More on Moore’s Law

Alexander from Aux Arts (ESC Lille’s BDA) and I have yet to define the terms of our cooperation, but talks suggest the BDA act as a postal office, on top of any promotion it would make. Reports said he was impressed with the idea ;p

We must now determine our promotional campaign, as I have many cards in my sleeve we can use. To name some of them: I could use a story in the Canard, use the school’s Internal communication and Press departements, get help from the BDA, and eventually get some help from Primeline TV. I’ll start out by trying to write a little PR story, and get feedback on that one.

The website’s invitation system works as of now, but I wonder if it is appropriate. Anyhow, the site is being fully translated, meaning text being converted to constants, and those constants being given value during the include process of a dictionary corresponding to the language. I have yet to tailor the translation to ESC Lille, though, like replacing State by School, tell to drop off at the BDA instead of sending it out using the postal service and so forth.

Apart from all this, I have been quite silent lately because of a certain involvement in the Oneid association, but that should be more or less over with now.

Bad news, Ammar called today to say that he wouldn’t have time for developping Swophit due to his studies and job as a consultant, so he won’t be available untile January. Time to look for a replacement. I’ll start out by going to a CS school to place an ad.

Otherwise I asked him a few questions and he said it was better to have only one website with stuff on many directories like /fr /de /uk rather than use subdomains, and that language should be handled with variables as I did. I’ll install Xoops tomorrow under Swophit.com.

Remaining stuff to code now is language to French, fix missing and broken links and things should be ok for now. There is still much coding to be done though.

The music section is now complete, with both the proposals and the profile once again functional. Testing is now necessary.

I contacted the BDA, and they agreed to a rendez-vous on Monday; I’ll make a presentation then, and see what is possible.

Finally, fr.swophit.com is up and in French, I just need to install all the modules and stuff and translate everything to French, change Amazon’s locale (I’m leaving out that there’ll be many site addressing issues that might take up a lot of time)

Peerflix landed a story on Slashdot here yesterday for the announcement that they are leaving beta.

Peerflix has a tremendous head start on us, to the extent it might not even be considered a head start. They claim having already 80 000 DVDs, and their website seems perfectly complete with Disclaimers, Privacy statements, online payment systems and all. They are looking forward to move into the CDs and Games business soon too, which is some pretty bad news for us, since even if we have a better mousetrap, there still is the Network effect that might prove itself a barrier.

On the good side though is that they might be infringing on Amazon’s Terms of Use, since they only provide small links to Amazon to buy stuff, and that is clearly not their goal. We would be selling on the marketplace, which I am sure Amazon would prefer since they would earn a 15% commission.

Apart from that, Mr Swophit, how was the show ? Well the Star-based value system is taken-care of, and Direct-select is well on to be completed today: the DVD section works, search does too, I’ll just have to change some parameters and add some variables to get the other selections to work as well.

The star-based value system has been fixed, and now correct values are given to all items, be they CDs, DVDs or Games. **Edit** apparently it does not work for all mediatypes, that has to be corrected sooner rather than later.

Inventory now works for all categories, perfectly too. Only the advanced search remains, but we can add that later.

Now we must get the direct select to work, handle language translation (for both Xoops and the rest I programmed) and we can go live ! I will meet the BDA next Monday to negotiate something; meanwhile I will interview some CD and DVD buyers on their buying experience, and try to write up some sort of plot the guys at the Canard could build up from to launch a PR campaign. I’ll talk to Bernard Mendolia at the same time, he’s the communications guy for the school, so he must have some contacts or know how that could help.

Between yesterday and today, we successfully managed to parse the Amazon XML response ! This is a great leap forward as it means the Inventory capture ins’t far ahead, and the same goes for price capturing and getting reviews and comments for DVDs, CDs and Video Games. The problem came from the confusion made by the response being considered sometimes as an array, sometimes as an object.

I finally managed to reach Ammar Ibrahim from Jordan today with Skype, and was surprised how nice he was, and how good his English was; I was expecting some difficulties in communicating. Anyway, I will send him an e-mail detailing what exactly his task within Swophit would be.

His task would pretty much consist of alleviating all our programming tasks, so that not only would I be able to concentrate on the business (getting users, testers, feedback, bootstrapping initial inventory), but the code would much more likely be faster, cleaner and more secure.

There was a caveat though: he is leading many projects and works in a consultancy, so I must hope he’ll have time to devote to Swophit. I hope he understands the potential of Swophit, and will alot more of his time it us.

I tried to contact Ammar from Jordan today, as he was recommended by Tom Adelstein of the Lxer, and seems to have the skill set and age we would be looking for, but he did not respond to my e-mail nor was available on Skype.

I spent the day asking friends about their motivation and feelings about buying Original cds, and what kept them from buying more. To no surprise price is too high, but they actually buy Originals for the sake of knowing they have the “Real Thing”. They also mentioned the superior quality of Originals, and without discussing the truth of that statement, that clearly means we must reinforce that perception. We thought about mentionning “Quality Originals” at a low price.

One caveat though is that the lack of casing drew most of them back. We should try to work this issue out, either by stating they keep their own and just switch, or by insisting on the reduced bulk it involves, or selling or sending out one for every whatever they get (whinch could be a premium service).

I also received from my father today a book on business which supposedly changes one’s view of it, plus ! the way cool new iPod Nano, which is the size of two fingers, and only half the depth ! and comes with a color screen. The best part is that there is written behind it my name and Swophit.com

Finally we thought about prompting users to put some of their stuff back in the system, to encourage a Netflix behaviour, or do it automatically after a while, with a flagging of sorts, that they might have to confirm. That would work out to a sort of Tellico.

After much consideration, the possibility of taking a cesure in ESC Lille would have been a waste between the second and third year, given the opportunity of furthering the development of Swophit. I therefore chose to take it this year, instead of starting my second school year, so that I might have more time available then just the evenings.

So far I have more or less devised a game plan for this year:
I wrote comments all over my work to remember what I did last summer yesterday, and started debugging the change of server from xml.amazon.com to webservices.amazon.com. I’ll first get the DVD inventory to work, then get the CD and Video game inventories to work. I’ll then move to direct select, proposals and profile sections for all categories.

Only then will I create the French dictionary, along with a French Xoops site on fr.swophit.com. Then I’ll change the amazon locale to that of xoops’ language, in other words to the French locale. After all that, we should be operational.

In the mean time, I’ll redo the presentation slides and make them available online so I can present them to my advising professors, which I hope will be Mr Lutzen and Mr Prabhakar. I’ll then demo the site to the BDA, give them a business presentation, and make a deal with them, giving them all revenue, most likely under the condition they promote it. I’ll probably be handling everything from their bureau so I may get some direct feedback.

I’ll talk to the guy’s from Le Canard (school’s student newspaper) and try to make a first story. I’ll then see the school’s administration to see if some more news stories could be arranged, and what they are capable of, what contacts they have.

Meanwhile, I’ll see what goes wrong, correct and maintain the website according to whatever feedback I receive. If everything seems to go ok, I’ll contact another school, likely the EDHEC or IESEG (business schools would tend to have more buyers less pirates) and make a similar deal.

I’ll also ask users what joy they experience when buying a CD, DVD or Game. I have a few ideas.
1/ They excitement of going back home with something they can do something with
2/ The new / present factor
3/ The Artwork / display-on-shelf factor (that sometimes leads pirates to buy something, to have the artwork / manual

I plan on asking friends Charles, Stephanie and Alexandre who I know buy CDs, Alexis and Damien who buy DVDs, and many other who buy Video games.

Noretude, the Junior Entreprise of ESC Lille, might be able to help me out somehow.

My teacher Sandra Walker could give me good advice in trying to convince others to help out, and in how to do phoning.