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Top Story CNNfn: The N.E.W. Show PATRICIA SABGA, CNNfn ANCHOR, THE N.E.W. SHOW: Well if there's one part of the college experience we all could have done without is no doubt those late nights spent camped out in the library researching and writing term papers and other reports and foot noting them. I hated that. CHARLES MOLINEAUX, CNNfn ANCHOR, THE N.E.W. SHOW: Well we're still getting kicked out of the library at midnight when it closes and you're not done yet. Well now help is on the way. Troy Williams is the founder and CEO of a new company called Questia and it may offer some relief to the paper chase. He joins us now from Houston. Thanks for being with us. It sounds like exactly what every college student would dream of, a data base to go into and do research right from one keyboard without running around to the Dewy Decimal(ph) System and doing that little dance. What exactly is this going to be? TROY WILLIAMS, QUESTIA CEO: Well, thank you for the opportunity to be here. You know Questia is simply put a research service that enables students to get online and to do all of that research that they need to do quickly and easily and write better research papers quicker. SABGA: So what is the subscription rate? How much are you going to charge students for this and who are you targeting? Which students in particular? WILLIAMS: Well we're targeting undergraduate students in the liberal arts. We focused on the liberal arts and what we've done is selected 50 thousand books to launch with in January all in the liberal arts and we're going back and doing books all the way back to the 1920s and before and cherry picking all of the relative books that are in the library today for the first time creating books and putting them online so students can access them anywhere at any time. MOLINEAUX: But let's talk about what sounds like a really remarkable feature here, this cross referencing and interconnectedness. As you put it, students are supposed to be able to follow a train of thought from one book to another. Now how actually might that work for a student in the middle of a particular paper? WILLIAMS: Well let's imagine that you're on page 29 of a book and you're reading along and there's a foot note there sighting another book and that foot note is referring to another book, a specific page. That's one click away. We've hyperlinked that book to the specific book site. You can click on it and that page pops up for you and you can seamlessly, you know, connect to those books. If you're in a bibliography many of the books on that bibliography will be hyperlinked so you can go and look at that book instantaneously. SABGA: Now you're a young business with a new idea. How do you create a barrier to entry to others who might want to jump into this business? WILLIAMS: Well we've been at this for about two and a half years and it's a tremendously large project. We've raised over $130 million in the last five months alone but we've also spent two and a half years going out and building the processes to do this. We're the worlds largest digitization project and creating electronic versions of 50 thousand books is a mammoth project. So the substantial barriers in the process and in the cost of doing the project not to mention putting together a first rate management team that it takes to do a project like this and we have over 250 employees today in the United States doing that. MOLINEAUX: Really briefly, we want to talk about your original source of funding which as I understand was your credit cards. How exactly did that work? WILLIAMS: Well it took a - I moved to Houston and at that time it took me about 10 months to find my first investor and so along that length of time I had to spend a lot of money off the credit cards and it took a lot of diligence but then eventually I found a great supporter in Rod Canyon(ph), founder of Compaq Computer , who put the initial money in. MOLINEAUX: OK. Thank you very much Troy Williams CEO of Questia. |
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