Group 7 : OrientExpress Blog

Background
With the popularity of social networks nowadays, people’s social information becomes rich and wonderful. However, much information comes from the people whom we don’t really communicate with and don’t care about. The problem seems to be more obvious and worse if the number of friends we have on social networks becomes bigger. In fact, our real social lives are much different from the current social networks like Facebook or Twitter. People we know and actually interact with most in real life are in our mobile contacts. It is meaningful for people to pay more attention on the social networks information of our mobile contacts.

Project Introduction
Our group’s project is a social network application on mobile phone called RankFirst. RankFirst integrates user’s contacts on mobile phone and information on social networks effectively. The core idea of RankFirst is to rank user’s social networks information according to the order of the relationship credits between the user and the user’s contacts. The credits are calculated based on the statistics of mobile phone’s social activities like sending messages, making phone calls, video calls and real meetings. Thus a relationship with higher credits gets higher social networks information priority.

Project’s Benefits
In this way, RankFirst helps user find the closest friends on contacts and let user get social networks information of those closest friends more efficiently. That is what the RankFirst’s slogan says “Make you and your closest friends closer”.

Demanded Investment
The number of demanded investment is £12 million, which is expected to be spent on stages of product design and development, product maintenance and upgrades, marketing, wages and benefits.

Business Model
Our choice of RankFirst’s business model is advertisement model. Based on the big user base of mobile contacts and social networks, the advertisement model is believed to be an efficient approach to make revenue from RankFirst.

Strategic Target
Our strategic target is to extend the total number of RankFirst’s users to 30 million on different mobile phone operation systems like Android and iOS by 2014.