To be honest, I'm writing this because prof ben emailed us saying we owe him blog entries.
Well.. To be very honest, I didn't really have a very strong impression on the external pitching session.
There are some lessons that I've learnt though.
First off, you don't always need to know what you want, but you should have at least a rough idea. There was some guy that wanted us to build a sims cities app, with no details and too much room for things to go wrong.
Next up, the idea is awesome, but its only occasionally useful. Jace(beleren, hohoho) has an awesome idea. I loved it. I mean, 1 week every semester I have to go through tons of stats to find out when I should bid for what modules, who are the lecturers, then I would have to research on the lecturers and the past lesson plans. It would be wonderful to have a site that did all this for me. However, the site would be only useful once every semester, which was a HUGE problem since most websites thrive on ads, and ads will only come if you have hits.
Personally, I feel that this is an idea with massive potential, just off the top of my head, I will setup the site so that it is endorsed by the school itself. Secondly, I will want it to review not only modules, but also lecturers, since I feel the content doesnt really matter, but the approach to which it was taught does(I have AlOT to say about a certain OS lecturer). To make users come back more often, schools that are affiliated to the site will automatically update the system with their lecturers and modules, students(who sign in with matric no) should be able to give feedback(read: whine) at any time without retribution. Lecturers should also be able to sign in with their accounts, but they will not be able to see any reviews that users set to private.
Lesson 3, always show people the good side of the picture. 6 waves claim they have 11 million monthly users, that is however, spread between a dozen games of 300-600k users each. Exactly how many of these are repeat users are not known, so the exact numbers should actually be far less impressive. But obviously whoever you're selling it to doesnt need to know the details :p
Thats all for now.
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To be very honest, I didn't really have a very strong impression on the external pitching session.
Any reason why you don't have a strong impression? The pitches were not interesting enough?
However, the site would be only useful once every semester, which was a HUGE problem since most websites thrive on ads, and ads will only come if you have hits.
Why is it a HUGE problem? Isn't it good that it's at least periodically useful? :-)
I will setup the site so that it is endorsed by the school itself.
Why do you think it needs to be "endorsed" by the school?
I will want it to review not only modules, but also lecturers
This the right observation. I already told Jace the same thing also. As it stands, the current site has issues -- but hey, someone got off his butt to actually do something. :-) That's worth something don't you think?
To make users come back more often, schools that are affiliated to the site will automatically update the system with their lecturers and modules
Actually, it's possible to trawl CORS and download the information. That was done for the Unofficial Timetable Builder.
@prof
No strong Impressions - not that its not enough pictures, but it just didnt spark any interest.
Module review - Jace spoke of opening the site to all other universities, and to get the students in those schools to use them its best for the school to publicize it to their students. My vision(if I were to do that) was a signup system for schools, and each school that signs up will allow their students to use it. That said, the site administration will be independent and the lecturers will not be able to see what students say about them. On the other hand, the school administration will be able to use some of the comments to access lecturers etc.
Regarding it being just periodically useful, I was looking at it from a "many universities" perspective, if I wanted to host a site that could facilitate a few hundred schools, I needed some form of income, which were ads, which won't come if I only have users show up twice every year.
Trawling cors would work for NUS, but many other schools don't have such wonderful documentation, and if the site were to be successful, then we needed a way for schools to update us.
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