Episode 6 : Pitch

External companies are pouring in to pitch their ideas to levarage on the facebook network. Even the NDP organizing team has expressed interest. It's undebatable that facebook's influence in everyone's way of life still remains strong. Advertisements ... Games ... Publicity ... facebook has a solution for all, thanks to the flexibility of its applications interface.

It particularly amuses me that I (or any of my coursemates for that matter) could have been the one who created facebook 1.0. I may be wrong, but the early version of facebook doesn't seem too technically complex to implement. Who could have predicted that it'll grow into such a giant 2 years down the road? On top of that, there's already friendster in the market. Infused with a little user-generated-content, however, facebook easily overtook friendster. Of course, friendster's infamous server lags helped a bit too.

During my day-dreaming sessions ... I often make wild guesses to myself on the next big platform to emerge. What kind of idea will it be? Most importantly ... who's idea will it be? Do i stand a chance at all?

God knows, we'll just have to see as we go. Meanwhile, the least that we can do is to keep our faith strong.

Truely, no sky's too high, if you soar with your own wings.

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My 2 cents on what I feel about Friday's pitching party.

...

Simply, it has been great.



No kidding. I know that that's the default answer for anything prepared by Prof Ben, but it really really has been a most enjoyable and enlightening session. Like most of my fellow students, I believe, I have already expected it to be quite an eye opener even before coming. I didn't expect, however, for the idea-sharing and interaction spirit to stretch to such a point of excitment and amazement (to me, at least).

I am very very impressed by the Pixie chip introduced by the Human Networks Labs. In fact, this is precisely the idea suggestion which I have suggested to Prof Ben last year, when I submitted my portfolio and documents required for my application to CS3216. In social networking sites such as friendster and facebook, the dimension of space and distance is negated. I can reach out to friends and strangers regardless of where they are presently. However, I have a personal vision of re-kindling the inter-human interactivity in the real world, without losing too much of the cross-boundary benefits derived from facebook. Therefore, I was proposing an application, much like a simple IRC chatroom, but that groups people based on their present physical location. Think about it, you can talk to that nice cute girl sitting on the front row of the LT which you are presently in. You don't have to know her, its cool to just hook up a friendly chat about random things. Especially since both individuals are presently connected thru the same boring lecture session, they might have a common topic to yakk about. Going by the same logic, I can use this app to talk to my neighbours (which most ppl don't usually do these days ... sadly) at night, or even arrange a supper session with people living near me. The most promising technology that I can thought of to power this vision is BlueTooth. I see a lot of potential in this. If this is to be embedded into a games interface, the gameplay will be totally awesome! Elven Blood in real life! I think Varsity Chronicles will be pretty cool with this gadget too! Imagine your mobile device beeping if a member of a rival faculty physically enters your territory and closes in to your perimeter (perhaps for lunch ... etc). You can gather up your party and fireblast the intruder, who in turn may gather her Jie Meis nearby and retaliate.

Now that's what I call true human interaction.

Also, it has been great to know Luther, of Lut! Games Studio. I played a number of his games, and thoroughly enjoyed it. If you have time, do try out the fright series game "Darkness" by him. I like to work on games, as a hobby and maybe even as a part-time job. As such, its great to know a local developer who is producing games of such quality. On top of it, he's an alumni of the same class I'm in right now. I sincerely hope that the Coolies, the developers of Captain Cook, will have a shot to rise to his level of achievement.

Lastly ... perhaps the biggest eye opener pitched in my direction, is the copied version of FarmWars onto the Xiao Nei platform. The developers are actually earning 12k per week !!! Based on a copied idea! At first, I thought that this will be a good problem to have, since only famed ideas are copied. Then again, putting myself in the original developer's shoes, I'd be damned to know that someone else is leeching in big bucks based on my idea. It could have been me! Worse still, there's probably nothing I can do to topple them. Thanks Wangsha and Boa for the great presentation ...

I'd be even more damned if the same happens to Captain Cook.