Semester 2 is finished- Dissertation workshop

Hi guys, second semester has finished! We are on Easter holidays now, then its exams and then dissertation. The year has gone way too quick! I don't want it to end =( I'm going to miss the time at university and the time spent with the friends that I made at university...well not that I won't be seeing them after University. (I used that sad baby picture because it describes how I feel. lol)

Last week we had a dissertation workshop and most of it was a waste of time. We have three choices for the dissertation, we either have to write about our own business idea, do our dissertation on a startup's idea or with a big company's project.

On Monday we went to Google campus to do our BFP presentation. We had to present the problem our business idea aims to solve, our solution,  3 important issues for our business and the 3 minimum features that will cover those issues. As well as the presentation we had to present our MVP made from Wordpress.

I must give myself some credit for doing the presentation slides lol because they look really good. Simple and sweet lol. Basically my style is no words just pictures to represent what is going to be said. I just don't like seeing too many texts on slides, it's very distracting. In fact I learnt this technique from last year finance classes. Itxaso said investors don't like seeing slides with too much texts. The slides have to be kept simple, clear and concise. Benjamin was the one who presented so credits to him for presenting so well and being able to understand my slides lol.

My colleague Bryan did an awesome job on the MVP. The demo page looked amazing, so much better than I expected. To be honest, I didn't think he was able to produce something like that, lol =p. You must be curious, go check it out here.

At the end of our presentation, Itxaso and Magdalena (our mentor) didn't have any questions for us. Not sure if that's a good or a bad thing. However, Itxaso did have a big smile on her face and said that our video is really good. Awesome! (The video is an explanatory video of iEducase which I blogged about in my previous post but I've included it at the end of this blog).

On Tuesday, Dave our lecturer invited two people in to talk about dissertation. Sorry not invite... he paid them to come in. We did some silly activities like writing down our feelings about the dissertation on post-it notes.. I only stayed for an hour because I wasn't feeling well but it was boring and waste of time anyways. Seriously, Dave wasted his money.

On Wednesday, Chris' workshop was to help us find and define our research question and areas. It was sort of helpful but I wasn't able to think of my research question.

On Thursday, we had to form study groups of 5 and discuss our research area. A few sponsor companies came in to give a short presentation of their company. I wasn't interested in any of them. This day however was useful because my path is clearer, I am thinking of doing my dissertation based on the beauty industry. Lol. Might as well do something you're passionate about, right?

Source from kweekweek.com

On Friday, we had an unconference. This took place at KweekWeek's office that's near Angel station. (KweekWeek is a startup, it suggests events to people according to their tastes and location. Something like that lol)

I don't know why we went there, the initial venue was one of the lecture theater at Uni. It would have been better at Uni as it was so cold there and we could have used the toilets freely and unlimited times without getting dirty looks. Basically, when my friend and I asked the founder of Kweek Week if we could use the toilet, she was reluctant to let us use it. She said 'no not really, but yeh go on.' She knew we were there from 1pm- 6pm. Either she was expecting all of us to be holding it in for 5 hours or she was expecting us to walk down  to the McDonald's that was 2 minutes away or to the pub that was also 2 minutes away.  At the end of the day, Dave introduced her to us as the host of the "event", she was a total different person. Nicer one that is. Lol. She had a lovely smile on the face when she spoke. You thinking what I'm thinking?

Later on we met our dissertation mentor and they were all interesting and really experienced business people. After the mentors introduced themselves, there was a mini networking session with the mentors as we get to choose the mentors. Everyone was fighting to get the best one lol.

Anyways, that is it for now. Thanks for reading and catch ya later!

Our Startup Idea, iEducase has pivoted... Again.

Hiya. I said I will update you guys on iEducase every week but I failed to do so. A lot has changed since the last post. We have pivoted again. In fact we pivoted twice in the last 3 weeks.

We first scrapped the video case study idea because 2 of our lecturer do not see it as a good idea and don't see it will create value or solve the pain point. They also said universities will hate it because its encouraging the students to be lazy. Lol!

However, we disagree as we are students ourselves and sometimes would like a shortcut to reading. We do believe it is novel, lol! Anyways so we then came up with 3 ideas and since we were in week 7 (we have 10 teaching weeks) we decided to test them at the same time.

1. Audio book for case studies
2. Make iEducase into a recruiting platform where companies will post real or made up problems for students and graduates to solve.
3. Make sketch note videos for finance lectures

The audio book idea was suggested by a classmate. To test it, I simply recorded one of the Managing High-Technology class' case study that we had to read for week 8. I read out the whole case study, took me almost an hour. Reading out loud for an hour isn't easy at all, your mouth gets dry and tired. Haha!

I then posted on TE's Facebook group ( our course's Facebook group) and asked my class mates to try it out. But not many did. I tried it out myself, and it didn't work for me at all. I kept fidgeting and kept thinking about other stuff lol. I got the same feedback from 2 classmates.

To test the 2nd idea, Benjamin phoned consultancy companies to find out what problems they have with recruiting, and their thoughts on our idea. None of them were interested. They are what you would call 'Early Majorities' because they wouldn't try it unless some other companies have tried it and have benefited from it.

The third one was suggested by Dave our lecturer, he said Alan our previous finance lecturer has been trying to animate his lectures and is working on creating e-learning materials. However, apparently he isn't doing very well with it. So suggested us speaking to him and use his materials as a starting point and possibly corporate with him.

Week 8.
We had a 3 hour meeting and scrapped all three ideas. We came down with a new idea...again... a much better idea. Well we feel more confident about anyways. It's a one stop shop platform for learning resources. It's not entirely new it's still to do with education.

What is it about?
All universities have moodle/ blackboard/ intranet to communicate with students regarding the learning resources. However, although that is the platform for student to find learning resources but most of the time the resources recommended by lecturers are on another website. So students click on the links, they  get directed to another website. So opens up a new window/ tab. Then maybe they will have to either create a new account or log in. Basically, the problem we are trying to solve is having to navigate to numerous websites to obtain learning resources can be long and time wasting and having to log in to different academic websites is annoying. The solution is linking all the learning resources to one platform which is iEducase. We've created a video for it to explain it, see below.

Week 9
We were more proactive this week. The meetings were more productive. We create a survey and distributed it to students over Facebook. We create a video using scribble book, an App that Ben used for the previous video. And of course I did the voice over, so you will hear my voice again...




For BFP class, we are required to create MVPs for the business idea; a website, mock up of a mobile prototype and a Facebook app.

We've created the website but since we have pivoted we need to modify it to make it look like a one stop platform, that's Bryan's job. I've created a mock up of the mobile prototype using Balsamiq- a software that they suggested us to use as it was created by a UCL alumni- and Ben has created the Facebook app. Scroll down for all these.


Week.10.
The results of the survey has validated some of our hypotheses. And it's great! However, up to this stage we still haven't 'got out of the building' to interview customers lol. Regarding the survey results, many have said that the process of obtaining learning resources is long and time wasting. They would also find it helpful if everything was in one place and only needs one single log in.

Mobile Prototype- just a couple of screen shots of it

Facebook App

Day at London web summit 2013

Hiya! Thanks for taking the time to read my blog. This post will be about my day volunteering at London web summit.

London Web summit is the largest tech conference in Europe and it was taking place at The Brewery on Friday 1st March.

Just a quick summary of the event programme. There were an exhibition area for all the start ups, a room for speed-dating (my lecturer Itxaso was there, she's a Venture Capitalist). Whilst all that were going on there was a startup competition where each startup has to pitch about their idea to the judges, this took place between 9am to 12pm. The winner was Flubit, an online shopping site. The CEO of Flubit, Bertie Stephens explains that their goal is to;

“provide online shoppers with a platform that will enable them to seek out the best possible price on an item they wish to purchase.”

“Right now, online shops spam consumers with deals and discounts that they guess you might want. We’re changing that by adopting a demand-led model, where we give consumers a lower offer for a product we know they want to buy,” 

 Between 3pm and 4:30pm there were tech talks, some kind of workshop. In the main stage, there interviews with with various CEOs and founders, speakers included; Mike Lynch (founder of Invoke Capital), Joanna Shield (CEO of Tech City Investment Organisation), Matt Mullenweg (Founder of Automatic), Shakil Khan (Head of Special Projects of Spotify), Jeff Lawson (Founder and CEO of Twilio), Danae Ringleman (Co-founder of Indiegogo) and many more. (Sorry the list is too long to write. Lol!)

Most volunteers had to arrive at 7am but I arrived at 8am. ^.^"
Every volunteer were assigned to different roles and I was assigned to work at the foyer, handing out brochures and greeting the guests. Fun I know.... But we had regular breaks where we could wander around   to network, watch the competition and talks.

The Reception

My wristband

Pauline and I

There was a robot there that everyone were obsessed with. It was a bit cheesy to be honest lol.

Interviews with the CEOs and founders in the main stage

Startup Competition, Kreditech one of the finalist

A caricature of me!!

During my break I walked around the exhibition area and saw a lady drawing caricatures of people for FREE.  Here's mine, took about 10 minutes. I don't really like it. I know I'm goofy but she exaggerated that lol!

Business Feasibility Planning- Web app session 2

Hi everyone, this post is written especially for my TE class. Its just notes and step by step guide of the 2nd session of developing a web app. Btw, some parts might be wrong lol. Sorry I missed little bits and pieces while I was typing.

Before you start, make sure you have registered as a Facebook app developer

How to get your friends details

1. open jsbin.com
2. go to http://developers.facebook.com
3a. click on apps---> click on '+ create new app' on top right
3b. a box will pop up, give your app a name
4. leave the other field and tick box blank
5.click continue
6. A page with a form will appear, on app domain field, put jsbin.com
7. select website with facebook login
8. fill in the site url: http://jsbin.com
9. click save changes
10. leave this facebook page on the side and open a new tab/ window and open another developer Facebook page
11. search for javascript SDK--> should be the first one of the results,click on it.
12. on the javascript SDK page, scroll down to Loading and Installization
13. copy those codes in the box

14. go to JSBIN page, (to keep your existing things but want to use the same codes, go to (top left) jsbin-->CLONE)

or

14. New page and paste those codes you copied from Facebook into body tag.
14b. if you're starting fresh, don't forget to go to Add library ---> Jquery latest. Otherwise the codes won'twork
15. within those codes, look for APP ID, replace it with your APP ID. You can find your app id on the Facebook developer app page you was working on earlier

To add button, input the following code
<button class='login'>
login
</button>

open up JavaScript panel-if you've cloned or have some code in the JavaScript part, delete everything in that section.

adding /* and */ in front and after a set of code, will tell the JavaScript not to run the code, it will be just a comment. for example.

/* loop 
for (var i=1; i<=100; i++) */

Next Step- adding behaviour to your buttons

1. open new tab and go to freeformers.com/snippets
2. scroll down and click on Adding Interactivity, you will find a set of codes. copy those codes
3. paste to JSBIN's javascript panel

Should look something like below;

// CLICK FUNCTION



$('.login').click(function(){

   //stuff to happen after click goes here. E.g.

alert('hello');

console.log('hi');

 }); //click

 // END CLICK FUNCTION

change $('.login') to what you called your button, for example if you called it submit, change login to submit.
to run the button, click run with JS at the top right and then click on the button you created

if it doesn't work, and maybe because you started from scratch, go to 'add library' ---> jQuery latest

try again, click run with JSBIN, click on your button.

If you're lost or page is a mess at this point, go to the following link:
http://jsbin.com/obediw/1/editand click clone
This is Josh's (freeformer guy) page that he is working on with us

console.log('hi'); 
this is to test your codes are working instead of always having things popping up.

click on console tab at the top of the page and then click your put. 'Hi' should appear on the console panel, if not delete the alert code.

Next step- Facebook login
1. back to freeformers page, scroll down to Facebook Login, copy those codes
2. delete console log

// FACEBOOK LOGIN

FB.login(function(response) {



// stuff you want to happen after login goes here

console.log(response);



},{scope: 'publish_actions'}); //FB.login



// END - FACEBOOK LOGIN

3. paste the codes between the curly brackets after .click(function(){ from the previous codes
4. test it by running it
5. a new page should appear asking you to login
6. click on Login to my facebook
7. a set of codes should appear in the console panel

Next Step- getting your Facebook Data

1. back to freeformers.com/snippet
2. scroll down to Using facebook Data
3. copy the codes

// GETTING FACEBOOK DATA



FB.api('/me', function(response) {



// stuff you want to happen after getting data goes here

alert(response.name);

console.log(response);



}); //FB.api



// END - FACEBOOK DATA

4. paste it after the curly brackets after fb.login(function(response){ codes from 'Facebook login'
.5. Test it by running it and your name should appear
6. if you have your console open you will see a bunch of codes, those are information about yourself.
7. If your console is closed open it and rerun.

Next Step- To get your friends data
1. where is says FB.api('/me, function(response) replace it with FB.api('/me/friends',function(response)

OR
2. go to freeformers.com/snippet
3. scroll down get Facebook data, its the second box. Copy those codes

// GETTING FACEBOOK DATA



FB.api('/me/friends', function(response) {



//stuff you want to happen after getting data goes here

console.log(response);

alert(response.data[0].name);



}); //FB.api



// END - GETTING FACEBOOK DATA

4. Paste it in the same place of html panel

alert(response.data[0].name);
where it says .name you can change it to .ID, .Hometown, etc

**For backup, click on JSBIN---> create milestone**

To get photos of your first six friends
1. After //stuff you want to happen after getting data goes here
2. add for (var i=0; i <= 5; i++){console.log(response.data[1].name);$('.FacebookPhotos').append("<img src='http://graph.facebook.com/"+response.data[i].id+"/picture?type=large'/>");}

or just

$('.FacebookPhotos').append("<img src='http://graph.facebook.com/"+response.data[i].id+"/picture?type=large'/>");



for (var i=0; i <= 5; i++){console.log(response.data[1].name);$('.FacebookPhotos').append("<img src='http://graph.facebook.com/"+response.data[i].id+"/picture?width=125&height=125'/><p>"+response.data[i].name+"</p>");}    

this will give your friends'name under their photos.

("<div class='column'><img src='http://graph.facebook.com/"+response.data[i].id+"/picture?width=125&height=125'/><p>"+response.data[i].name+"</p>");}  

The div class will align those pictures in columns

To style the border of the photos
1. Go to CSS and add the following:


.column{
   float: left;
}

.facebookPhotos{

  width:800px;
  margin:0 auto;
  
}

***Add <img class='img-circle' before src to make the images in round shapes. see below ***

$('.FacebookPhotos').append("<div class='column'><img class='img-circle'  src='http://graph.facebook.com/"+response.data[i].id+"/picture?width=125&height=125'/><p>"+response.data[i].name+"</p>");}  

Re run it. If it doesn't work, go to Add Library, boost strap Latest


for (var i=0; i <= 10; i++)

the 0 will show your first friend who joined your facebook
the 10 will show the additional 10 friends, so in total 11.
If you change 0 to 5 it will start showing the 5th friends of yours.