About the external pitching session

I must be late already. Sorry about that, I haven been screwed a little bit these days.

The pitching session benefits me a lot, especially the speech by Bjorn Lee from 6Waves.

The following are my opinions about each speech:

1. World City Summit: The speaker is not concentrating on what we might be able to do but spent too much time introducing the event itself. So the result is the speech gave a feeling that the topic is irrelevant. Maybe the speaker himself was not sure what this session was about.

2. Project Nimbus: This is very interesting. It provides us with huge amount of information and enables us to use this information in our web applications conveniently through its API. One possible application making use of this convenience that I could think of is a shopping plan maker which can make shopping plans for a whole day by arranging for path and shopping place based on the database. The database itself is still in development and as it perfects itself, it will enable many fascinating ideas.

3. RedSports: This site is very well-known among young sport lovers in Singapore. It is actually surprising that it has no any integration with Facebook. Even if just feed a piece of news to Facsbook could help the site to grow. Some things, despite their trivialness, are effective. It seems very likely that the site will get more well-known it has some integration with facebook such as setting up a page that feeds sport news to its fans.

4. iSyndica: After the speech, I was still quite blurred about the concept of this site. But the cloud computing concept is catching. It really fits to build a site that distributes images based on a cloud architecture. It restates that cloud computing is the future.

5. Module-review.com: The speech is very impressive. I have been to the site several times and the information it provides is very useful for a student in NUS. The problem with this site is that the number of active users will vary very sharply throughout the year. If the site could be developed into a more general form that could accepts review of modules for other Universities and Colleges, it will be very successful. The fact that he speaker, Jace Liew, is soloing the site and that shocked me a lot. I am having great respect to his persistence and courage. If he could find some good partners to do it together, it could grow much faster. The key point is still to extend the range of modules to other colleges.

7. 6Waves call for ideas: This is the most beneficial among all the speeches. It explained how we should build and manage our games to make profit. We need to consider in detail what role each game should play in the whole business, whether it is effectively an ad or real profit-producer, based on the intrinsic characteristics of the game itself. It helps a lot to fix the design target of a game.

Project Case Study: GetHelp!

The concept of the application looks really attractive to me. The interface looks good also. The application should have been a success even now, let alone it was built 2 years ago. I am quite curious about the result of the app. By the way, was it for the final project?

Now coming to the important part, what is the problem with the app.

1. Homepage:

1). The homepage is not able to show the user the status of his current requests.

2). Some of the elements are not really needed

a). Estimated time:

this somewhat does not make sense and it is obvious the user would not understand what it means

b). Location:

This is a useless element

c). SMS:

No one would be interested to be spammed through SMS. Another problem is how to realize the function.

3). Some elements are quite confusing:

a). Who do you want to ask:

The selections seem contradictory with each other. The users will probably get confused when using it.

Recommendation: Now that there are a lot of space in this page, we could just put the list of friends here.

b). "need quick help? add more details...": These two sentences are the most confusing to me. After some thoughts I guess it might mean that if the user completes the optional fields, the others will be more willing to help him...

Recommendation: Change it to: "Details (optional)"

2. Project page:

1). It is better that if users could have more options when posting new messages such as "private".

2). I am not sure whether the user will get informed if someone has posted on his project page. This is essential, though.

3. Statistics page:

There seems no big problems with this page but the "Reward system" should better be integrated into the posts. Specifically, after the user gets a Nickname, all the posts he wrote will have something like: "Jack-The Greate Guru wrote: ".

I have a recommendation that the developer could add in some "reward system" that has its own currency. Users could set up award points and give the user with the best answer the points from his own account.

This is generally my review of the application: GetHelp!

Facebook Seminar Critique

As I have been allocated CafeWorld about which the presenters did not really talk, I would like to switch to MarketPlace, on which I have spent some time myself.

Marketplace, as explained by its name, is a place that a market operates, the difference from conventional marketplace is that this one is a e-market built into Facebook, meant to make full use of its enormous social network. It now has about 3.3 million users and Group 7 described it has made great success as well as provides Facebook users a convenient way of transactions. Is it really the case?

Marketplace is vitally different from other applications: it is an OFFICIAL release by Facebook. This brings tremendous advantages to Marketplace. An easy example is that Facebook has an API specifically built for Marketplace (they are deprecating it now though). This would not be possible for unofficial applications. Other than that, another obvious advantage is Facebook could advertise its own applications more than other companies. After all, it does not need to pay for the ad fees and go through any negotiations with itself. With such inherent advantages as the starting point, it would be impossible that Marketplace not having many users, even if it is really as poorly designed as Pillowfight, users would still try it as it is built by Facebook itself. So, is Marketplace really a success after all? The answer is negative.

It is true that Marketplace has over 3.3 million monthly active users, which is a big number. While Facebook as a platform has over 350 million users, so less than 1 percent active Facebook users actually play around with Marketplace. I guess this figure is quite poor given the analysis in the above paragraph. What does it say? It says that Marketplace is not successful, at least till now it has not been successful. Why?

First thing first, Facebook does not really know what it wants Marketplace to do. Is it a duplicate of ebay? Maybe, at least it looks like it. But where is the secured online payment system? Things simply doesn't work without it. Then let us assume it is a platform for physically closely spaced users, why get it so complicated that every time I look for something, I have to choose within how many miles away I want from a certain city? This just makes things worse. From another angle, what kind of goods Facebook wants to sell? Is it new items or used items? Normally people won't care about distance much if they buy new items but it becomes critical when they are buying second-hands as they are facing much higher unsatisfactory rate and quite possible will not accept the item. In this case, long distance not only increases the risk of swindle but also makes returning of unwanted items very tedious.

Secondly, as Facebook is not sure about what Marketplace should do, it now stays in a awkward situation.

On one hand, it is directly competing with famous E-commerce companies like Ebay. Facebook is likely to fail. Let's just take Ebay for example, it is the most famous e-commerce brand. According to one of its 08 quarterly report, ebay had over 80 million active users, which is highly likely to have exceeded 100 million today. Well, this is a huge difference. It seems to me there is no chance that Facebook could win. Actually Group 7 commented in their excellently awesome video ( it is really awesome :) ) that Facebook is trying to integrate a online payment platform into Marketplace. In my opinion, this helps little, for reasons that it has a too small market share and has no distinguished advantages over its competitors.

On the other hand, Marketplace is not optimizing the platform as a regional second-hand market. It does supports functions like sort out items according to users' network settings and things like that, but it is too complicated to use and not user-friendly. As commented in the 5 paragraph, people tend not to sell second-hands on big e-commerce sites like ebay. Does it mean that people are not selling second-hands? Of course not. As my observation indicates, people tend to make use of local forums to buy and sell second-hand items. The reason is apparent be cause it is simple, easy and safe. Second-hand items are actually in tremendous need because they often carry a higher value/price ratio. While it is much more difficult for people to actually find second-hand items comparing with new items. This is where business lies.

Summing up the above two paragraphs, we see that Marketplace is trying to accomplish two functions at the same time, while not successful for different reasons.

How should it improve itself? My idea is that on one hand instead of competing with big e-commerce companies like E-bay, it should seek possible chances to cooperate with them. On the other hand, Facebook should optimize its advantage of having a giant interconnected user group to occupy the world's local second-hand markets. It should simplify its UI to make it as simple and easy as possible. A desirable result is that users could spend only 3-5 mins a day to quickly look through items that he might be interested in, just like what they would do in a farming game. Real-name policy simplifies and secures transactions tremendously. In such a way, Marketplace might be able to really popularize itself and make a success.