Week 8- Final Summary Post

Meeting Sprout is an online calendar-based platform that revolutionizes the way people organize and schedule to create a more meaningful and productive life. 

Picture your upcoming week for a second.  You have things on your mind such as deadlines, tasks, leisure, sports, meetings, and those are just the tip of the ice berg.  Most people take one of two roads. They either give up on themselves with all the stresses life has, or they spend all their time trying to manage lives complexities that they fail to have any time to actually enjoy their life. 

We first started recognizing this issue our society has through my experience in college.  Given all the amazing opportunities college offers, we watched as students simply give up on themselves.  They were ignoring their classes, turning to drugs and video games, or just dropping out.  Then there are students who are succeeding in college, but they spend so much time planning, structuring, trying to stay on top of things that they run out of time to actually enjoy life.

We plan to charge both businesses large and small to have their own calendar based page, giving their consumer pool easy access to them through static information, making appointments, or transactions through the calendar.  They can purchase premium features, which allow their customers to make appointments and transactions through their calendar.  They can also purchase market research on their consumer pool.

My idea has evolved from a platform to a central hub throughout the semester, and I also have gotten into Emerging talk through the Sandbox. The project was great and helped me advance my idea as well as put it down on paper.

I commented on Alyssa Maria Brennan, Hunter Simon, and Tony Zeng.

 

Week 7- Blog Review Post

Tech Crunch is a popular tech blogging site where users can blog about technological things such as the android, operating systems and hardware. Jason Kincaid is a writer at TechCrunch. He grew up in Danville, California and later relocated to UCLA in Los Angeles, California, where he studied biology with a minor in ‘Society and Genetics’.You can reach him at jkincaidtc@gmail.com

In this blog, Kincaid introduces two entrepreneurs, Matt Galligan and Joe Stump. He tells the story of how the people wanted to create location based games, and ran into a roadblock because the technology or computing power did not exist. They then set out to build software and servers that could handle location based request and basically  made what they wish they had. They launched one year ago and already have mass databases that include Places and Context.


You can read more at the blog source http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/28/simplegeo-launches-storage-a-distributed-hosted-database-for-location-data/

Week 6- The Market

Our initial market will be college students and universities.

Meeting Sprout’s Primary market serves the needs of small businesses such as local food establishments, hair dressors, or health related practices.  Just to name a few

Meeting Sprout’s secondary market services the needs of larger corporations, ranging from professional sports teams to department stores to non-profit organizations.

Market caps have been derived by quatifying each market, and cutting it down by 75%.  We do this to account for unpredictable variables.

Ultimately, with superior brand name recognition, Meeting Sprout is perfectly positioned to target individual end users, including previously untapped client bases such as housewives and retirees. 

We chose this as our primary market due to the overwhelming growth in technology, and the need for small businesses to keep up with this growth. Many small businesses cannot afford to have websites made, or may not even be aware of its importance.  Our service allows small businesses to successfully reach their consumer pool at a price they can afford.

Week 4- The problem

We first started recognizing this issue our society has through my experience in college.  Given all the amazing opportunities college offers, we watched as students simply give up on themselves.  They were ignoring their classes, turning to drugs and video games, or just dropping out.  Then there are students who are succeeding in college, but they spend so much time planning, structuring, trying to stay on top of things that they run out of time to actually enjoy life.

After talking with people, mainly professors…we realized that these are not just issues that college students have, they are issues everyone has. After tremendous amounts of research, we have narrowed it down to three main problems.  These are the time, lack of information, and scheduling around others.

           So, we created a web based community that allows individuals, groups, and businesses to organize themselves, and interact over a publicly displayed calendar based platform.

Week 3- 5 year vision

My long term vision for Meeting Sprout is to penetrate into the small business market. Businesses would be able to post important events, coupons, and store hours on their calendar. Users could then search a business, see this information, and merge it with their personal calendar to see times they would be available to attend the business. We would charge the businesses a monthly fee to keep their page open, serving as our main revenue stream. To attain this, we would require a large active user database built up from previous years.

We would offer the business an API that allows them to see the most popular times that people are available, and this would serve as the revenue driver. We also could offer the business other market research information such as how many page hits per day. With this data, the business could staff and have hours of operations appropriately.

Week 2- Technology side

The technology needed to pull this idea off include a deep understanding of code and programming. To be able to sync calendars, the user will have to export their personal calendar into a database that we would own, and it would have to come in a grid format close to Excel. Also the information would have to be in a consistent variable so the server side code PHP and MySQL could decode it, parse it, and store it on our database in format that could be later displayed and accessed through PHP.

The consumer would have to know both where to send the information from their calendar and how to export the information. This would require a training video for each platform available. When the user hits export on their calendar, they would have to copy the URL of their Meetingsprout home page to properly export it to the right place.

To make the genral website, front-side code such as Javascript, HTML, and CSS would have to be used. The HTML would serve as the backbone, while CSS will make the design look nice. JavaScript would add the interactivity to the user such as rollover images and actions when the user clicks, and form verifications. The forms would also be verified server side, however, using PHP.

Week 1- General Idea

      I am currently working on an entrepenurial idea and am part of a start-up company called meetingsprout.com. Meetingsprout.com is an online service that offers calendars to students that contain their class schedule, important due dates, and university events.  Our vision is to allow students to simply log-in and receive all the above information without the need to input any information.  Through Meeting Sprout, students can view each others schedule and merge (sprout) them to see available times.  

      A unique feature of Meeting sprout is a group project facilitator.  Students can invite group project members to a page, and sprout all members class schedule to see overlapping times.  In addition, they are able to chat, assign tasks, upload documents, send blast emails, and many other features that will help facilitate group projects.

      Our long term vision is to sell this product to other universities, and then shift into the corporate world.  Group work is the backbone of any business, and can be very frustrating and complex.  Meeting sprout will provide project managers with a base of operation.  Meeting sprout  helps deal with the little annoying aspects of creating a meeting, like finding a place and time.  In addition, Meeting sprout will help keep teams functional by allowing users to add group objectives, assign tasks, send blast emails, upload documents, and many other key aspects that are involved in group work.