Session 4 Review

This seminar was held in a new IT lab since the previous class had problems with computer confirgurations. The computers were much faster and better and it was a little unfortunate we did not have to use it much!

The seminar started off with group presentations and discussiong on the Jurong Bird Park case study. The study asked us to come up with a single slide presentation on how to avail all the shows at the bird park in many different languages using just a mobile phone. Our group, the Wizards of the Web, came up with a three tier solution. We intended to use the IVRS system for all cell phones to call and listen to shows in different languages, SMPP protocol for cell phones to receive messages with information and Bluetooth A2DP profile to stream sound and additional information to bluetooth capable handphones. Looking at all the presentation I thought we encompassed quite a broad array of ideas. Infact we have decided to broaden the scope a bit and take this on as our project for this class. Other groups too came up with similar based solutions and infact one used a really different approach. They spoke about the registration and receiving of a bar code which has the visitor's mobile number linked to it. This would be used at scanners all over the park so that calls will be made to the registered number as and when the bar code was scanned. After all the groups finished presenting we had a short but detailed discussiong with our professor about the life cycle of the system. After listening to that it suddenyl struck all of us how general and vague our ideas were. The next step and discussion was basically fine tuning the answers and trying to eliminate as many loopholes as possible. One important point our professor pointed out was that none of the groups looked at it from a behavioural point of view. I now realise that is very important and will keep it in mind for future projects and discussions. All in all it was an excellent discussion and I enjoyed the open discussion going around the class which actually uses something from last week: the crowd wisdom concept.

Later on we also had a short discussion on how Google and Amazon get revenue. They mainly used advertisements to earn revenue and what is unique about Google is that its so 'clean'. The dont seem to allow companies to post up big pictures or anything of the sort. Infact its just a few lines on a corner of the page with a link to the website. I think it is fantastic for users since pages are no longer cluttered with millions of pop-ups and ads.

Towards the end of the seminar we briefed about four different models.
1) Business to Consumer
2) Business to Business
3) Consumer to Consumer
4) Consumer to Business

But what I realised was more important than all this was the 'Value proposition'. It is always important that some value is added to a process for the consumer and that is what our projects should also revolve about. We must try and add as much value as we can so as to sell our ideas. I enjoyed this seminar as it involved a lot of ideas and open discussion. It gave us a lot of chances to rebound ideas and discuss as a group. For our next class we have to come up with a 2 minute long elevator pitch selling our idea for the Jurong Bird Park project. Untill next week then...