The eCircles Story

The Beginning

This is a story about the Lee Family Reunion. Being the dutiful son, brother and cousin that he is, Prescott Lee volunteered to organize his family's reunion. Putting his tech smarts to work, he thought e-mail would be the perfect way to share every detail with his family. This worked perfectly for about the first three e-mails. After that, a few e-mails went astray and important people began to fall out of the loop. But it was when Prescott's mother and brother agreed on a date and forgot to copy him that he knew he had to find a better way. Or a new family.

Prescott decided he needed a central, private forum where everyone could keep track of what everyone else was saying. So a determined Prescott decided to build his own on the Internet, the perfect yet untapped medium for multiple-party, back-and-forth communication.

The result was a completely new environment on the web where his family could share a group calendar, discussion boards and documents to plan their reunion. It doesn't stop there. Prescott wanted to make this concept available to other groups that wanted to stay in touch and get organized. So he teamed up with colleagues Joe Hayashi and Mark Yatabe to create what is now known as eCircles.com.

The Basics

Selected by PC WORLD as the "Best Online Community Site" in 1999 and by Technologic Partners as "Most Likely to Succeed" through its Investors Choice award, eCircles.com is a free service that gives small groups a central, private place on the Internet to communicate, organize and share.

It works like this: one person gets the ball rolling by starting an eCircle. She can share a photo, plan an event, share music, start a discussion, or she can get all of these features by creating a private place for her group. She then invites her friends and family to participate and whenever somebody accepts her invitation, they are taken directly to the content of her eCircle. Once in the eCircle, everyone can participate by sharing comments and adding content for everyone to see.

Each of these eCircles comes with a different set of applications. If you choose to "Share A Photo", the main sharing tool is Photo Albums. If you plan an event, your main tool is the Event Planner. What makes eCircles unique is that a person can customize their eCircle by choosing from a variety of applications to add. A person who shared a photo album can also add a chat room or a discussion board to their eCircle. A person who planned an event can add a photo album or a Wishlist to their eCircle. Thus, eCircles are all "made to order".

eCircles also makes gift giving in your eCircles as easy as a few clicks of your mouse. Users can add a Wish List to their eCircles for birthdays, upcoming parties, weddings or any other occasion. These wish lists contain links to many trusted Internet vendors. Aunt May in Des Moines can look in the family eCircles' Wish List to see what her nephew Bobby in Tucson wants for his birthday and then click through to an eCircles affiliate site, such as eToys, to buy it. Movie, book and music clubs can also create recommendation lists that link directly to affiliates like BarnesandNoble.com and Reel.com.

eCircles is great for keeping in touch with groups of friends, family, clubs, sports teams, study groups, work contacts and more. Any activity that requires group editing, planning, scheduling or discussion is infinitely easier with eCircles. With eCircles, you can choose to simply share photos, music and other details of your daily routine with those people you can't see everyday or create an entire hangout with chat rooms, discussion boards, games and more.

The Business

Partnering with e-commerce affiliates and advertisers, eCircles.com is able to guarantee a free and multi-faceted service to users. We are already affiliated with many trusted Internet vendors and have more in the works. We also offer co-branded versions of our site to other sites.

Experts predict that more people will join the Web in 1999 than in the past three years combined. Many of them will be looking for a fun, simple way to share and communicate with family and friends. eCircles goal is to offer them the most comfortable and private place on the web to do all that and more.