value. It began in earnest to make the preparations to show the world what it had known, deep in its heart, since its conception two years before. But to prove this, it needed things. Use cases. Monetization plans. Algorithm evaluations. Competitive analyses. Interface definitions. Mockups. Scalability plans. A pitch. A schedule — a, mocking, ambitious schedule. And — oh, merciful Turing — a Prototype.
Herein we will watch the young Jectiv as it sets out on its own, with dreams and ambitions bigger than its pocketbook. It will be an epic journey, fraught with the usual things with which epic journeys are traditionally fraught, not to mention the somewhat less customary elements of late-night coding sessions, stinging rebukes from investors, server headaches and alpha tests, and — most wondrous of all — a henceforth non-anthropomorphized protagonist. That’s right: the author shall hereby revert to the only slightly less pretentious and annoying affectation of referring to ourselves in the plural. If you’re a good audience, we might even start dropping that.
* p.b., post bubble