3rd Lecture?

This is our 3rd lecture?
Hmm....Not really a lecture. Today, rather than listening to speakers, we had to present our chosen Facebook application and evaluate them.
Also, this my 1st ever presentation in NUS...cool......really was looking forward to today

Our group presented Graffiti, which was a very simple yet it is capable of many things.
Thanks Janus, Wenhan and Wang Sha....my team mates...we all contributed quite a lot to the presentation.
I was in charge of the New apps section, thought of an idea and decided to present it in picture form....haha...hope everyone enjoyed it
I was quite nervous during the presentation,
Luckily I didn't really freezed-up during the presentation.
Don’t know if you guys find me nervous while presenting?
We also get to see our course mate present, this is kind of interesting to see what cool presentation ideas can come from my friends here and also learn from them.

The Application that I will choose to critique is Geochallenge.
Why? It's because this is one of the facebook app that I am most familiar with and interested. It is the one which my friends had been crazy playing it for a period of time. Some of my friends even played during lecture......

The few main pts the presenting team have said:
1. It is an addictive game.
2. It has quite a consistent graphic design.
3. This is also an educational game.

1. It is an addictive game.

As an addictive game, it will attract many people to keep on playing this game.
People will want to come back to play this game rather than just a "one night stand" game.
The leader board is also a very crucial element for this game, users will want to outbid their friends ranking and spend more time playing.

2. It has quite a consistent graphic design.

Graphics are also one of the crucial things in a game application.
For some people, graphics is something very important for them.
But for most, though there won't be demanding for very high-end graphics for FB apps,
A nicely done interface would definitely enhance the users experience.
The layout of the game is also very organized and also even has links to other Playfish games to promote other games.
All the Playfish games design and layout are very similar in style, it actually gives you a sense of familiarity. When you go to other games, you won’t feel that it is something foreign.

3. This is also an educational game.

Being sort of educational game itself has a very high market potential.
If marketed well, it could hit into preschool or primary schools around the world as an innovative way to teach kids to memorize these geographical names. Kids will enjoy this as a game and not as a chore to memorize all these names.
It can also slowly include other educational games tailored for kids to play and learn.
Eventually, they might even take over the market.

What I would also like to mention here is Playfish success to really create many good games.
Most of it games are those that you can play alone and use the score to challenge your friends scores.
The concept is also quite good as it doesn’t need real time connection with the server to play the games which might cause bigger load. The users only need to download the flash once. The rest of the time the users will only need to upload/download scores and friends details etc.
The only bad thing about this is that the initial download of the flash takes quite a long time, people who have no patient might not wait.

Most of the game are all pretty simple to play, very suitable for Facebook platform which users don't really want to use too much brains to play.
Geochallenge, Word Challenge, Who Has The Biggest Brain?
Main game concept of these games are only testing users
Reaction time and different type of knowledge each.
Even if a person is extremely bad at geography, he/she can choose from one of the other games which are similar to play.

About the presentation, the one that I love most is the presentation on Causes.
This team utilize their own teammate strength and manage to hide all their weakness well.
The "faceTV" was really very innovative. Really enjoyed it.
What I love most is the part when Zhao Cong act as a professor. Besides his face looks young, the accent and all the other things really portraits a professors.
This is very good, Zhao Cong manage to utilize his uniqueness to an advantage.
As a first year, I really got a first look at NUS student presentation skills. There are really quite a few good presenters in this module. Like Dr. Ben said, knowing how to sell is also important. Hopefully, I get to learn and polish my presentation skills in this module.

* edited
I almost forgot to post these.
One of the most important thing learnt through this seminar is evaluating others app.
Rather than reinventing the wheel, we can learn what is already there that is good.
Like Dr. Ben said, it's ok to copy a little bit.
By evaluating other app's ideas, business models, programming methods, logic flow, commercial potential etc.
We can learn a lot when applying it to our own apps.
Analogous to programming, we can use certain prebuilt API rather than always writing new codes for programs.
There is already lot's of great ideas out there that we can always learn from others.
In fact, there are many apps that are similar with their predecesor, after repakaging, some manage to do very well.
The most prominent few examples are like baidu and xiaonei of China.
Baidu is basically almost the same as google, established about a year after google.
xiaonei is also almost the same as facebook, established about 22 months after facebook.
These two really shows that it is possible imitate but can still be successful if used in another place.
One of the thing that makes it success is also it's quick move to immitate the programs, they only take about 1,2 years to establish themselves after their predecensors.
If they were a little bit later, google or facebook might have already taken over the market.
Furthermore, google and facebook also made a mistake by underestimating the market of China.
If they were to predicted this and produce a chinese version, they would have got much more revenue.
Once again, this shows that anticipating the future is extremely crucial.
As this module name speaks, "Softwawre Engineering on Evolving Platform",
These world keep on evolving and technologies keep improving through time.
We have to anticipate what will happen next and know what are the possibilities in the future.
Learn from the past, and anticipate the future.