Posts Tagged social networking

Links to related news items in the tech media: Events…Everywhere! – Jokha & Sami

Posted by Jokha Al Adi in Links to Related News Items in the Tech Media on March 2, 2014

This post looks at related news items to our social networking application.

The Travel Industry is Growing [1]
It has been reported that the global travel industry is set to grow at a sustained rate throughout the next decade. Our social networking application is focused on bringing people together, and enabling them to travel to their events together. If this industry is growing, therefore implying that more and more people are travelling around the world, then our application would be appealing to an ever growing market of travellers.

Event Management Applications are proving successful [2]
Eventbrite is an event management application that allows you to create events, promote them, and sell tickets for them, and it has proven to be very successful. “In 2013 alone, Eventbrite processed nearly 60 million tickets in 187 countries, totalling more than $1 billion in gross ticket sales.” Obviously our social networking application does differ from this (as described in our previous post) in that it is about organising the event and organising the travel, instead of selling tickets for the event. However, it does show that there is clearly a market for event based applications, and that even though there are social networks that cater to event management very well such as Facebook, there is scope to approach this organisation from different angles, like Eventbrite have, and like we intend to do.

Twitter and Facebook and Events [3]
Twitter and Facebook offer some useful event organisation features, such as being able to track RSVP numbers (Facebook) and Tweeting about your event to attract interest (Twitter). Our social networking application will allow you to track number of attendees to your event, and in addition people will be able to sign into our application using their Facebook and Twitter accounts. Therefore there is the potential to link these accounts more comprehensively with the events such that people could tweet about them.

Event Organisation is Trending [4,5]
Scheduling and arranging various kinds of events are one of the the most apparent trends these days. It is underlined by IT vendors who are evaluating this trend and deploying some ideas about events. Microsoft is establishing Microsoft Public Safety & Justice Event Series which is about creating events which serve to solve problems related to crimes and safety.

Conclusion
These news stories illustrate that there is a market for both event and travel based applications, and also illustrate the importance of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter in making these events a success. Our social networking application aims to provide both event planning and travel organisation services, in addition to allowing people to sign in from multiple social networking accounts, and invite people to their events who don’t have any social networking accounts. This also means that people can use our application without having to add yet another social networking account/profile to their web presence, which they may not want to do.

References
[1] http://www.travelweekly.co.uk/Articles/2014/04/02/47522/global-travel-industry-set-for-period-of-sustained-growth-says.html
[2] http://www.eventindustrynews.co.uk/2014/04/01/eventbrite-enables-people-world-plan-promote-sell-event/
[3] http://www.business2community.com/social-media/chicken-waffles-social-media-event-marketing-0826350#!Cw8A9
[4] http://www.microsoft.com/government/psj-events/Pages/about.aspx
[5] http://www.microsoft.com/government/ww/safety-defense/blog/Pages/post.aspx?postID=398&aID=22

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Related Academic Work – Sami

Posted by Samantha Kanza in Related Academic Work on March 2, 2014

There is a lot of academic work related to these topics:

FOAF – Friend of a Friend [1]
FOAF is the semantic web ontology that describes ‘who knows who’.
This could potentially be useful in our project as we are inviting people from various social networks, and also no social networks. FOAF could be used in the following ways:

  • Inviting people by URI
  • Like facebook events list out all of your friends as potential ‘invitees’, FOAF could be used to also list out the URI’s of people the event coordinator knows.
  • When it comes to the intelligent travel suggestions; FOAF could be used to align people who know each other into taxi/train groups.
  • Link together who knows who from different social networks.

Distributed Semantic Social Networks [2]
Our idea is not the first to address the issue of breaching the divide between different social networks. In 2011 Android created a mobile application to try and connect people from different social networks [2]. The Android Semantic Web Core Library and WebID content provider for Android were created to work in harmony to produce a distributed semantic social network for android mobile users. Building upon the FOAF suggestions from above, these libraries did indeed use FOAF to link together participants. It also used WebID to link together users from a number of different social networking applications. Users could use their WebID account to link together their skype, google plus accounts to a single WebID thus making a single login that contained unified information about an individual. This shows that there is clearly a need to unify this information; and whilst our application isn’t centered around this point, it is aiming to unite people across the borders of different social networks (and unlike existing applications) also looks to include people who aren’t part of a social network.

Semantic Web Services [3]
McIlraith, Cao Son, and Zeng float the idea of Automated Semantic Web Services for travel in their paper ‘Semantic Web Services’ where users could ask for things such as “Make the travel arrangements for my conference”. This shows that people have considered using the Semantic Web to create intelligent services such as sorting out travel arrangements. However, this doesn’t have the inclusive features of our idea as it doesn’t facilitate a group of people all trying to get to the same place from different start points.

Similar Systems
There are some systems out there for both intelligent travel planning and event planning:

  1. Intelligent Travel Planning (ITP) [4]  – A travel planner which allows the user to set both their travel and accommodation preferences and the system will for example organise their travel from the UK to Bermuda by their preferred method (e.g Flights/Taxis) and book them a hotel. However it does not seem to be linked to specific events, and like all of the other systems is lacking the facilities to do this for a group.
  2. Location Based Event Planner [5] – This made use of the ability to track other peoples phones using GPS if permitted to schedule events in two different ways: firstly specific events, and secondly spontaneous events based around users proximity to each other. This is a pretty neat application and does look to break down boundaries of not having to belong to a specific social networking group to belong.

Conclusion
There has been academic work done around different elements of our system: distributed social networks and an intelligent travel organiser. However, so far I have yet to find a system that does both in the same way that we plan to. Therefore it seems like hopefully we have stumbled upon a unique idea; or at least one that isn’t obviously too similar to anything else.

References
[1] http://www.foaf-project.org/.
[2] S. Tramp, P. Frischmuth, N. Arndt, T. Ermilov, and S. Auer. Weaving a Distributed, Semantic Social Net- work for Mobile Users. In 8th Extended Semantic Web Conference on the Semantic Web: Research and Applica- tions, volume Part I, pages 200–214, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2011. ESWC’11, Spinger-Verlag.
[3] Sheila A McIlraith, Tran Cao Son, and Honglei Zeng. Semantic web services. IEEE intelligent systems, 16(2):46–53, 2001.
[4]  Zachary Pousman, Giovanni Iachello, Rachel Fithian, Jehan Moghazy, and John Stasko. Design iterations for a location-aware event planner. Personal and Ubiquitous Com- puting, 8(2):117–125, 2004.
[5]  David Camacho, Daniel Borrajo, and Jose M Molina. Intelligent travel planning: a mul- tiagent planning system to solve web problems in the e-tourism domain. Autonomous agents and multi-agent systems, 4(4):387–392, 2001.

 

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Analysis of Existing Tools – Part 2 – Sami

Posted by Samantha Kanza in Analysis of Existing Similar Tools on March 2, 2014

This post is also about looking at existing tools that have similarities to our application. AppAppeal made a list of the top 34 free event planning application. This post will categorise these types of application and compare them to our social networking application to illustrate how they differ.

Group Event Organisation 

These applications are centered around organising events for specific groups. However, it doesn’t organise the transport element, and nor does it allow inclusion of people not on a social network.

Event Planning

These applications offer full event planning services, from creating websites for your events, helping with locations and vendors, and even organising invitations to the events. Kuandoo is by far the most similar application on this entire list to our social networking application, as it actually offers some form of transportation management by allowing people to organise car pools for the event. It also allows you to connect via Facebook. However, it is still lacking some of the features of our application that will allow you to be invited to an event even if you aren’t on a social network. and our intelligent travel algorithm will organise the best solutions for people’s travel preferences including trains, busses, taxis, etc, as opposed to just car pooling.

Invitation Design

These applications are designed to aid people with their invitations to events. They provide invitation templates and illustrations for people to use, and organise delivering and managing the invitations as well. Our social networking application organises the delivering of the invite, but purely as a plan text invitation. However this is because the main focus of our social networking application is to bring people together through the events as opposed to focusing on the inviting side.

Event Listing & Ticketing

These applications are predominantly focused on selling tickets to events. Our social networking application is focused on the social aspect of events where people create events for either their friends or colleagues, or people they have some form of connection to.

Event Location

These applications look at finding events for people to join in a specific location, and or matching a specific type of event. This is aimed at someone who is looking to go to events, where as our social networking application is focused on people who want to organise events.

Event Calendar

These applications provide calendars to enable people to see which events they and others are going to. Our social networking application will have a calendar of events, but they will be personalised to the user as opposed to letting everyone see everyone else’s events.

Event Scheduling

These applications are about enabling people to group together to jointly choose the best date for an event. This is something that our application does not include, and could be an interesting future consideration.

Social Network

These are social networking applications centered around events, Fyesta shares what you are doing with your friends, and Erly maps people based on the events/locations they go to. This shows that others are trying to make social networking applications out of events, neither of these ideas are that similar to our social networking application as ours enables creation of events and organises their travel, therefore it still has a unique edge to it even if there are other social networks created around events.

Seating Chart Manager

These applications are specifically focused on organising seating charts for events. This is not similar to our social networking application at all.

Other

These applications are also equally different to our social networking application as Zokos focuses on organising and paying for dinner parties before they occur, and Giveamonkey is an online gift listing site.

Conclusion
These event based applications vary greatly in their similarities to our social networking application. Several types of these applications such as the Social Network, Event Calendar, Event Planner and Group Event Organisation share similar features and ideas to our application, but overall none of them match what we aim to do. Even Kuandoo which is by far the most similar application differs from our social networking application in several ways, and offers less transportation based features than we intend to. Having studied 34 different event based applications, in addition to the previous post regarding similar tools, we have yet to come across an application that is really similar to ours and offers the same services. Therefore we still have a unique edge .

References
[1] http://www.appappeal.com/apps/event-planning

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Analysis of existing similar tools Part 1 – Why our idea has a unique perspective! – Someah & Sami

Posted by sssa1e13 in Analysis of Existing Similar Tools on March 2, 2014

In the past, making an event was a lengthy process; even if you only intended to invite your close friends. It involved making numerous phone calls, or sending group emails, or even posting individual invitation cards. Our idea, is to try and solve that issue by creating a social space for managing events; whereby events from different social networking events can be linked, and anyone, irrespective of whether they belong to a social network (or not!) can be invited.

The main services our social networking application provide are:

  • creating events
  • organising and coordinating travel to provide an intelligent travel organiser.
  • inviting friends to events (irrespective of whether they are on a social network or not

Below are some tools that provide similar services:

Event Websites

Facebook [1]
Facebook have made it very simple to create an event listing. You can create ‘Facebook Events’ and invite anyone on your friends list. However the downside to this is that you cannot invite people who aren’t on your Facebook friend list!
Our advantage: using our social networking application you can invite anyone irrespective of whether they are signed up to our network. 

Eventbrite [2]
Eventbrite is a site that is purely dedicated to organising events and even allows you to promote your event and organise tickets for it; and this don’t necessarily require you to have a social networking account to join these events.
Our advantage: our social networking application doesn’t just organise the event, it organises the travel too.

Travel Websites

TFL & National Rail & The Trainline [3,4,5]
These sites offer a ‘plan your journey’ service; whereby the user can input their start location, destination, and desired time of arrival/departure. They even offer a service where they will give you multiple options of transport (e.g tube/train/bus). It also allows you to purchase tickets on the site, in addition to giving you pricing information.
Our advantage: These services are for the individual, whereas our social space is for everyone; and only includes certain public transport options. Our users will input their start destination and preferred method of travel e.g Southampton, and Train. Our system will then suggest to all the ‘train-goers’ from Southampton that they get the same train together, and illustrate what group sharing options are available such as group train tickets. Similarly, for a local event several people who all opted to travel by taxi and live in the same postcode, would get the suggestion that they shared a taxi together.

Rome 2 Rio [6]
This sites enables you to plan a journey from anywhere in the world, and will provide you with the multiple coordinated travel resources that you need.
Our advantage: whilst this site seems similar to our social networking application by way of it’s travel organisation, it is missing the social networking element of our application. Our application provides a travel organisation service for groups of people all wanting to attend the same event even if they don’t necessarily know each other. 

Conclusion
There is a huge market for event based websites (based on the amount that already exist, and the popularity of Facebook events) and our idea will allow everyone to get involved; as well as providing them with easy cost effective travel solutions. Our idea clearly has a unique perspective as whilst there are websites and applications that are similar to certain parts of our social networking application, none of them combine social networking, with travel organisation.

References
[1] https://www.facebook.com/events/list
[2] https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/
[3] http://www.tfl.gov.uk/
[4] http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/
[5] http://www.thetrainline.com/
[6] http://www.rome2rio.com/

 

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A new intelligent way of managing events – Sami

Posted by Samantha Kanza in Welcome and Project Brief on February 21, 2014

Our idea for a social networking application is centered around events, it has two main aims:

1. To bring people together from all different (and in some cases no) social networks.
2. To make organising and planning events easier (specifically the travel element).

Why?
We don’t want to create yet another social networking site that necessitates another set of user accounts; more we want to build and improve upon what we already have.

Our idea is to create a social space for managing events; whereby events from different social networking events can be linked, and anyone (irrespective of whether they belong to a social network, or which one they belong to) can be invited.

All attendees of the event will specify where they are travelling from and their preferred transport options. Our application will then collate sensible travel options together for different groups. For example, if several people from Portswood, Southampton were attending an event in the town centre and they all selected ‘Taxi’ as a transport option; our application would suggest that they all shared a taxi together to reduce costs.

Type of Application
This application will be created with a view to commercialise it.

Commercialisation Potential
This application could be commercialised initially by the use of advertising (e.g specific taxi companies would pay to advertise with us, and we would promote them as the taxi company to call for that transport option). Once the application is more established and has begun to grow, additional options such as booking group train tickets, coaches, even flights could be done through this application with a certain fee going to us as the facilitators of this transaction.

Future Potential 
There is great scope for future development of this idea, as a simple version with minimal transport options intended for local areas could be created initially; with the potential to expand out into international travel with all sorts of travel options, even potentially multiple combinations of travel such as taxi –> plane –> taxi.

 

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