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OpenEntry History

OpenEntry is a wholly owned initiative of PEOPLink, a 501(c)(3) non-profit


organization. PEOPLink was founded by Dr. Daniel Salcedo with the mission of
helping artisans and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in developing
countries to benefit from the exciting new opportunities opened up by the
explosion of the Internet. It was based on his pioneering 1978 founding of the fair
trade mail order catalog Pueblo to People.

In 1994 PEOPLink launched the first global fair trade on-line catalog and began
selling products from grass roots producers around the world. Dan soon realized
that, rather than paternalistically marketing the products of grass roots producers,
it made more development sense to build tools that empower them to create and
maintain their own e-commerce catalogs. This enables producers to bypass the
long chain of middlemen that normally pay them no more than 10% of the final
retail price. So in 1997, PEOPLinkbegan distributing digital cameras to grass
roots groups and then built on-line training modules guiding them to edit the
images. The modules were soon expanded to show how to cut-and-paste their
company and product information into PEOPLink supplied HTML templates.
Finally PEOPLink built an uploader tool that enabled 44 producer groups in more
than a dozen developing countries to create and maintain their own crude
catalogs.

The venture was widely hailed for its pioneering use of the Internet to
democratize global trade as reflected in the glowing articles in the New York
Times, Washington Post, Le Monde, CNN, NewsWeek's Cyberscope, MSNBC,
Wired, United Nations World Development Report and more (see full list
atPEOPLink Press).

In 1999, Dan realized the need for a tool to enable SMEs in building their own
transactional catalogs and also to make it easy for SME networks to aggregate
their members' individual catalogs into a branded market capable of generating
the necessary visibility and credibility. He wrote out the functional specifications
for the CatGen (for "catalog generator") e-commerce platform and Jeff Skoll,
then Vice President for Strategic Planning at eBay, made a generous personal
donation to launch it. Oracle, impressed that CatGen placed database based e-
commerce in the hands of SMEs worldwide, donated a full suite of its latest
software. Many other donors also supported the effort (see PEOPLink funders).

CatGen enlisted developers (based in Armenia, Ukraine, Siberia, India, Ecuador,


Nepal, Ireland, and USA) to build a powerful e-commerce platform and guided
thousands of SMEs in 44 of the poorest countries to participate. A United Nations
Development Program evaluation in just one country, Nepal, concluded:
• "The largest impact of implementing this 'pro-poor' e-commerce approach
was on income and employment. Firms using it reported jobs that were
directly attributable to the on-line promotion . . . 3918 women"
• "A relatively inexperienced group of young IT professionals could, with the
proper tools, create employment for themselves while providing e-
commerce services to local SMMEs."

While CatGen was originally designed for the worldwide network of fair trade
producers comprising theWorld Fair Trade Organization, as it grew in power and
functionality, commercial business networks (chambers of commerce, trade
promotion organizations, industry associations) found they also needed network
markets. CatGen won the Global IT Excellence award by the World Information
Technology and Services Alliance ("members represent 90% of the global IT
market") and also established alliances with a wide range of public and private
institutions (see full list at Alliances).

Yet, by mid-2008, CatGen was facing many of the difficulties typical of small
"dot-coms" - managing one's own server was expensive and complicated.
Moreover, the smallest members of business networks did not have sufficient
income or knowledgeable staff to manage the CatGen client application while the
largest already had their web catalogs built with other systems. Therefore it was
impossible to induce all the members to implement CatGen catalogs that could
be aggregated into a branded network market capable of generating the
necessary visibility and credibility. This prevented CatGen from achieving the
critical mass of $100/yr users necessary to sustain the high cost of the server
and technical staff in the US, Russia, and Nepal. Facing serious financial
difficulties as a non-profit managing its own servers and software platform, Dan
decided in late 2008 to relaunch CatGen using the latest Web 2.0 tools (see The
Economist Magazine report and NewsWeek & InformationWeek articles on
"cloud computing").

The e-commerce platform has been completely rewritten. The catalog generator
now uses Google tools and servers while the network market builder runs
on Amazon's EC2 cloud computing facility. In January 2009, it was relaunched
with the more professional name OpenEntry.

Visit www.openentry.com for details

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