alias.brianna

Mahesh and I, along with two other members outside of NOC, took part in a cross-college initiative last evening. The word of the day was BizBuzz 07. Basically, it was a business case competition, within the space of 72 hours. It involved two teams each from Silicon Valley, Bio Valley, Singapore and Stockholm. Our team was called “Hejsan!”

The case was on a web 2.0 company called Zazzle, which allows for on demand printing on multiple user-generated custom made products. You can check out more on their website.

Zazzle had 2 main goals: to increase brand awareness, and increase revenue, at the same time pushing forth the image that Zazzle was a convenient and easy way for artists to express their creativity online through merchandise, as well as an online marketplace for uniquely designed items. They wanted to be seen not only as a gallery but also as a revenue source for contributors, and they were now specifically targeting the college population.

What did our team come up with? We felt that the best approach to the challenges Zazzle faced amongst college students was to viral market through the existing student run organizations or communities. At the same time, building an ecosystem for students. You can download our presentation here.

The entire competition took place concurrently across the various countries involved. To co-ordinate proceedings, the organizers made use of an online conference platform called WebEx.

There were a lot of difficulties involved through presenting the cases through WebEx. Firstly, there were audio inconsistencies that made it difficult for both parties at times to hear each other clearly at at an optimal level. This problem isn’t an isolated one though. It seems to occur with almost every platform involving an audio stream travelling across the internet in real time. As a result, people had to constantly repeat themselves to be heard. However, where co-ordination was concerned, I felt that certain kinks could have been better. It is difficult to co-ordinate between so many people in different geographical locations. However, there was feedback that it got quite annoying when the people in stockholm were constantly muted. Though there was a chat option within the WebEx platform, no one seemed to take notice of any activity there. As a result, it was really difficult to get feedback and information over to the person in control of the platform. There was also an incident where data analysis done by one team was shown during an question and answer session done by another team.

Personally the only thing I took away from the event is the fun i had with my team working together on the case. Although the case was given to us 72 hours before the deadline, my team only had time to work on it the day before the presentation. We started working on the case at 9PM on Friday night and came up with a bunch of ideas by 1AM the next morning. Splitting the work up, our presentation was finally ready by 5.51AM, 9 minutes before the deadline! The event itself started at 6PM (Stockholm time). Oh, and another thing I took away from the event was 300USD, for third prize, to be shared amongst the 4 of us! =)

Thanks to the organizers for a great initiative!