Case Study

Rupert Carter - Entrepreneur

• Overview
• What's New
• Profiles
• Community

Perhaps due to the concentration of countries and languages in Europe, Rupert Carter has always had a strong interest in travel and getting others to understand and enjoy the culture and subtle flavors of a foreign city. With these talents in hand, Rupert was a perfect complement to a team establishing an online travel company in France.

When the company was in its infancy, Rupert assisted with the hardware and software requirements needed by the initial staff as they began work on web-based and printed travel guides. As the company reached over 300 employees, he used Curio to coordinate and research potential new office locations in neighboring cities around Paris, while working with city officials on specific terms and agreements.

Information Overload

Finding a new office is an incredibly complex project with scores of variables coming together to decide on a final location. Once the initial discussions began, Rupert realized that he was going to need to juggle a lot of information. But fortunately, Curio had just been released and it looked like a perfect match for his needs.

"From the word go, I started brainstorming in Curio."

Idea spaces were quickly filled with the questions and concerns that had to be addressed such as distance from Paris, relocation costs, potential government aid, and the needs of the employees. All documents sent to or generated by Rupert including cost analysis spreadsheets, letters and contracts, and OmniGraffle floorplans, were immediately embedded within Curio for quick referencing and easy archiving.

"One thing I can say about my work over the past few years is that I've been saturated with information. If information is not right in front of my face I can lose track of it."

To help establish a more visual connection between topics and related data files Rupert turned to Sleuth. With Sleuth, he quickly found maps, images, and facts pertaining to the potential provences and cities around France.

The graphical and asset managing cabilities of Curio allowed Rupert to place Excel spreadsheet files and other data files directly on top of the regional maps. With this spatial relationship established, Rupert doesn't need to remember where he stored a file on his hard disk. Instead he can find the information more naturally thanks to the visual nature of Curio's idea spaces.

"The advantage is workflow. The documents are kept in their pertinent areas."

Organization and Presentation

"Part of brainstorming is re-arranging your ideas into clusters and this is something you can't really do on a whiteboard but you can do very easily within a Curio idea space. The next advantage of Curio is that you can hierarchically organize and group your idea spaces which you can't easily do in other brainstorming environments." You then have an organized project with details upon details neatly arranged under upper-level topics.

Many times the creation of the idea spaces occurred in conference room situations where others were able to participate in the brainstorming process. So, to make his Curio project more presentable he first began with an top-level idea space containing an overall map of France.

"You can then create jump targets going from the initial brainstorm to the detail hierarchy. Why? When presenting your ideas on an overhead projector, you click on the jump target to skip to the relevant area and the audience's concentration remains focussed."

This audience involvement in a brainstorming session allows the meeting participants to feel joint ownership over an issue so the project can progress at a faster pace than simply presenting conclusions to an unprepared audience.

Continuing the collaboration outside the conference room was made possible thanks to Curio's HTML Export and new Publish to .Mac features. The resulting HTML files look 100% like the originals, and all assets can be easily downloaded via the browser. With Curio, the entire team always has the most up-to-date facts.

And the end result? Karavel management was able to more effectively narrow in on a city for future company growth.

• Contact Us
• Terms of Use
• Privacy Policy