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Why are you doing this?


This week's highlight is the Golden Circle, an idea inspires us to think about WHY before proceeding to HOW and WHAT.

It is easy to get lost if we only focus on what we are doing, how to do something but forget the reason why we are doing something. Great leaders think from inside out, while the others do the other way around. "People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it."--Simon Sinek

One of the weakness some leaders have is that they don't believe sth strong enough. I pitched an idea on a mobile hospitality app which helps hotel admin to create promotional contents to the hotel guests. I wasn't clear enough about why I intended to make this app and I didn't successfully deliver my idea to the audience. In fact, I ended up identifying the wrong problem and presented quite badly during the pitching.

I went back and rethought about the reason. WHY are you trying to make that app?
There are three main reasons.

Firstly, it helps those small and medium hotels to owe their own apps to better engage with their guests. Most small and medium hotels cannot afford to develop their own mobile apps. They also have pains promoting their products/services. Promotional contents are attractive resources which can potentially engage hotel guests, especially those frequent guests. This also opens up another possibility for the hotels to use our app for hotel booking and save the cost for big PMS system.

Secondly, more ambitiously, the data of all the hotel promotions will be stored in our central database and we can further train the data for better filtering. In the long run, we can provide hotel promotion search for public users.

Thirdly, all the ideas can become in vain if we don't have hotels to use our app. The business world is complicated. Most likely, the programmers are not into it. CS3217 people are really cool. but one thing I noticed that among the three years' projects, only a few apps get published on app store, which I suppose is the problem with the fact that programmers are not good at sales.Personally speaking, I don't have enough business senses. But I don't want the app made by these cool people get dead. Even if we need to sacrifice for sth, it cannot be worse than we ourselves witness the newborn baby gets dead at our hands.  I happen to know one IT consultant who has a lot of contacts in hotels and has already got clients before even having products.  Thus I thought maybe we can make this happen. Honestly speaking, I don't really trust that IT consultant. He seems to use other people instead of making a big difference. However, last week I get to know that he is a Christian, thus I think he should not be bad.

Project wise, it seems to be more suitable for CS3216 than CS3217. But it is a quite good project to work on.

Some other alternatives--Games. I talked with two friends who are interested in technology in general. One friend has an idea of a location based multi-player game, which is a fair idea. Another friend has a really cool idea which comes from a science fiction named "Flatland". The idea is that there are creatures living in a 2D world, while 3D world creatures can interfere them with super skills. Say when you shake your ipad, an earthquake happens in the 2D world. The idea is not completed yet, but it sounds pretty cool!

Other notable things:
1. Hackathon this weekend. First time attending this kind of activity, it was pretty cool. We made a rough prototype for a native iOS app. However, one of our team member was sick and I happened to have an interview the next morning, thus we didn't present in the end.

2. The Human Resource business class. We learnt personality in this week. It helped discover myself more and it was really interesting.

3. Reflection. This week, I get distracted easily. Need to be more focused. I shouldn't get discouraged easily even if get criticised.








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