miersawitan

[miersawitan]

“You cannot make everyone think and feel as deeply as you do. This is your tragedy … because you understand them, and they do not understand you.”

— Daniel Saint

[miersawitan]

Pitching

This week is all about the preparations that we make for the deciding factors for our pitching to work and be able to be a part of the top and the toughest ten to present their pitch. From the last weeks preparation until the launching part of our program we worked hard to be able to succeed in making our ideas come true.

But before we go to the battle next week, we are now finalizing the things that we wanted to add in our system. This is the keyboard tutor software that we decided to include in the last-minute notice since we only had the chance to know about this few weeks before. And we are still hesitant to add this before because we did yet have the curriculum and ideas to put in the keyboard tutorials.

Then after discussing the pros and cons of the new idea that we had, we’ve decided to include it to our system.  Also after hearing some of the ideas on our interview to the Special Education (SpEd) teacher we now have the idea on how can we know that the student is really learning thru our product.

So, we have implemented few of the lessons that will be useful to the users to learn in our mvp. And we think that this will be more than enough for now since we still need more time integrating our product to its best performance in the future.

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Product Launching

As for this week and last weeks plans on launching our product to the school that is our main customers, but have been delayed due to the communication problems and that we have a hard time finding their main company to talk to.

So we decided to launch our product first in the local blind community area, since they are the closest and most efficient users to our system. Since there are blind masseur in the city so we tried to approach them and let them try the system that we made.

As we approach them we are rooting that they will likely be in awe in our product as it will be a solution to a problem they are facing in a daily basis. Luckily, when we approach them they are very cooperative to what we ask them to try and answered the questions when asked. They also said that money issues will not be a hindrance because they can work for it ass long as they will be able to know the basics and functions of the system.

Lastly, during our interview we asked them if they had already encounter a system  like ours, and one of them said that he had a friend that had this kind of system before but he lost communication to him. Also that was few years back so probably the system of that is already outdated so our new solution would more likely to be a better solution to the problems they are facing.

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As for our customer segment that is our issue during the last weeks, we now solved it and decided to focus on a single customer. In connection to this we now decided to create a curriculum for a blind community's educational system that will be used in a school using our product.

Though we find it hard to create a curriculum based solely on what we think is neeeed we are trying our best to contact some schools that will be our partners to know their say about our product.

Then as for our products development we are now trying to create a suitable and efficient system where the keyboard will create a sound when pressed since this will be the basis of the learning system of our product.

So since we don't have the connections from the schools that we contacted now, we decided to follow the suggestion of our instructor to try to test the product to a blind person regardless of age and knowledge of the system. To be able to have another ideas as to how can we create the curriculum that will be more useful and easier to use by the blind people.

[miersawitan]

Curriculum

This week the idea is to create an educational process of the blind people to be able to have a new system where they will be able to adjust into a modernized world of technology.

By doing this we are implementing a educational curriculum where the user will be able to hover through the program while learning, but the process is not easy since we need to know how the educational system of the blind people are working, but sad to say we are having a hard time in communicating them since they are far from us.

So we are planning to create a curriculum based on what we thought to be useful but on a process of development to what really is needed for the blind people of the community and upgrading it to the needs of the blind people.

So all in all we are starting to create an educational system to be able to be used in a school for blind people so that they will be able to advance in this technlogical world that we are using , and also to create a solution for the lack of work for the people with disability.

[miersawitan]

This week is about finalizing our customer segment, and to fully implement the things that we planned in our MVP. Though we still have some issues in the implementation of our product to our customer since we cant communicate with them directly, we are still reaching out to them.

As for our software we are now on the phase on the implementation of the mouse hovering to create an echo on the pointer of the mouse. Then making our product be more user friendly.

On the other hand, as for our customer segment. We now decided to focus on the schools for they are easier to contact. Then the suggestion that was asked to us by Engr. Meriam Mejias, was very useful that we need to create a curriculum to be used by the school that will be the users of our product.

All in all, this following weeks will be focused on creating the curriculum that we planned. And to create the range of age for the curriculum to be used. Lastly to create an MVP that will be more efficient for the users.

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Preparing to Launch

This week's progress is focused on the first users of our project. Supposedly, from our updated BMC during the last weeks reporting we targeted customers which are from schools and individual person . However due to some problem that we encountered during our discussions we decided to focus on a single market first, before upgrading our product and taking the bigger market size.

As we discussed the pros and cons of taking a market of diverse groups, we decided to focus on a market that we can communicate more effeciently so we can know their feedbacks more easily.

Another issue that we saw is that, since braille schools are far from us we will be having a difficult time to asses our products performance and upgrade the product to the users benefit. But since there are communities of blind people here in local areas so we will grab the oppurtunity to help them. But we still need to interview them to know what they want the most out of our product.

Then on the other hand the problem on our design implementation was also tackled because there was an issue on the design since we are giving the product to a blind person and if the design is hard to understand then the user will have difficulty in using our product. So we are stil developing more ways to upgrade the design to make it easier for the users to use.

[miersawitan]

Midterm week: this week we focused on our academe first before trying new stuffs to update our project's performance.

So last Tuesday we had our first pitching and I can say that it was successful, the panel judge throw some good questions that really make us stumble but good thing that we came prepared and answered them, also the suggestions that they gave are really useful and we are on our way to validate them.

Then there is the problem on how we can get revenue on our project which was also asked by the panel judge during the pitching, so my team and I already talked about the subscription as the method of getting the revenue of our project.

Then another problem arise as to how we can make sure that the subscription will only be used to a single person or computer because if we let the user use the subscription code multiple times then we will be bankrupt before gaining revenue. Then there was the suggestion made by our instructor to put the subscription code to the cloud so that there is only one-to-one subscription for a single code.

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As we finished our first report on the progress of our project we also had the chance to listen to our instructor about his say about it. Then after that, my team talked about the development that we can do to make our speech synthesizer a better solution to reading difficulties. And we formulated an idea to make the application to read the buttons and create an audio as the user hovers thru the screen. And also we talked about making our project be used by private individuals.

Also since we are creating a company we decided to start to gather investors or partners to fund and use our project.

So as a starter, since our project is dealing on blind communities and schools for blind people we decided to send request if they are willing to be part of our company as the users of our project and if they are willing to make our project as a new venture of learning experience to the blind people. Though we haven’t received a reply from the emails that we send, we are hoping to have a positive reply from them.

Then as I said earlier we are planning to make our project be used private individuals and local blind communities of Cagayan de Oro. So we are making another appointment to the CSWD for us to have a proper interview to them.

Lastly, on the end of our hacker, he is working now on the user interface of our project and making our ideal milestone become true. So now on our end we need to have our first user/customer of the project to know what they can say about the project and plan a way to gain more customer.

[miersawitan]

" I'm sorry to say that the smiles that I give you, One day will be tears in your eyes. I'm sorry to give you these memories, 'Cause memories like this will one day make you cry. But I'ma stick around, I promise you that I will stick around for now "

Lucas Graham

[miersawitan]

Blog 7: Implementation and Practice pitching

My team and I were formulating new ideas on how we can have a better output for our startup project. Thus we came up with an idea of computerized vision, since we had already a brief understanding on the Digital Signal Processing and how does image processing works. But the job of this process is not easy so our hacker will do his job little by little.

As of now the progress of our project is still low but our hacker is making his progress and the output that we can show is that when we input text and it will be read and will output the audio of the text.  But the target is that the software will read an image that contains text and the software will read it aloud for the blind people to hear it.

Aside from the progress of our hacker we also are preparing for the first pitching and our updated BMC. During this week there was a lecture about how pitching works and what does a pitch needs and do. So to have a good pitching we need to clarify our problems and have a clearer solution and more on the validation.

Based on our hacker the algorithm still needs a lot of development as to how the words will be read to have our ideal output. All in all, our project is already in its first step, so we need to work for it more to have our ideas come true.

[miersawitan]

"There are no shortcuts to genuine friendship. Relationships are built over time."

- Rachel Simmons

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Proposal week 4: The beginning

After our third attempt to propose our TTS synthesizer project that was again declined because we still lack the validation. Then our instructor suggested that we need to focus on our customer and that if we can find a school that teaches the blind community how to read by using braille. Then we need to contact them and ask them some questions as to how they operate and teach their students.

So upon learning that the closest school for the blind community is in Davao and in Cebu, Cebu Braille Center we again faced another problem as to how can we interview them, luckily we found their contact information and had the chance to talk to them through a call.

My team asked them if they are still using the old way of teaching the blind community which is by using the braille, then they answered that they are still using braille and haven’t used the digital learning environment which uses desktop to learn to navigate a computerized system of learning. This part we had our chance to enter in the market because we will be targeting to create a computerized, efficient and cheap project to be used by the blind community.

So given the new information that we’ve gathered through the interview we again proposed our idea to our instructor hoping that it will satisfy all the requirement for it to have an acceptance in the community. Then as our hardships bear its fruit Mr. Bronson Mabulay approved our proposed project.

So now our hacker is beginning his baby steps in creating the program for the TTS synthesizer, by learning again the language that we will to use for the base of the program. And lastly since our instructor think that we are making a breakthrough he suggested that he will be writing a letter of recommendation to the academe for us to conduct our internship on our own company that we will to develop during the span of time that we had this summer instead of applying to another company for us to work outside.

[miersawitan]

Pivoting; after a long fought battle of proposal of the project ResCan, we now decided to turn our direction to a new idea which is to create a speech synthesizer. But after our first trial f proposing the speech synthesizer we, again, did not have the approval because we still lack the information to back up our idea and still need to gather more of data’s to validate our proposed project.

Thus, in validation, we need to talk to people to know if this proposed solution of the problem is what they really need. But before we try to go outside and talk to our prospect customer we need to visualize and theorize our ideas so that when we experiment the idea if it is valid or not.

So we thought of some theory to be proven. Like if the speech synthesizer is really needed to the people with disability in their vision and also if that they had any idea or prior knowledge of a technology that helps those visually impaired people on their needs like learning through sound and voices also if what is their means of learning aside from using brails.

So we talked to several individuals specially those who had a problem in their vision or the blind people. We asked a few question like how can they read without learning brails, they answered that they ask for their relatives to read text for them. But sometimes not all blind people do this because they know that their relatives had also works to attend to. Also since some of them are not financially inclined and the cost of the printing is expensive so they don’t usually use brails also they need to have learning on how to use it.

On the other hand they don’t know any technology that helps the blind people to read aside from brail so they just got used to it. So all in all based on the information that we’ve gathered there is a high chance that our proposed project really affects the norm of this group of people on their daily lives and it will really help them to learn and read text not just on the textbooks but as well as conversation basis.

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Proposal: Week2

Approach a prospect customer and talk about the solution that you think will solve the problem at hand. This is the basis for this week’s blog or the validation of the solution that we present if it’s useful to the customer or maybe another solution may be of better use than our proposed answer. Also upon validating our solution we also created our Business Model Canvas (BMC).

The BMC which will contain the ideas on who and how many segments of people do we think we can cater our services. It also contains the answers to the problems based on their needs and how can we give the solution so that it will not be a hassle to the customers. Then how can we make sure that the custo will reuse our product after testing it. Of course the where and how can we get the resources, may it be financial or the workforce and how will we manage the business. And most importantly how can we make profits and revenue on our product.

During our class we discuss about the BMC which was explained above, then we had an activity to create our own so that we can have an idea on our eminent goals. As our proposed business startup is to research and canvas materials from the local businesses we agreed that our main target are the business owners (sellers) for they will sell their products using our platform and the internet users (buyers) whom will be the one who will buy the products. We need it to be handy so we plan to create a web as well as an app so that the customer of our product won’t be hassled.

Then after an all-out battle inside the corners of the classroom we proceeded outside of the room to talk to the people that we think will be our future customers on how would they want their problems to be solved. Quite the problem that we've heard about the stores that we interviewed is that they needed more of an advertisement to their store since they only started a few years back and that customers don't still know their locations.

Buth then on if we will not be able to let our first proposal be accepted, maybe we will fall back, regroup, and go for plan B.

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Proposal: week 1

This week and the following weeks will be intended for defending the ideas that we’ve gathered. As well as pointing out a solid statement that this proposed solution will be useful and that many people can benefit from it.

During on our interviews, we asked different people on their views and opinions on the subject that we presented to them. We asked them on what they want to do to this problem and also how do they solved this.

As we talked to the people on what they want, we realized that there are many ways on how we can develop our project and on what aspect should we focus to. For instance we are still thinking on what to do on the first proposed project the “ResCan” if we were to put different market or to focus on a single market and make it as the base of our items on our site.

After doing the brainstorming, research and interviews we now have multiple prospects on what to do in this subject, but before we can perform these great ideas we must defend it and make our point that these problems can be solved with our solution through technology.