Driving in the dark

Been awhile since I last blogged, and for good reasons too.

The cs3216 final project is picking up really fast. Adding onto my endless assignments and exams which I hardly have time for, the hours on the clock seems to be insufficient. It's so weird that I am spending more time on cs3216 than my biz mods together even though It is not my core.

Our project is doing well so far. We are pretty much on schedule and we have managed to talk to some interesting people including founder of wavehouse sentosa, founder of Brantology, founder of inmeetpro and founder of sgcamerarental. In this groups there are sponsors, event organizers and someone who has experience working with brands. They have given us good insights about how things are currently being done and allow us to translate it to what we are building.

I am pretty excited about what we are building. Of course there is also the element of not knowing whether it will be something people will use. It's kinda like driving in the dark, hopefully we are going in the right direction and eventually we will reach our destination. A lot of it also falls on the usability and the experience of using the product. Even the best idea could fail on execution. So I am hoping we have enough time to iterate a couple of times over the next few weeks. I especially like how well my team works together. All of us have very different strengths that compliments the weakness of others. I think that's exceptionally crucial for a well functioning team. I hope that we can bring splinkit beyond the classroom and I hope the team have the same dream to do that too.

Fan Page Team Dynamics case

1. Lanh said, “It would be really bad if we have a great idea but are unable to execute it successfully”. What are your views? Which is more important - the idea or the execution? Why?

 I agree with Lanh that execution is the utmost important aspect for the project. Ideas are practically worthless without the right execution. We have seen many examples of successful companies who are not the first in the market. All of these companies succeeded by executing a great product that met the needs of customers better than their competitors. Especially in the time frame of the course where there is no luxury of time, the ability to conduct extensive testing and reiterate it is limited. Thus execution matters far more than having a great polished idea.

2. What have you learnt about Facebook so far?

 I have learnt from the Facebook assignment that having a team that complements each other’s strength is extremely important in this course. Having just 4 members to complete execute the entire idea, having members of duplicated skill sets would cripple the progress. Thus having members strong in fields that the rest are weak at would ensure that the team can learn more and can move quickly. The second thing is to ensure that all members believe in the idea. Without a commitment to put effort into the development, there will be inertia to constantly seek weakness and make the application better. Having committed team members will ensure that everybody plays a part in improving the application.

3. Comment on the ideas for Another Life and Fan Gang.

Another life did not have much appeal as it was not clear who the application is targeted at and what value does it provide for the user. As mentioned in the case, the team lacked goals and objectives of why a user would play with it. The crucial game play element was lacking in the team who had no experienced game designers.

Fan Gang

Fan Gang was a new concept that is similar to fan pages that allows friends to create pages for others(doesn’t Facebook also allow that by not restricting who can set up pages? Maybe a few years ago it did not allow that?) The team segmented the target users to people who want to showcase their talent by uploading their work. In my opinion, this may be a useful tool for independent artists who are trying to make a name for them. Thus other than showing off their work, they are able to show that they have a considerable amount of people who support their work as well.

4. Should the team have changed their idea for the Final Project mid-way or stuck to their original idea? Why, or why not?

I felt that the team made the right decision to change their idea. Another Life is a game application that the team did not have the experience or capabilities to execute. Games require a very niche skill set that not every developer or business people can execute well. Whether users love the game or not depends not how well the code is written or how the marketing is done, but whether the story and visuals are engaging to keep users coming back. On the other hand, Fan Gang is a platform that users create their own content. Thus from an execution point of view, this is a much more manageable task by the team consisting of mainly coders.

5. List the major problems (obvious and non-obvious ones) in faced by the team? How could they have done differently and better?

The 2 obvious problems for the team was the lack of communication and the dwindling commitment in the project.

The 2 non obvious problems were not having a proper project management in addition to not understanding the strength and capabilities of the team and putting them into consideration when deciding on the idea.

The team should have been formed by people who could first work well with each other and had complimentary skills. This way, there would not be an issue of no communication and the members can build on the energy and passion of each individual. Having constant communication would also help the team to discover any problems known only to a single person and seek to quickly resolve it. I believe that dwindling commitment in the project is a side effect of a team that lacks communication and direction to a shared vision. To ensure members stay committed throughout the period, it is important for team members to know each other as a friend and understand their expectations for the course. Armed with the knowledge can teams better cater to each member and increase the commitment level.

Just as the coders have to pick up new languages to develop, the non-coders should pick up skills that can ensure the team moves forward. The non-coders should pick up project management skills and constantly ensure that team members is well informed of the progress and is on the right track. Additionally, it is important for each member to highlight their skill sets to the team prior to development. This will ensure that the team have a realistic view of what can be done, who needs to learn what and what cannot be done by the team. This will help by reducing the number of roadblocks that they will face in the development process.

6. What did the team do right/well?

The team did well to change their idea when they realise that they could not deliver by the given deadline.

Given the different expertise of the members, the team had split the team into 2 subgroups so that all tasks are covered by each members of the team. This helps to prevent duplicates and overlap of efforts by team members.

7. What would you do if you were Jeremy on the evening of 24th April (and the deadline for the final project submission was the next day)?

There is little that Jeremy could have done at the last day other than to reflect on what went wrong and pick up valuable lessons from this experience. If he could talk to the team and persuade the team to work on it for just 1 more day, it would help them to complete the project. Given that he could have done it throughout the half semester and the problem would have been resolved, it may not seem possible at the very last minute. He could perhaps ask the members who did not have exams the next 2 days to spend some time to finish developing the main features.

8. How would you handle a situation where one of your team members is unable to deliver on the work he/she promised because of personal problems?

This is exactly why we work in a team. By having a team, we are able to cover the time and work when some members are unable to deliver. If it is a problem that the rest of the team could help resolves, we should definitely give a helping hand. Otherwise, we should provision some individual time for this member to resolve his/her personal problems while the rest of the team continue working on the project.

9. What, in your opinion, are the key learning points from this case study?

Choosing members that you can work well with and ensure constant communications within the team members are crucial to any functioning teams. Additionally, team members should have diverse skill sets and can complement each other.

GetHelp! Case review

The interface is attractive as it can be seen that effort was put into designing icons and images to represent functions on the site. The application is very feature rich and the team made the decision to include several key features on the landing page for easy access.

The application can employ current UI trends to make the application more user friendly

1)      Single focus task

Many websites such as Google now have a clean and simple landing page where user’s attention is directed to a single focus task. GetHelp! can employ similar design element to reduce the clutter and features displayed on the page to encourage user action.

2)      Visual and pictures

Another trend startups employ is to place more emphasis on content through the use of visuals and pictures. Pinterest is a good example which uses many visuals in their products. GetHelp! can have a feature which generates a group of images for users to choose based on the keywords extracted from the task.

3)      Collapsed Content

GetHelp! highlighted 5 features that they placed on the front page. Instead of having all features accessible on 1 page, they can collapsed content and hide them into different tabs. This will allow user quick access to the menu without overcrowding the interface.

4)      Pop up box

To encourage user interaction with the site, the request for help form can be in a pop up box instead of directing users to another page. This way, users can easily return to whatever he/she is doing with minimal interruption.

                                                               

To convert the application into a mobile application, we must first determine the user behaviour of GetHelp! on mobile. In my opinion, the focus of the mobile application should allow users to post requests and receive help on the go.

Thus the first thing the team should do is to develop a high level feature list and a flow chart illustrating the different pages. This designing process will help the team by clearly drawing out the process in which users will interact with the application.

For GetHelp! the main features the application should have is the ability to submit a request, view all requests submitted and answered by user and view requests by others.

Once the flow chart has been constructed, the designers and developers can start writing the codes. Along the way, the development team should constantly test each features of the application as it rolls out to ensure that no errors or bugs are carried forward to the next features. Before launching it, team should invite external users to test ensure the application is working as promised.

Getting tougher here

Pitching Party

Last Friday, CS3216 had a pitching party. Students and alumni would pitch ideas to the class with the hope that some people would want to work on it. Unfortunately for me, I was the first to go and get slaughtered lots of feedback. 

The grand idea:

SplinkIt is an online market place that connects event organizers and brands through campus event sponsorship.

The objective of SplinkIt is to help organizers with the painful fund raising process and at the same time provide brands with an easy channel to reach youths.

The comments and questions asked were pretty good and fortunately it was not the first time someone posts the same questions.

As a multi sided platform, our team have the confidence that we could easily get the students on board(free money, why not right?) and the debate of the session lies predominantly on would the companies buy into this? 

Based on what we found, we believe the answer is yes. Brands have an insane appetite to advertise themselves all the time (I am sure everybody knows of a red bottle of sugared water). They do it for awareness, launching of something new or just simply branding. The challenge for us is how to make our service so valuable that they would consider advertising at events (through us) vs TV, print, radio, facebook, google and other avenues. A fact that consoles us at this point is that we are not trying to reinvent the wheel here. Brands sponsor all the time, just look at many of the events held in NUS and you will see many logos on flyers and banners. What we do need is to understand the motivations behind such acts and how we can make provide more value to them. 

We do not have the answer to this during pitch night and we are yet to have it now. But we are taking steps to validate this assumption by speaking to brands and their marketers in the coming weeks. 

Assignment 3

This assignment is proving to be way harder than it should be. Up till now, we are still unsure of what really matters to the user. The danger of creating something so simple and with so many competitors is that it is easy to be missed without a compelling value proposition. I guess this also makes it more fun, we either win big and become the sole clear winner or fall into the abyss terribly here. 

Given there is just 2 days left, I foresee we will be scrambling these 2 days. All braced for that!

Pitching by companies

So we are almost halfway through CS3216. The journey has been tough and mixed with ups and downs. This week we had several companies/individuals coming to pitch their ideas, hoping students would develop their ideas for them(some for a charge).

Had a chat with my assignment 2 group mate who is a developer and I could clearly see that she was underwhelmed by the quality of ideas. Other than the first pitch about 3D visualization, the rest were simply a mere representation of the web on mobile devices or a platform to store content for easy access on mobile. At the end of the discussion, she felt that all these ideas are too easy for the people for CS3216!

Back to my second assignment. The idea generation process was seemingly harder than the facebook application. We took almost a week to brainstorm and still could not come to a conclusion what we should develop. As far as our discussion went, the conclusion is that there isnt any problems that nobody has tackled before. After throwing out a list of ideas, we decided to make a task manager app that is way better than anything available out there.

We will be having a pitching party this coming friday. It should be a very fun and interesting event and I am really excited about it.

Flipboard iPad Application

The 2 speakers Michael and Jesmond were great presenters whom passion for the application overflowed onto me. Maybe the team's strategy was to get the 2 best individual to present, however I felt it would have reflected better if the entire team showed teamwork by ensuring everybody had a chance to present. At the end, Michael did a fantastic job of tanking all the questions skillfully.

User interface
The first thing I noticed about this application is how beautiful the application looks. The way the text and graphics are arranged and placed in the ipad's real estate just seems to go so well together. On first impression, I didnt think too much about implementation and assumed that maybe it just happened to be that way. It is only until Michael talked about the layout algorithm(he actually called it griding algorithm in his presentation but upon further research, I realise there isnt such a word). The algorithm takes into account variables such as popularity, whether it has images or videos etc and priorities them to determine which one gets larger real estate. Not only that, the algorithm have to juggle how to place them on the screen when in landscape as well as in portrait view. The amount of thought that goes into something so seemingly simple astound me. Jesmond later revealed more secrets about the design elements of Flipboard by highlighting the attention to detail about many of the minute things in the application. I especially like the way the pages flip, especially when the pages are flipped halfway you can see that the text are stacked together and you can still read them just like a physical magazine! Even though the flipping animation is not the company's core offering, it is such attention to details that makes people hooked onto the app, thereby using it more. For this, the company has really done a great job!

Caching
One thing I didnt like about the application is the inability to cache data for offline usage. Especially on a tablet or phone devices, having the mobility to use the app while out of wifi zone should be expected. Before writing this, I thought to myself some of the possible reasons why they did not include this feature. Maybe the combined text and images would be too large for the devices? maybe they didnt want to make the user go through the process of downloading content? Yet none of these reasons really make much sense. I think this should be a no-brainer and if anybody from FlipBoard is reading this, Shame on you! You better include this in the next update!

Business model
Flipboard's business model is quite interesting and is something worth investigating(maybe as a business student, this appeals to me more). It is a pity that during the presentation this was not discussed in details as I think there is much insight we can gain from this. In the presentation it was mentioned that until recently, Flipboard was surviving on the funds it had raised(US$60.5mil). Now Flipboard offers full page glossy advertisement from the publisher's advertiser and takes a cut from it. Additionally, Flipboard also offer subscription to some premium content from publishers. This in essence is a similar business model as a traditional magazine publisher who earns from both consumer buying the content as well as advertisement. Whether this is good or bad still remains to be seen as this method of content and advertisement distribution is still relatively new. Publishers and advertiser still have not wrapped their heads fully around how to best leverage on this new platform. Thus from a strategic point of view, I think Flipboard made the right decision to employ a familiar business model to partner with the publishers.

Personal thoughts on FlipBoard
I think that the road ahead for Flipboard is going to get very tough. As a aggregation platform, the company is pretty much dependent on publishers for content. Without access to these content, the application will be rendered useless and users will start to quit. Just in summer 2012, both Wired and The New Yorker decided to pull out of Flipboard citing ad sales as the main reason. Personally, I feel that they wont be the last to do so. FlipBoard partnership with the publishers are sorta complicated. Even though it is an additional distribution channel and the publishers can potentially reach out to more people, they are in fact providing content and money to their competitor! Using the Flipboard's advertising model, not only do publishers earn less money than their website/application banner advertisements, they still have to split the revenue with Flipboard. And with another type of advertisement to sell, publishers are essentially cannibalizing their original revenue source. Lastly, by offering content to Flipboard, users will prefer Flipboard and not use the publisher's own application and website. All of these would affect negatively on the publishers.

Yet you may wonder why some publishers are still currently sticking with Flipboard. For this I offer my two cents worth
1) Riding the hype of a new distribution platform
2) Mine user data and behavior
3) Small time publishers who do not have the resources for their own digital distribution

I believe these are the three reasons why some publishers are currently still on board. However all three reasons are not sustainable for Flipboard and they are at risk of losing content. It will be a matter of time when the publishers understand how to serve their niche and pull out of Flipboard. Thus for Flipboard to gain competitive advantage, they have to think of ways to increase the advertising value against the publishers applications advertisement without infuriating consumers. They may also possibly offer publishers more support and help them leverage on this platform for more advertising revenue. This would mean the advertisement they offer to consumers will have to be radically different than what they are doing now. Lastly, it is crucial that they device a way to help increase the publisher's subscriber base.

The next few months will be a roller coaster ride as the technology giants Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and many other players pit against each other to release their newest and best product for the holiday season.

Holiday season? Hari Raya and Deepavali ah? Of course not, I am talking about Christmas in December.

Timing the product launch is such an important decision to make and many companies would rather launch an imperfect product than miss the time. Thus we can see that technology companies are lining up their media event in the month of september and october in order to build up buzz and market their products just in time when people are thinking of what to get for their loved ones. 

I am definitely looking forward to iPhone 5 and iPad mini from Apple!

On another note, Microsoft evangelists came to our CS3216 class this week to talk about their new products, Windows phone, Windows 8, Microsoft desktop kinet and the slate tablet.

Some aspects of the technology are pretty cool such as the rotating tiles on the desktop and the slate tablet's keyboard, however I must say I am not really blown away. I know many people in my class were extremely excited about the upcoming products and I would expect some to be the first in line to get them. For me, I am still going to stick to my trusty iOS at least until I get my hands on one to try it out.

Lets get back to what I was talking about earlier, market timing. As a business student whom specializes in marketing, this week onwards is the time for me to go wild with the facebook application assignment. My job from today onwards would be to acquire as much users as possible for Eureka and seek feedback for us to iterate. Fortunately for me, Teacher's Day in Singapore is this coming friday and I see this as an excellent opportunity to push out our social learning application to all students in Singapore. Thus to ensure we deliver something useful, our team managed to alpha launch the application on sunday to test it out with users and fix as much as we could before we try to market it on friday.

Till then!