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My name is Yaacov Martin,
I am a co-founder and the CEO of Jifiti.com,
and I would like to share with you some of
the interesting milestones that we've experienced in our journey from inception,
and all the way to the stage that we are currently at, with Jifiti.
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Like many other startups,
this one started with an idea;
this idea was actually inspired by my engagement.
I got engaged to a South African girl at the time living in the US,
and obviously as is the culture in the US,
so once we were engaged,
my fiancee said to me that we must register for gifts.
She took me to one of the most obvious brands or chains in the US.
I, myself, grew up in Israel,
and therefore, this entire concept was quite foreign to me,
known to me maybe only through movies,
and we walked into a Bed Bath and Beyond-
this was, I believe, at the end of 2002.
At that point, I was quite a bit younger than I am today,
and we were approached or greeted by a dedicated staff member at the store,
who, apparently, was in charge of taking care of newlyweds to be.
They brought us into a dedicated office, sat us down,
took a whole bunch of details or data with regard to our wedding date,
a number of guests, et cetera,
and then proceeded to hand us one of these very bulky industrial barcode scanners.
Believe it or not my fiancee, wife today,
is not into shopping at all and merely took me to the store,
I think probably because her mother said that that is what she has to do.
At some point very early on in the process,
she told me that she is going to find herself a very comfortable couch
and I should pick her up once I am done with my shopping spree.
This idea of being able to roam a store and use a barcode scanner
to simply add any item that I could possibly imagine receiving as a gift,
was intriguing to me.
It gave me the full in-store experience of touch and feel,
so I was able to make sure that the towels were fluffy enough,
and the sheets were to our liking,
and I proceeded to spend over an hour running around that store,
and simply using this very bulky scanner to scan any barcode,
of any item that came to mind.
I'll remind you that this is in late 2002,
so I had no way of monitoring what I was doing,
this was simply some kind of scanner that apparently was collecting the data.
At the end of this process,
I returned to that office,
they stuck this scanner into a cradle,
synced the information, and let me know that this will be now available on a website
for my friends and family members to see
and then purchase, if they would like, for our wedding.
