Posts Tagged g+

Overview of Dragons Den Pitch – Sami

This post details an overview of the preparation for the Dragons Den pitch.

The pitch will begin with an introduction to the project and the team, and then progress immediately onto a showing of the video.

Once the video has been shown the following items will be discussed in the pitch:

USP’s
This portion will detail the USP’s of Koh.Tu.Me:

  • Inclusive: Koh.Tu.Me aims to bring everyone together, irrespective of whether you are on a social network or not, and if you are actually a member of Koh.Tu.Me or not.
  • Intelligent Travel Organiser: Koh.Tu.Me contains an intelligent travel organiser that not only aims to get you from your location to the event location, but is centered around organising the best travel options for the group!
  • Unique Combination: We have looked at over 40 different event and travel applications, and none of them combine the service of Koh.Tu.Me.
  • Open Data Centric: The travel data that Koh.Tu.Me uses will all be taken from different Open Data sets.
  • Targeted Event Advertising: Koh.Tu.Me is event centric, and therefore all advertising within the application will be aimed providing relevant adverts to the event you are attending.

Application Dev
This portion will provide detail about the application itself, initially by displaying an architecture diagram. Then it will be explained that it will be implemented by creating a responsive web app, that will then be ported to a mobile application, such that there will be a desktop site, a mobile site, and a mobile app to download depending on the users preference.

Survey Results
This section will look at the results from the survey ran to ascertain the popularity of the different features of Koh.Tu.Me. The survey produced some very positive results, with each ‘feature’ taking the majority vote as appealing.

Revenue
This section will detail how the initial version of Koh.Tu.Me will look to make money. This will be in three ways:

  • Targeted Event Advertising: Koh.Tu.Me will provide targeted advertising related to the event information. For example events that include a meal out at a restaurant would show offers or adverts for restaurants in that chain, or in that area, or in that cuisine.
  • Taxi Referrals/Promotions: Koh.Tu.Me will be approaching taxi companies to ask them to consider paying to promote their taxi firm within our application, and Koh.Tu.Me would take a small booking referral for taxi’s booked through our application. Additionally/Alternatively they could pay a fixed rate to promote their company within our application. These companies could potentially be enticed in with trial offers.
  • Non Advert Purchasable App: There will also be a purchasable app that doesn’t include advertising for those who prefer this option.

Future
Once the app has gained in both users and popularity we can introduce premium accounts and extra services. This will also give us more scope to pitch to more companies for booking referrals and promotion within our application.

Summary
The pitch will end with a summary of Koh.Tu.Me and will then break for questions.

 

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

No Comments

Advertising Video – Sami

This is the initial advertising video prepared for the pitch. It was created using drawings that were all put together to run as a video, so that different soundtracks could be recorded behind it.

We are still currently experimenting with different voice overs for the Dragons Den pitch, but this is the preliminary cut.

Advertising Video

 

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

No Comments

Application Refined Version 5.0 – Sami

This blog will make clear which elements of our application will be included from the outset, and which elements are future considerations:

Building on the previous post Application Refined Version 4.0 – Sami which focused on the features of our initial application, this post will look at how the initial application of Koh.Tu.Me will be used to make money.

Our initial application will make money in the following ways:

  • Free app with advertising revenue.
  • Booking referrals (from taxi companies).
  • Purchased app with no advertising.

Once our app gains popularity and users then we could progress to these methods:

  • Premium business service.
  • In app purchases.
  • Ticket purchases within the application, with booking referrals.

Therefore to summarise, our initial version of Koh.Tu.Me will be focused on the social, purely built on Open Data, with minimal setup costs and complexities. The main complexity will be associated with handling the different types of Open Data that need to be correlated for the travel organisational element.

 

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

No Comments

SPARQL & Pseudo Code Example – Sami

One of the technologies that Koh.Tu.Me will use is SPARQL [1] which is the query language of the Semantic Web. The University of Southampton has made a lot of Open Data available [2] and have set up a SPARQL Endpoint [3] in order to facilitate easy querying of this data.

This images below illustrates a SPARQL query that can be used to get the bus route and bus stops information, complete with name and latitude and longitude information. This means that if a user requested to travel by bus and put in their location details then this information could be used to locate the bus stop closest to their location, ascertain which bus routes that was on, and then locate which stop on one of those routes was closest to their start location.

The pseudo code would look something like this:

#in the case the user selects bus
select case: “bus”
      Stop dest_stop = nearestStopFromCoordinates(dest_lat,dest_long);
      List<Route> dest_routes = routeFromStop(dest_lat,dest_long);
      Stop start_stop = nearestStopFromCoordinates(user_lat,user_long,dest_routes);
Route bus_route = locate_root(start_stop, dest_stop); 

#works out the nearest bus stop from any route to the lat/long provided
nearestStopFromCoordinates(String lat, String long){};

#works out the nearest bus stop on the routes provided, using the lat/long provided
nearestStopFromCoordinates(String lat, String long, List<Route> routes){};

#works out which bus route has both of these stops on
locate_root(Stop start_stop, Stop end_stop);
SPARQL Query
Sparql

SPARQL Query & Results
Sparql2

 

 

References
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/sparql11-query/
[2] http://data.southampton.ac.uk/
[3] http://sparql.data.southampton.ac.uk/

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

No Comments

Open Data within our Application – Someah & Jokha & Sami

There will be a multitude of different travel data used within our application. When a user accepts an event invitation they will be offered the option to choose their desired method of travel. This can be walking, bus, train, taxi, aeroplane. Koh.Tu.Me will provide suggestions for these different types of travel, complete with the time taken to use this method, prices, locations (e.g bus stops), and people in a close vicinity they can share travel with. In addition to this Koh.Tu.Me will also be using weather data to provide the weather forecast element of the application.

Koh.Tu.Me will be looking to use Open Data as much as possible because this is data that is freely available for anybody to use under an Open Government License [1]. This post will be looking at the different types of travel data we need to use. As Koh.Tu.Me is being created in Southampton by Southampton University Students then potentially a Southampton prototype could be created first to test out the application. This post will be looking at travel data specifically in Southampton, and also for the rest of the UK. Following this, this post will then touch on travel difficulties in different countries, and weather forecast information.

Busses
There are a number of different bus companies in Southampton. UniLink runs the connecting services between all of the University Campus’s and Halls of Residences’s, as well as to both Train Stations and the Airport. BlueStar operates other bus services outside the University to provide services between Southampton, Eastleigh, Winchester, Romsey and Waterside areas of Hampshire.

Southampton Data
Southampton University has made much of it’s data ‘open’ including it’s bus information. The following datasets could be utilised by our application to freely access bus timetable information.

http://id.southampton.ac.uk/dataset/bus-info– this is the open linked data set of all of the latest bus information, including bus routes, bus stops, geographical positioning, and links to bus times.

http://id.southampton.ac.uk/dataset/transport-linkset – this is the open linked data set of bus and train information into the government “Naptan” scheme. Naptan is a system that can uniquely identify all access points to public transport.

http://id.southampton.ac.uk/dataset/transport-locations – this is the open linked data set of the location of bus stops relative to campuses.

UK Data
http://travelinedata.org.uk/nextbuses.htm – this is real time bus information that can be accessed via an API.

Clearly there is a lot of Open Data bus information that could be used within our application. This would mean that this set of data could be obtained and used for free under the Open Government License. An initial version of our social networking application could look to use one service such as NextBusses, and as new iterations get created it could expand to use different bus sets for different cities that have them available such as Southampton.

Trains:
There are also excellent train connections in Southampton by South West Trains, with two train stations: Southampton Central and Southampton Airport Parkway. South West Trains offers the option of group travel on certain journeys, enabling people to save money by travelling together in a group.There are several open data feeds that contain rail information:

Southampton Data
There is less Southampton specific data regarding trains, however there is still one dataset:

http://id.southampton.ac.uk/dataset/transport-linkset provides bus and train information for Southampton.

UK Data
http://www.networkrail.co.uk/data-feeds/ and http://www.opentraintimes.com/ both provide real time train information.

These datasets would definitely provide a large amount of train based data for use within Koh.Tu.Me. Combining this with the bus information would facilitate journeys with multiple types of travel within them.

Taxis:
There are a number of different taxi companies in Southampton, notably Radio Taxis which is widely advertised around Southampton. 

Southampton Data
There is no specific Southampton Open Data for taxi information. There are certain taxi companies such as Radio Taxis (mentioned above) that promote themselves to Southampton University during Freshers Fayre’s and other events. They would be the companies to approach to ask if they would pay to be promoted within our application, or even if they would pay us a small finders fee for any bookings made through Koh.Tu.Me.

UK Data
http://www.owenboswarva.com/opendata/Taxi_and_Private_Hire_Companies.xls – provides a list of taxi and private hire companies within the UK. Unfortunately despite providing Company name and address information they don’t provide phone numbers. Therefore in order to make use of this facility, Koh.Tu.Me could either provide taxi suggestions for the user to go and look up, or do an in-app google search for these taxi companies to provide phone numbers.

Aeroplanes & Ferry
Southampton has an airport and therefore that might be the natural choice to fly from if there were the right flights available. Additionally it also has a Ferry Port down at the docks.

Southampton Data
There is no specific Southampton Airport or Ferry Data although again it might be possible to liase with the airport/ferry port to make their data available to our application.

UK Data
http://openflights.org/data.html – this is an open data set of airports, airlines and flights all around the world. This would allow Koh.Tu.Me to provide information about how to fly to another country to our users. This could of course be used for Southampton flight data.

http://www.traveline.info/tnds.html – this is an open data set of public timetables for various methods of transport including ferries. This equally could also be used for Southampton ferry data.

Walking
As with most cities, the cheapest easiest way to get to and from certain locations is simply to walk. Southampton has certain footpaths that provide shortcuts around the city, and also has safer places to walk through such as the University Campus.

Southampton Data
http://id.southampton.ac.uk/dataset/southampton-postcodes – this is a dataset of the Southampton Postcodes which also contains lat/long information that could be used to identify places within close proximity to each other.

UK Data
http://www.openstreetmap.org/ – this is an open data set of map information which would enable our application to not only look up start and end locations and identify their proximity, but also to potentially provide directions between them.

Conclusions
There is a lot of Open Data available for all of the different travel elements of these locations. This is fantastic news for Koh.Tu.Me as it means not only is there a wealth of data available to use to build up our application, but also this data can be used for free.

Travel issues in different parts of the world:
Each country has different transportation systems that differ due to culture aspects, finance etc. In the Arab Gulf States (Someah is from there) there is a shortage of public transport in most regions, especially small towns. The majority of people use private cars to travel short distance, and aeroplanes to travel long distance. Once Koh.Tu.Me was expanded into an international application it could adopt different travel suggestions and use different data sets depending on the Country the user is in, (or indeed going to).

Weather Forecast Information
OpenWeatherMap is an example of open weather data. This site provides free open data about weather, along with APIs for developers to use within their applications. It receives its data from broadcasts and forecast from more than 40,000 weather stations. It has a variety of information such as week forecasts that would enable users to plan ahead for their events with relevant weather information.

References

[1] http://data.gov.uk/blog/new-open-government-license

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

No Comments

Application Refined Version 4.0 – Sami

After analysing the results of the survey it became clear that the most popular aspect of Koh.Tu.Me was the more social aspects of the event. Whilst the questions asked about the appeal of the business features gave some promising results, the highest results were given to the elements of inviting friends who aren’t on social networking, and creating that inclusive travel feature. It is also important to point out that only half of our participants were actually working professionals in the first place.

Taking this into account, the first version of our application, whilst still offering a Business/Pleasure event classification, will include the five primary social features proposed for social events in our survey.

  • Being able to invite friends to events irrespective of whether they are on a social network or not.
  • Being able to sign in with Facebook/Twitter/Google+ Accounts.
  • Receiving travel planning advice about getting from A to B, and money saving advice.
  • Being able to travel in a group to the same place.
  • Receiving information about the best companies to use to organise travel.

Ideally if Koh.Tu.Me is successful and gains popularity, then we will add in the additional ‘professional’ services, which will also allow us to provide a free social service, and a premium business service.

 

, , , , , , , , , , ,

No Comments

Using a Qualitative Method to get Feedback on our Social Networking Application Idea – Sami & Someah

In order to see which elements of our social networking application are most appealing we decided to use a qualitative method to investigate this. We considered interviews, focus groups, and surveys as potential ways we could get this feedback and analysed the strengths and weaknesses of each method in relation to the time frame, and the information we wish to collect.

Focus Groups [1,2]

Strengths 

  • Exploring what different people have to say.
  • Providing insights into the roots of complex behaviour and people’s motivations.

Weaknesses

  • The moderator of the focus group can actually prove more disruptive than helpful when it comes to trying to draw opinions out of the participants.
  • “polarization effect” – attitudes can become heightened and more extreme as the group discussion continues.
  • Discussions can get sidelined if participants disagree strongly.

Surveys [3]

Strengths

  • They are anonymous and neutral, potentially leading to more honesty.
  • All of the data is collected automatically and can be analysed at a later date.
  • Takes less time (in terms of direct time put towards the study).
  • Can address lots of different demographics easily.

Weaknesses

  • There’s a lack of engagement with the person answering the questions.
  • There’s less scope to get more personalised information out of a survey, as whilst you can show different questions based on user answers, you can’t make subtle adaptions to the questions depending on how the answers are going.
  • Takes more time (in terms of indirect time, of waiting for people to answer the questions).

Interviews [3, 4]

Strengths

  • Qualitative interviews produce credible evidence
  • It can be used to explore multiple different possibilities to answering a specific question, in addition to allowing for elaboration on certain points.

Weaknesses

  • Interviews are neither as neutral or anonymous as surveys, meaning that people won’t necessarily answer as fully or honestly as they would in a more neutral surrounding where their answers could not be attributed back to them.
  • There’s also a huge pressure to collect all the data needed during that interview period as otherwise that information could get lost or misrepresented when it comes to writing up the results.
  • Can risk being interviewer led.

Conclusion
We wish to ask some very simple yes/no questions to find out if the problems that our social networking application attempts to address, are actually commonly occurring problems. We also wish to find out whether people find different elements of our social networking application appealing, and if so, how appealing. These characteristics seem to lend themselves best for a survey as we can ask direct yes/no questions and we aren’t looking for different interpretations or different ways to explore questions, we just want simple yes/no answers.

In addition we could run a survey cost free, and after the initial overhead of setting up the survey, it would take a lot less time to collect the data. It also allows us to target a wider demographic as we can share a survey with all of our Facebook friends, thus addressing people of different ages and professions.A survey also seems more likely to elicit participation as participants can fill in the survey at a time convenient to them, and we wouldn’t be asking for any personal information. Additionally, if we were to use the isurvey tool offered by soton, then that offers easy data analysis of results after the survey is completed.

Having taken all of these factors into consideration it seems like a survey is the most suitable for the questions we wish to ask, and the resources/time we have available.

References
[1]Sussman, S,. Burton, D., Dent, C.W., Stacy, A.W and Flay, B.R. Use of focus groups in developing an adolescent tobacco use cessation program: collective norm effects. J. Appl. Soc. Psychol. 1991. 
[2] Morgan, D.L and Krueger, R.A. When to use Focus Groups and Why. 1993.
[3] Kvale, S. Interviews. An Introduction to Qualitative Research Interviewing. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, 1996.
[4] Rubin, H.J and Rubin, I.S. Qualitative Interviewing: The Art of Hearing Data. Sage Publications, 2012.

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

No Comments

Application Refined Version 3.0 – Sami

Event Features

The results from our business and pleasure event analysis showed that the most common features that would be useful to both business and pleasure events were:

  • group travel
  • multiple travel organisation (aka train then taxi)
  • weather forecast information

These therefore are the main features that will be offered in the first version of our application. Future features will include:

  • local area info
  • accomodation
  • venue booking

Login Features

In the interest of breaking down the barriers between different social networks, this application will allow logging in/signing up, in multiple different ways. In the initial version of our application login will be facilitated through:

  • Login with Facebook [1]
  • Login with Google Plus [2]
  • Login with Twitter [3]
  • Sign up to our site and create an account to login with

This means that if someone has a social networking account with any of those platforms they can still login to our application without having to create a new account.

Additionally guests can be invited to events who don’t have an account by their email address, and they will receive a link to view the event at.

In the same vein as our advertising features, this social networking app is about providing a service, and is less about collecting lots of data about the users. FOAF [4] could be used to facilitate working out who knows who for each event to  make the travel planning easier, and an Address book importer [5] could be used to extract an event planners contacts to make the invite process easier.

References

[1] https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/
[2] https://developers.google.com/+/web/signin/
[3] https://dev.twitter.com/docs/auth/sign-twitter
[4] http://www.foaf-project.org/
[5] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/87408/get-contacts-from-email-account

, , , , , , , ,

No Comments