I'll answer only the first and the last questions (:
Inspiration http://s23.photobucket.com/user/NRGrush/media/ZX-10R%20Custo...
not sure about cupcakes, but blueberry muffins would be my choice, I just assume you are a cupcake manufacturer and perform customer analysis.
As for the rest I should probably write a small blog post to sum up all of that. In short server is ruby on rails, client is mostly emberjs + d3js. I also post updates on StoryLine blog, so check it out, it should give you an idea on progress of things. http://blog.storyline.im/