You’ve got me all tied up!
When you are in your 20s, college is that place where you spend most of your waking moments. When you think about it, you can crudely categorise college students into
A.) The ones that Exceed Expectations
B.) The ones that Exceed Expectations slyly
C.) The last minute finishers (usually the ones who get the Participation Certificate)
I belonged to category C. I was what they call a lazy student back in college. The only reason I was present in class was because of the mandatory attendance. If I wasn’t busy sleeping, I was busy doodling, talking, or playing tic-tac-toe. This is how every semester passed except when you realise there is one week left for your exams to start and you have no clue what the name of the chapters are. Drowning in panic, I would frantically ask (read beg) my classmates for reading material, the portions, and anything that would help me pass. That is when I was introduced to the concept of Dropbox. The students who belonged to category A and B were incessantly pestered to share everything they have about the subjects via Dropbox. There were innumerable documents and folders on it which we somehow meandered through, found what we needed, and got through the exams. Next semester, repeat.
What might sound like a seamless system, had more flaws than perks. To begin with, it was extremely disorganised. Not everyone created folders and subfolders to differentiate between subjects and chapters. We had to sift through many documents that was just strewn around and you can see how that would be a problem for a last minute finisher like me. Then there was no method of backing up the data. Unlike Google Docs, you cannot revisit changes that you made. If someone accidentally or sadistically deleted something, there was no way of retrieving it. When few of them learnt the mistakes from previous experiences, they made backups and uploaded them, but my internet would allow no such thing. If you know what files were deleted, the whole cycle of pestering the smart ones had to be started again. If you didn’t, you cross your fingers, hope and pray you haven’t missed anything important. When the juniors would ask us for material to study, we couldn’t share anything with them because files and folders would get deleted. So they would start this whole ordeal of aggregating necessary resources to pass the exams all over again. As humans, and especially if you are an engineer, what we hate the most is repetitive tedious tasks. We love automation and so this deletion, creation and bad internet connection bothered us way way too much. When they asked us to make something for our final year project, we knew exactly what we wanted to do.
A secure place that held our relevant information, safe from deletion or any change unless I personally wanted it. One place where people could contribute articles, texts, images, videos almost anything that was useful towards the topic. And so, we decided to build a hassle free way of accumulating, aggregating, and collaborating on information that could be easily viewed and shared. We wanted to tie-up the internet so people never have to say “Oh I watched that brilliant video/article/image but now I don’t remember where it was!”. And that is how Interknott was born.
Interknott is an online resource aggregation and collaboration tool that allows one to put all their information into one simple, neat, visual place. This information can range from anything you find online — like links, videos, images and even paragraphs of text from webpages — to offline information like ppts, PDF documents, Word documents and images. And with the help of Interknott, you can invite like-minded to collaborate and add on to your resources to create a hive of information.
We are currently in beta and are still testing the product out. But feel free to sign up for an account at www.interknott.com and become a “Knittwit” (yes, that’s what we call ourselves), today. Your feedback is vital to us.
That’s all folks! For now, atleast. Will continue tou keep you guys posted about our progress and our story so far. Byee!
PS. To all the chrome users out there, download the Interknott extension. I promise you will not be disappointed.