Catherine and David Cook were two siblings attending high school in New Jersey. One day they were looking through their school’s yearbook and they saw how useless the information in it was. At that moment, they decided to put the entire yearbook online! They immediately researched online and found developers based out of Mumbai. Catherine and David also convinced their older brother (who was attending Harvard and had already sold a company) to come on board, and they began working on MyYearbook.com. A month later, they launched a basic but functional prototype and marketed it to their fellow students. They had 400 signups in the first week. Over a year later, they had one million members and the site was growing extremely fast. Five years after that, they were acquired by a Spanish company for 100 million dollars!
It is amazing to see how these kids took such a traditional idea such as the yearbook and turned it on it’s head. This is the type of innovation that pays off in the long run!
The kids were really smart in doing this. Especially with the whole “going green” culture. Everyone could really benefit from this by not printing yearbooks and using all that paper for it to just sit there after one time’s use when you could just put it all online from everyone to access it whenever they wanted. The cost I’m assuming would also go down.
This digital yearbook idea would be great for students in this society. So much of culture is online now, without an online presence people can definitely feel left out. After doing some research I found that this yearbook emphasizes meeting new friends. Most social networks stresses the ability to stay connected with old friends, but MyYearbook allows you to make new friends as well. Great Product and innovation.