Application Critique - Grab

Congratulation to Group 3 for the successfully presentation. The ideas elaborated were quite inspiring. 

In my opinion, the best part of the presentation came with the question: how will Grab compete with Uber in Southeast Asia? The answer was localisation. For example, GrabBike at Indonesia offers a new solution to the pain caused by Jakarta's terrible traffic jam. It reminds me of how KFC out-powered McDonalds in China by selling chicken rice during lunch hours. It is great that Grab make use of the resources it already acquired to server different needs. Such action is likely to bring customers for all services it provided.

As a user of Grab myself, I cannot agree more that Grab should provide more information to users and update data at real time. Otherwise, users will keep complaining about information asymmetry deals which may leads to trust issues. 

On the other hand, I am afraid that involving bidding into such business model is a risky move. It is true that during peak hours there will be mismatch between demand and supply in certain areas and involving bidding is likely to increase the amount of supply. But considering that more cars means more traffic jam and more traffic jam means longer waiting time. Users may end up paying extra money without saving much time. Besides, with the large amount of demand daily, taxi is more like a kind of necessity good. It is unfair to have customers bidding on necessity good.

The idea of GrabHitch Deals - Sharing 1-for-1 Deals was very interesting (e.g. grab a strange to share the Starbuck 1-for-1 offer). The idea proves the value of information. But I am wondering what kind of commercial potential does the service have for Grab. Please leave comments if you have any ideas =)

Many thanks to Group 3 for uncovering the valuable ideas for us.

What is good and bad about Discord and possible improvement

After reading tons of reviews about Discord on blogs and Reddit, I get a further insight on what is good and bad about Discord and what functionalities are expected.

Let's start with the advantages. I believe a very important reason that Discord is getting more and more popular is that it is 100% free. Its competitor, TeamSpeak for example, charges $30 per year for a server with 32 slots while Discord is free with no limit on how many channels a user can create. Why pay for something when you can get it free? Besides, Discord is designed for use while gaming which means that it has minimal impact on users' CPU. The game's performance won't be affected in the slightest. Maybe it's time to ditch CPU hogs like Skype? Moreover, unlike apps like IRC, Discord enables different user permissions within an easy-to-use UI. TeamSpeak also supports permissions setting but it requires a package that is ridiculously complicated.

Then what is ugly about the app at current stage? First of all, no user profile. Though Discord doesn't actually require users to login before joining the chat but a user profile is really necessary for logged-in users because I do not want to encounter situation where I find myself texting the wrong Jack. Second, Discord doesn't support search function for text chat. Users have been complained about it for more than a year but it seems to be a very complex problem to fix according to their technical team.

What can be improved then? Of cause, starting from fixing the problems mentioned above. Other than that, some users asked for video chats because they want to play online card games while seeing each other's faces. Screen sharing is also quite nice to have because gamers always want to learn all the fancy moves from each other to improve their skills and screen sharing will server their need.

A glance on Discord

To be honest I am a bid sad that Pokemon GO was not assigned to my team for Assignment 2. But considering that Discord is something closely related to a gamer like me, I am still quite happy about the topic. The following are a few things I observed when I first visited its official website and downloaded the app.

First of all, Discord has a nice cute logo which like a gamepad and a pig nose. It leaves me a good impression. Besides, its registration process seems to be simple. I did not encounter any difficulty in choosing a username. But I am not sure if  it is just by luck nobody had chosen the name or Discord allows duplicated username. I am also unsure about what will happen if there are duplicated names. I need some more testing to figure it out.

A great thing about Discord is that it provides a feedback forum on its official website. Garena should have something similar to collect complains about unstable server and suggestions on improvement of its voice chat app TalkTalk (to be fair, TalkTalk had improved remarkably in the past 4 months). This feedback forum of Discord will serve as a great source for the "What is bad / ugly about the application" and "Suggest improvements" parts of our presentation.

So far I hasn't observer the key feature that makes Discord better than other voice and text chat applications. I guess today after lecture I should play game with my friends purely to test the functions of Discord and gain some first hand user experience =)

The origin of NUS-PARTIME

For the Facebook assignment, my team members are Yanhao, Hanming and Zhuohan. To be honest we didn't form a team of 4 Chinese students purposely. It was just so happened that 4 Pokemon fans sat together in the first lecture so why not just form a team to catch Pokemon create cool apps together?

As for the core feature of our app, we proposed around 10 ideas through brainstorming. For example, selling unused SOC printing quota to students of other faculties, taking tutorial attendance with mobile locations, IVLE chit chat group that was open to student ONLY and, of cause, dating app. But some of the ideas had no much relation to Facebook or to social networks, and some of them were not of piratical use. In the end we came up with this idea of creating a platform for NUS students, SOC students in particular, to find part time jobs / projects. It was a surprise for us when we found that there were no existing platform or attempts because we thought the need was real. We were all CS major and we understand that many CS students, including ourselves, were doing or were interested in doing part time jobs / projects as a way to enhance experience and skills as well as earning some money. 

After further analysis, we decided that the flow of the app should be as follow: Companies, or individuals such as professors, will post available jobs / projects onto the app and students will be able to indicate interests. Afterwards, companies and students will get in touch with each other and proceed the process or recruiting offline.

I personally think the app will be useful but there are issues concerns me as well. First of all, can the demand of SOC students to part time jobs be a fake demand? In other words, is it possible that most of students are just considering about finding a part time jobs but actually cannot do it due to problems such as time constraints. Second, how can we ensure that the companies that are recruiting can be trusted (for example, they will pay our students)? Actually I should worry about not being able to get enough companies on board first.

Concerns aside, I am actually quite looking forward to carrying out such idea because it may be able to serve the needs of my fellow schoolmates.

What I hope to learn in CS3216

It is a big surprise for me get a position in CS3216. To get ready for the course, there is one key question I need to ask myself: what I hope to learn in CS3216? I can only understand my mission and responsibility in the course after this question is clarified. The following skills are what I have in my mind so far and hopefully at the end of the semester I find myself learning even more =)

Project Management

3 assignments and 1 final project all in 1 semester. It sounds a bit crazy but that is the challenge I accepted. In order to survive, I need to enhance my project management skill to improve efficiency and reduce the number of mistakes made. Correct me if I am wrong, I think project management is a mixture of planning, teamwork, communication and decision making. It required experience and knowledge to master such skill and CS3216 will be an excellent practice because I can not only manage 4 projects of my own but also observe how other teams manage theirs to double the experience learnt.

Time Management

It is known that the workload for CS3216 is very intense. If each semester can be imagined as a long and exciting game, by taking CS3216, I believe I have set the difficulty level to super hard. But the fun is maximized playing in hard mode. To handle such stress, I need to manage my time effectively to achieve maximum productivity. My plan is as follow:

1 day for CS module A

1 day for CS module B

1 day for Singapore study, physics and community service

4 days for CS module C

Hopefully this timetable functions as expected or I guess sleep will be optional.

Working with People

An interesting part of CS3216 is that students are supposed to work in dynamic teams. Working with different people with different personalities sounds challenging, but it can serve as a good demonstration of real working world where one cannot really control whom is he going to work with. I think the key is to find a common interest. For example, in CS3216 the common goal can be the success of the project. One team united with one goal is more likely to be efficient and effective. Moreover, different team members will have different strengths for me to learn. Another aspect of working with people is how to work with lecturer and TAs. I believe they have much to teach and they are more than willing to teach, but among all the students, how can I be one of those who learn most? This is another question I better figure out early this semester.

Hardcore Coding 

 As one of the coolest modules provided by School of Computing, I believe CS3216 is designed in such a way that students will improve their web development skills rapidly along the way. Hardcore coding skill is the fundamental for my future career so I am more than willing to enhance it whenever I can. So far I am more like a back-end guy, but I want to be involved in every part of the project (and I am likely to achieve it since each team is formed with only 4 people). As Steve Jobs said, "Don't settle.". I think I still have much potential.