Going Forward - March 17, 2010

CRD
The Critical Design Review went well overall. We discussed the critiques of our presentation in class and will make the proper adjustments when the time comes for the Final Design Review.

Ideapitch
Adam will lead his team in the Ideapitch competition. The presentation will be completed by next Wednesday and the team will practice it for our class to give them feedback on.

Adam has also finished his paper on Microfinancing and plans to present it to a conference in Sryacuse, NY in the coming weeks.

Undergraduate Exhibition
Mike, Christian and Drew are working on developing the poster and presentation for the Exhibition. They will have a copy of their poster ready for class on Wednesday March 31 for critiquing. They give their presentation on April 7.

Marketing Material
Powerpoint slides are to be developed for each of the new scenarios.
A video will be created for the system as a whole, with the scenarios implemented into it.
For now, we are scraping the idea of handing out flyers or any kind of physical marketing material on the ground in Kenya.

Technology
Code is still being written for our rating system and the tech team is still exploring options to allow WishVast to process a greater volume of messages.

Links and General Info:

Chanakya is going to take the lead and reach out to Mary Marete to set up an appointment for the team. 

As Khanjan mentioned, here's a link to Seth Godin’s blog.  There's plenty of good stuff in here so take some time to poke around.  We discussed this blog when the concept of story telling came up.  Here's the link to Seth's piece on How to Tell a Great Story.   

Another key point that came up was that of "checking in" or "attendance" in exchange for points.  Rather than have the NGO, for example, be required to send out hundreds of individual texts to award points for attendance, we discussed the idea of a code that would be available for users to text (essentially crowdsourcing the point system to the individuals themselves).   I mentioned foursquare in class, so here's a pretty good roundup of the "virtual badges" users can earn by checking themselves in much like we may award "virtual points" for texting in the attendance code.

Also, the WishVast Twitter feed is now up and running.  I will make the password information available to the team shortly.  In less than 10 minutes with a bit of creativity, we were able to gain several followers from Nairobi, Penn State, and elsewhere so I look forward to using this tool more efficiently for marketing purposes in the future.  

Specific Goals and Steps Moving Forward:

Before CDR:

Tech Team:

1 – Frontline SMS

2 – How is SMS via yahoo and other websites sustainable? How does it make money?

3 – Simple test of Frontline.  Will the Java work in Kenya?

Kaylyn to bring the website up to speed before CDR

We’ll also need a block diagram of the technology for the CDR

Marketing Team: scenarios (Ad Hoc, Farmers) need to be visually represented on slides for CDR. 

The revised semester plan will be sent back to Mike so we can add some more details and clean it up. 

After CDR:

Marketing Team to begin video creation to illustrate scenarios.  Videos for:

1) AD Hoc

2) Farmers

During CDR

We decided on the following order of events:

P1
P2
Big Picture
WishVast
S1
S2
Business Plan/$
Technology (to include block diagram)
Demo

Additional Notes: Include section of assessment.  This should coincide with the work Chanakya has done to champion IRB efforts

Fundraising/Competitions

Chanakya & Chris to coordinate on Pepsi Refresh Challenge.  We will also explore Dell Social Innovation and look for others.  Everyone please keep yours eyes open for additional contests/opportunities.

Adam to proceed with the Entrepreneurship in Africa conference at Syracuse University

Others will attend, travel arrangements will be coordinated – 4/1 – 4/3.  Actual Conference is Friday April 2nd. 

Mike/Christian – Poster competition

Khanjan – to forward poster from last year along to team

English 202C

Their next assignment is a formal report on how WishVast can be used

Core team needs to pitch the ENG 202 class to give them more insight into our direction, and also to refine our concept pitch.

U.S. Testing

Goal: 3 minute pitches for each applicable testing scenario

Khanjan to set meeting for the end of CDR week (thurs/fri) with a professor so we will have to move quickly on pitch refinement starting immediately after CDR. 

 

 

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