Big Ideas @ Berkeley: 2012 Full Proposal

Loccasion: Geo-location technologies for effective engagement between organizations and students
1. PROPOSAL AND IMPACT
Product and Features Loccasion is a smartphone application that uses geo-fence technology to make the interactions between campus organizations and students more effective and sustainable. This application is intended to improve the way students receive information about clubs and groups that they are interested in because up until now, the distribution of flyers on Sproul Plaza is passive, inefficient and unintuitive. The idea is to develop a native application for the popular smartphone operating systems (iOS and Android) that enables campus organizations and student promoters to create digital flyers for events which can be broadcasted when members are tabling to promote their club. By creating a flyer, an ad-hoc geo-fence (virtual perimeter) is instantiated around the clubs stall. Information about events and club activities are pushed to users who walk through the virtual geo-fence, eliminating the need for the physical distribution of flyers. From the students perspective, only flyers from relevant clubs (based on interests and events attended in the past) will be pushed as notifications to his/her smartphone. In addition, students can opt-in to subscribe to certain clubs for getting updates about their events regardless of their relational distance between each other. Loccasion has two main objectives. The first of which is to streamline the process for campus promoters to disseminate information to a relevant audience. Current solutions for event promotion, such as the practice of flyering, have large materials and human resources costs. In addition, existing methodologies are inefficient at reaching the appropriate target audience, and therefore have low conversion rates. This bottleneck is an obvious problem, but no new innovations have emerged to address it. Our solution is to give student organizations a tool on their smartphones to create events and announcements that are interactive and engaging. The user interface provides a framework for creating events - such as date, time, directions to venue and the ability to upload photos - enabling a very simple way for organizations to create announcements and blast it out to their targeted audience all within a matter of seconds. Upon the creation of an event, a circular virtual fence with a certain radius around the student promoters smartphone is set up. Now, anyone who has installed the app on their phones can receive notifications once this imaginary border is breached. Because of the time and space context of the user receiving these notifications, this also encourages users to engage in person with the relevant event organizers. Event organizers can tag their postings with certain keyword hashtags (similar to the topic system of Twitter) such as #engineering or #entertainment and users can subscribe to certain keywords to receive a stream of events on their smartphones. Eventually, the application will support promoted topics that will show up on the users list of suggested topics so commercial partners can engage with a wider range of users. The second objective of Loccasion, of course, is to create a significant benefit for the average student user who uses the app to discover new events offered on campus. In the apps home screen, users can browse a suggested stream (see appendix I) of individual events or clubs sorted by relevancy using an algorithm that combines factors such as distance from the clubs stall to the user, the users personal interests, events attended in the past, and events attended by the friends of that user. Users can also search for specific events that are not listed in their suggested stream. Instead of receiving information from random club representatives who are indiscriminately distributing flyers, users will only receive updates from clubs that are relevant to them. Users can also see what events their friends are attending or if their friends are attending the event they are looking at. If an event merits enough interest, users can choose to sign up for the event in the app with a single tap (see appendix II). This will also automatically subscribe the user to the organization so updates continue to be received even outside the range of the geo-fence. Each time a user performs an action in the app (signing up for events, subscribing to clubs), these actions will be used to improve the relevancy algorithm. The more a user uses the application, the more data we have about his/her usage trends that we can use to provide a more accurate and relevant experience for them. The app also supports full integration for native built-in apps such as the calendar so they can get reminders on upcoming events and the address book for storing contact information of the event organizers.

Big Ideas @ Berkeley: 2012 Full Proposal

The application is distributed through the app marketplaces of the respective devices (iTunes App Store, Android Marketplace, etc.) to the smartphones of our users. Because the amount of benefit derived from using the app is directly related to the amount of users it has (more users means denser interactions between each other), the app will be available as a free download. It is important to note that revenue is not a key priority in the development of this idea. The primary objective, in our early stage, is to grow and scale our userbase as fast as possible to validate the apps potential for commercial solutions to our future corporate partners. Use-case Scenarios In order to gain a better understanding of how users will use Loccasion, we surveyed a diverse sample of individuals and asked them, if a service such as Loccasion existed, how they are going to use it. We generated user-case scenarios to help us evaluate the design of certain features. Here are a few: I. Spencer is a second year Computer Science major who is interested in robotics. However, his classes do not provide enough hands on experience on his interest and he is interested in meeting other students who share his common interest. Spencer is an active user of Loccasion and have attended events through the app in the past. While walking through Sproul Plaza on the way to class, he discovers a meeting for a club called the Berkeley Aerobot Team. He chooses to attend the event and mark it in his calendar app to remind himself. Then he subscribes to the Berkeley Aerobot Team events stream so he can get updates on future events. II. Tatiana is first year and is new to campus. She is interested in finding events on campus that are related to dance and theatre. However, she has not used Loccasion in the past so the app has no data on her interests and previous events. Instead, she searches for the topic #dance and the app returns a list of relevant events sorted based on location and relevancy. She decides to attend a dance class and now updates on related events. III. Garrett is an active member of a student political group called Students for Sensible Drug Policy. One of his main roles deals with public relations and recruiting new members. However, previous methods of promoting his club have been efficient and he has been unable to attract a very niche audience. He decides to sign up for Loccasion to create an event for an upcoming debate and files it under the topics of #politics. In the backend interface, he sees that his listing is attracting many students who subscribe to the #politics topic but notices that not a lot of people are actually clicking attending. Garrett realizes he is reaching to a broad and unfocused audience and decides to additionally tag the topic #student activism to the event. He notices a significant increase in conversion rates after making this change and passing by students are even engaging with him and asking about the event. Advantages of Loccasion Over Existing Solutions The implementation of Loccasion has relatively low entry barriers. The required hardware and technology infrastructure already exists for this idea to work. Users of this application only require low-latency cellular 3G or Wi-Fi enabled mobile devices (see appendix II) to adopt the service and benefit from its advantageous features. The significant advantage for the users is that they receive relevant information instead of being bombarded by events that do not interest them. Relevancy is a hard term to define, because it does not always mean personalized. Relevancy is about being dynamic - it depends on the needs of a user at a specific point in time or space. There are times which are most effective in engaging users about events on campus and there are locational contexts in which the user has to be in for these events to be interesting. These two factors, combined with the users interests can provide a powerful and relevant experience in which the content they receive is both relevant and interesting. Often times, users get annoyed with organization representatives using foot-in-the-door techniques to promote their events. During the peak times of activity on Sproul Plaza, this can be extremely irritating especially when one is in a hurry to get to his/her next class. This is not the fault of the clubs representatives, but a fault in an outdated system that is still being unnecessarily perpetuated. With Loccasion, updates can be received on the move without the user feeling inconvenienced.

Big Ideas @ Berkeley: 2012 Full Proposal

Flyers and event information are stored on our remote servers so users can retrieve information about events at any given time or place. This also eliminates the need for keeping a clutter of physical flyers for reference later on. Instead of throwing away uninteresting flyers, users can just choose to opt-out of subscribing to a particular organizations updates. The goal of Loccasion is supposed to streamline every process that is involved with registration for events or clubs to a single tap of a button. The app also fully integrates with the default calendar and address book apps so reminders and calendar objects are synced with the cloud. As there exists benefits for the every day user, there also exists huge benefits for event organizers. The first of which is the complete elimination of the material costs associated with printing flyers and posters. It also eradicates the need for many physical human representatives to distribute these flyers. Tabling can be more effective with Loccasion and club members become more focused on engaging with prospective audiences. In the same way that users are pushed relevant information, event organizers can also more effectively engage with relevant users. For example, a drama club that wants to promote acting classes is unlikely to want to promote their event to individuals who are not interested in acting. This illustration may seem obvious and trivial, but this is the exact thing that happens on Sproul Plaza everyday. Loccasion provides a platform for clubs to actively target only individuals who are interested in their events and filter out individuals who are not. Distributing physical flyers do not tell the organizers how many individuals are attending the event they organized or exactly how many users are interested. Loccasion provides an interface for clubs to get live data on who viewed their listings as well as who signed up for their events. Furthermore, real, live analytics data can provide event organizers an idea of the effectiveness of their campaign. Now, they have access to important data such as the exact amount of people who are expected to attend their event, so they can prepare for a better event experience. It is also important to consider the possible multi-million dollar plan for renovation and expansion of lower Sproul Plaza in the foreseeable future. Even though this does not directly affect the organizations as a large part of their tabling occurs in upper Sproul, it is crucial to encourage promoters to think about alternative venues for setting up their stalls. WIth location-based technology, the placement of the stall can be more creatively reconsidered in other areas of the campus - for example an engineering club might want to promote their events outside the engineering library. Changes in the Product Since First Submission The first iteration of our idea predominantly focused on improving the information distribution process for organizations and making it easier for them to create events and announcements. Our idea also put a great emphasis on reducing environmental impacts and material costs. While these factors are important to the objective of our idea, we realized it is important to build the app around the most important consideration - adding value for the user. After careful reflection on our original idea, we recognize that Loccasion could be mistaken as another channel for promoters to advertise for their events and a last thing a user wants is the feeling that this is just another app that provides them with more advertisements. In order to make the app worth using and provide a valuable experience to our users, we decided to make the digital flyers interactive. In other words, instead of static messages, users will be able to register for the events and subscribe to the club. To make things even simpler, we decided to integrate Loccasion with default native applications such as calendar so reminders can be automatically set up on the day of the event. Furthermore, each event listing will have an interactive map which will interface with the native maps application to provide directions to the event venue. We feel it is also important for organizations to be able to easily create, manage and edit their flyers in a backend interface. Event organizers should also be able to analyze the effectiveness of their campaign using metrics tools in the backend for example view count (the amount of users that viewed the event page), bounce rate the amount of users that viewed the event without performing an action), loyalty rate (the amount of users that are returning users) and conversion rates (the amount of users that viewed the event and are actually attending). This kind of data can help organizations improve their listings and create more engaging events. This backend interface can be accessed on a web browser and directly interfaces with the mobile application.

Big Ideas @ Berkeley: 2012 Full Proposal

Limitations with Existing Solutions Loccasion isnt the first attempt to digitize the event information of student organizations. There exists websites that list campus events based on different category. BerkeleyEvent.com is a student run website that lists all the upcoming events of the week. It utilizes a Google calendar frame to display the events in chronological order. The webmaster of the site updates the Google calendar manually when there is a new event. There also exists an official events page located in events.berkeley.edu. Because this is an official list maintained by the University, the amount of content is far more organized and comprehensive than the first solution. However, both these solutions fall short in being dynamic and flexible. Both these sites involve the user to actively search for events instead of having relevant events already filtered out and pushed to the user. The advantage of the passive approach is that it not only saves the user time in searching for an event, but sometimes the user does not even know what he/she is searching for. Loccasion fills the gap in this market in that it intelligently suggests relevant events based on the users interests. Secondly, these sites are maintained by a single webmaster and therefore, not very flexible. In the advent of mobile technology, it is foolish to neglect the importance of usergenerated content, especially considering how simple it is to create an event on Loccasion. Instead of generating the content ourselves, we democratize the system by allowing individual organizations to add events to the database for all other users to access. This allows for new events to be dynamically added to the database and distributed to users in the matter of seconds, rather than having a static list of events being updated over infrequent periods of time. Existing solutions also lack relevancy and therefore, also lack engagement. Building a service that is relevant to users means it helps them address the problem of information overload. There is a great deal of information overload in existing services because users are going through a large list of events most of which do not concern them. WIth Loccasion, this filtering process is skipped and done automatically for the users - using parameters such as the users current location, personal interests and social connections, relevant and personalized content is delivered to the users mobile device. Effectively, the problem of information overload becomes non-existent because the content displayed on the users smartphone is all relevant to him/her. Marketing Goals and Strategies Our userbase can be effectively divided into two categories: 1.) students who are looking to get more involved in campus activities and 2.) promoters from organizations who want to reach out to recruit new students. Of course, there also exists an overlap between these two user groups. Often times, software developers who have to build services that are only valuable when there are a lot of users using the service, they encounter what many people call the chicken-and-egg problem in that the app is only useful when there are a lot of users using it and users will use the app only if it is useful. With Loccasion we run into an even greater dilemma in that we have a chicken-and-egg problem that exists in two dimensions - in order to get students to use the app, there must be enough content generated by clubs who adopt the technology; and in order for the clubs to see value in the app, there must be enough users for them to feel it can necessarily replace older methods of promotion. The long-term objective we are trying to achieve is to make Loccassion the primary mode of communication between campus organizations and students with smartphones. By the end of 2012, we aim to minimize the distribution of physical flyers and posters by at least half (although the number of smartphone users is increasing according to Jefferies report (2011), nonsmartphone users are still the majority), and spread a sense of environmental responsibility within the campus community. We plan to demonstrate successful advertisement can be done without the distribution of physical flyers. We envision this attitude will continue to propagate in the future of Sproul Plaza. Our marketing strategies are framed around the double chicken-and-egg problem described above. To do so, we have to market Loccasion as an application that will serve useful functions to users who want to be more involved in campus activities, rather than an application that floods the user with irrelevant advertisements. We are going to achieve this goal by following step-by-step marketing approaches designed with short-term marketing goals in mind. Prior to executing any of the strategies illustrated below, we are going to first recruit Loccasion campaign representatives called scouts who assist us with the various marketing procedures. These scouts are going to be dedicated individuals who are

Big Ideas @ Berkeley: 2012 Full Proposal

genuinely interested in making our campus more sustainable with innovative technologies. More details of training and recruiting procedures are explained in the Training and Recruitment section and the cost of recruitment is justified in the Budget Narrative. 1. Event-Specific Marketing We first aim to let all our potential users know about our presence and purpose by sponsoring club meetings and events. By sponsoring materials needed for carrying the events out such as food or venue reservations, we are going to encourage club members to fully utilize our application when planning and executing their events. Loccasion scouts will help event organizers fully understand the useful features our application provides, so that they can use it in the most effective way. Loccasion scouts will also decide which events to sponsor based on the size and nature of the events. We posit that sponsoring events for business clubs or engineering societies will be a good start, because they are more likely adopters of new technology. The cost we are planning to spend on this strategy is explained in our Budget Narrative. 2. Partnerships with Student Organizations In order to carry out successful event-specific marketing and other various marketing strategies that require a considerable audience, we are going to make partnerships with student organizations for continual and long-term support. Once Loccasion scouts successfully negotiate what we plan to provide (sponsoring equipment and catering for events, etc.), student organizations are expected to make a consistent commitment of using our application for planning and executing their events. This method will not only guarantee active usage of Loccasion, but also allow organizations to fully see the benefits of using Loccasion over other solutions. 3. Social Media Campaigns As we are mostly going to be dealing with digital information, utilization of social media, such as Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter will play the most vital role in our marketing plan. In addition, it would be completely hypocritical to use flyers and printed materials in our marketing strategy, therefore we have to come up with more creative solutions to virally spread our presence. We will use social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube pages, frequently managed by our Loccasion scouts, to attain a successful public outreach. Starting with our more tech-savvy partners, we will encourage them to promote our app via their individual social media channels and this will eventually spread to other organizations. Since most students on campus are connected via at least one social network, it is important to make full use of this. Every time a user chooses to attend an event in the app, he/she has an option of posting it to their Facebook or Twitter timelines. This is important because close friends of that user are likely to share similar interests and may encourage them to try the app so they can check out the event. It is also important to enable an option for the users to not post on their various social profiles, as to maintain strict privacy and anonymity when appropriate. We also intend on reaching out to our media partners in the Daily Cal and Cal Business Magazine that have wide student circulation in order to further cement our community presence. We hope to build a successful brand identify for Loccasion through social media tools and solidify our position as the market-leader for aggregating campus events by the end of this academic year. 4. Partnerships with Local Businesses within College Town Eventually we will have to establish partnership with local businesses as commercial sponsors. Once we have enough traction, business owners will see the benefit of using Loccasion to reach a large audience of college students who are usually their biggest customers. Loccasion will enable business owners to create digital flyers for deals and promotional events and distribute them to relevant users. However, overloading the user with information that is largely for commercial purposes is something we definitely want to avoid as that changes the initial goals of our application. This is where the benefit of location technology as a contextual filter comes in. These promotional announcements will only be pushed to users who are within the range of the business and never distributed more than once. As local business owners are reaching out to a relevant audience not only based on interest, but also on location, we expect conversion rates to be much higher. Even though users can opt-out of receiving promotional messages, they have an incentive to subscribe to them because they would otherwise miss deals that would save them money. Effectively this

Big Ideas @ Berkeley: 2012 Full Proposal

becomes a win-win-win situation: local businesses get exposure to a relevant audience, users get benefits from local deals, and we get to expand our userbase. Training and Recruitment Procedures for Loccasion Scouts Recruiting the right Loccasion representatives is directly related to successfully establishing a campus presence of the service, as they are needed for almost every single marketing strategy we will be executing. From our experience with working with early founding members of rapidly growing startups, we will be providing the most appropriate training to help them successfully carry out their tasks. There are two distinctive categories for our Loccasion scouts. 1. Public Relations Representatives For this position, we are looking for enthusiastic people with good people skills. These individuals are going to be responsible for making online (via social media) and offline connections with student organizations on campus and negotiating deals for event-specific marketing. Additionally, they will also spend time on making partnerships with local businesses who are willing to provide commercial incentives to our users in exchange for advertisement opportunities. PR representatives should be open-minded to experimentation with various marketing strategies, and have creative initiative in their execution. Teamwork is essential, but we are also looking for independent thinkers who can provide quick and creative solutions to unanticipated obstacles. Training will be mostly concerned with getting them used to the features and services Loccasion provides. We aim to make them become experts at using our application, so that they can teach event organizers and new users how to best utilize Loccasion effectively. We want our public relations representatives to be genuinely excited about the technology so we want to motivate them by sharing our ambitious plans to disrupt the events promotion space on campus. 2. Operations Management This position requires people with strong analytical thinking skills and, preferably, familiarity with HTML and CSS for managing social media pages. They will be responsible for addressing bugs ar concerns and helping us identify key areas that we need to improve our application on. They will also be overseeing the transactions between organizations and students, and moderate inappropriate content or anything that contributes to bad user experience. Again, teamwork is essential, but, especially for this position, we want independent thinkers striving to achieve operational success. Experience with design software such as Photoshop is a plus, as these skills will be useful for creating more attractive social media pages. Training will be mostly concerned with getting them familiar with using cloud-based productivity tools such as Google docs and spreadsheets for effective collaboration between us and the Operations Management representative. Establishing an unified, effective collaboration method is vital, and part of the training involves helping our recruit achieve fluency in these tools. Additionally, they will be taught to become not only experts at the Loccasion features, but also to be familiar with the back-end and inner workings of the application, so that they can effectively provide solutions to help users troubleshoot software bugs. The application is bound to run into bugs and solid customer support is essential for maintaining traction and user retention of the application. Ethical, Cultural or Legal Considerations 1. Environmental Impact Mobile technology is a powerful tool and it should be exploited fully to address environmental issues. Loccasion strives to make the engagement between campus organizations and students more sustainable. Our advertising strategies will not include a single printed material so we can demonstrate that successful advertising can be achieved without wasting unnecessary resources. Our goal is to, for a large part, eradicate the use of printed materials on Sproul Plaza once the Loccasion is popularly circulated. Gradually introducing these sustainable practices and eradicating paper waste, is one of the principles that govern our idea. 2. Discriminating Non-Smartphone Users Currently Loccasion is only available for smartphones and we want to express that this is just

Big Ideas @ Berkeley: 2012 Full Proposal

an unfortunate outcome of the limited software and hardware capabilities of nonsmartphones. We have no interest in discriminating against non-smartphone users, and, if we can figure out a way to deliver an equally satisfying user experience and effective service, we are more than happy to adapt and learn the technology to work on developing alternatives. At the moment, we are considering a SMS-based communication system similar to that of Twitter and Foursquare, but we are afraid that it may not be able to keep the quality of user experience we wish to keep due to a lack of features such as geo-location and cellular data connection. It is also possible to open a web-browser interface for discovering campus events, but it will lack the dynamic and immediate nature that geo-location technology will bring. 3. Content Control 100% of the events content that is consumed by our users is generated by the users themselves. This provides the obvious advantage of flexibility in dynamic content, but at the cost of the content quality and consistency. We have addressed the issue of consistency by implementing a framework, essentially for content creators to fill in the blanks for their event. At the same time it is also important to find the balance between structure and personalization, so we enabled customization via image attachments. It is inevitable, with user-generated content, that there will be content that might offend a particular group of people. We support open communication and freedom of expression, but when this freedom infringes on individual rights, we will remove the content immediately and permanently ban the user. This is an unfortunate consequence, but it is necessary to protect other users and maintain a generally safe and fair user experience. Our recruits for Operations Management representatives will be responsible for moderating content on our databases and removing offensive material. In addition, users can police each other and report abuse on any malicious content. Our Loccasion scouts will verify the validity of these reports on the backend and remove the material effectively. 4. Handling sensitive data As our userbase grows, so will the amount of data they will generate. With this massive amount of data on our users, also comes the responsibility of handling it. We make it clear that we will never sell specific user information to third-party companies and infringe on any privacy rights of our users. This data (such as a users previously attended events, topical interests and social connections) will be used in improving our suggestion algorithm. Organizations will be able to use this data indirectly to create a better targeted campaign, but they will never see information of individual users. For example, a promoter can target users that are only interested in the topic #yoga and this will utilize information from our database to distribute the content to the appropriate users. Consider the entirety of our backend (user database, usage trends, etc.) as a black box, that event promoters can interface with but not directly access. It is also important to respect the privacy of our users because sometimes they dont want their activity to be shared in public with their social networks. Although users are encouraged to share events with their friends because that helps the userbase grow, users have the option of not doing so if they wish.

2. NEEDS STATEMENT
Problem statement The method of distributing flyers in Sproul Plaza are unengaging, inefficient and at best, a huge inconvenience for both the flyer distributor and receiver. There is also a physical limit to how many members tabling for a club can hand out flyers as it is impossible to effectively distribute information when a huge group of people are passing by at any given second. As a result, the process of flyering involves the promoter to take an opportunist approach - attempting to hand out the flyer to any random person within arms reach without specifically targeting the right audience. Consequently, flyers become a nuisance for most students on their way to class and end up disposed of. From the organizations perspective, a budget has to be allocated to order copies of flyers, which is laborious and the process may have slow turnaround times. From the students perspective, such opportunist approach often irritates passing students who are either most of the time not interested or in a rush to get to class. A large portion of flyers that are disposed of are not recycled, wasting resources and producing an unnecessary amount of waste. Additionally, there exists the

Big Ideas @ Berkeley: 2012 Full Proposal

problem of information overload: too many clubs are competing for the students attention, as a result none are actually get the attention of anyone. Therefore, the current state of information dissemination on Sproul is passive and ineffective. Campus needs & market Students at Berkeley definitely need to adopt new ways of disseminating information to mass audiences and receiving and managing relevant information if they were to increase efficiency and access to events they are interested in. Additionally, as an institution actively supporting environmentalism, Berkeley must change the conventional methods of handing out flyers. We need a more sustainable yet more effective way of communicating with students who are interested in finding out about various events and activities available on campus. Furthermore, we can make Loccasion financially sustainable by letting local advertisers and business owners advertise context-specific products or services to Berkeley students. Previously unexploited local businesses, can be viewed as our potential customer, and location-relevant advertisements like this can actually benefit and offer students useful deals or services. Our target audience is every single smartphone owner at Berkeley. According to The Morgan Stanley Blue Paper on mobile phones in 2011, smartphone market is a rapidly growing and has the potential to take up the major proportion of the web transactions within two years. The number of smartphone users is only going to increase (see appendix II & III), and it will eventually become an essential part of everyones lifestyle. There has to be a pioneering smartphone service that governs the way student organizations and students communicate, which has the potential to become one of must-have applications to have for students. Through various means, we have conducted surveys and interviews required to accurately identify and understand the existing problems. We have reached the conclusion that the current method of distributing printed materials and flyers is highly ineffective and environmentally destructive. Below are the findings we have gathered. Measuring the Inefficiency of Current Practices In an effort to gain a clear understanding of how inefficient distributing physical flyers is, we have conducted a series of surveys and interviews since Fall 2011 semester. Using the data we collected, we were able to quantify the trash being generated and the money being wasted by the current practice. Methodology: Throughout the surveys, we tried our best to maximize objectivity and fairness in our method by introducing random sampling to every single step we made. The surveys were conducted at the Sproul Plaza during two separate periods: the beginning of Fall 2011 (the high-traffic season that lasts only for the first three weeks of the semester) and the mid-February season (the lukewarm season that goes on for the rest of the semester). Volunteers were asked to stand next to 8 randomly chosen trash bins (out of the 20) at the Sproul Plaza, and count the number of flyers being disposed of shortly after being distributed to students. The counting was done between 12:00 PM and 1:00 PM, and we repeated this process every Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday for two weeks. Below are the results per trash bin: High-traffic season (12-1pm) Lukewarm season (12-1pm) 90 yers disposed per hour on average 30 yers disposed per hour on average

The data shows us that, during the high-traffic season, around 1800 flyers ( = 20 trash bins x 90 flyers) were being disposed of overall and, during the lukewarm season, around 600 flyers ( = 20 trash bins x 30 flyers) were thrown away of between 12:00 PM and 1:00 PM. We have conducted interview with over 30 organizations, and calculated an average number of flyers given out to students during the 12:00 PM and 1:00 PM period. Our findings show that each

Big Ideas @ Berkeley: 2012 Full Proposal

organization circulates around 100 flyers on average in that hour window. From this data, we were also able to make percentage calculations of their inefficiencies. During the high-trafc season, around 40 organizations were out at Sproul Plaza giving yers out, and this tells us that around 4000 yers ( = 40 clubs x 100 yers) are distributed in one hour by various students organizations. This means roughly 45% of the yers are getting wasted without the content being fully appreciated. During the lukewarm season, around 20 organizations were at Sproul Plaza. Using the same methodology as above, we can nd out that approximately 2000 yers (= 20 clubs x 100 yers) are given out in one hour every day during the lukewarm season. This means 30% of the yers are getting wasted without the content being fully appreciated. After interviewing a few copy center owners around Berkeley, weve come to discover that the cost of printing 500 flyers can range between US$100 and US$300 (depending on the quality of paper they use). This information shows us that, on average, US$1600 worth of materials is wasted every hour during the beginning of the semester. Extent to which we have developed community partnerships Our marketing strategies include various stages of event-specific marketing, and, in an effort to successfully execute these strategies, we have already started negotiating mutual partnerships with various student organizations. 1. Media Partnerships The Daily Californian: through our professional networking, we have had constructive conversations with a writer, photographer, and publicist at Daily Cal. We have made an informal agreement with them about featuring our project in one of their issues. This will be a promising way to establish our identity within the Cal community. CalBusiness Magazine: one of the CalBusiness writers contacted us earlier to discuss the possibility of featuring us in an article about young entrepreneurs trying to use innovative technologies to change the campus. We were deeply humbled by the offer, and if we end up appearing in CalBusiness magazine, this will be another effective way to let a niche market of the Cal community know about our project. Cal TV: we have established a working relationship with a Business/Advertising/Marketing/Finance (BAMF) officer at Cal TV about ways to promote Loccasion on campus. Winning the Big Ideas competition will provide us many opportunities to get public media exposure required to make Loccasion a successful story. 2. Business & Social Fraternities Alpha Kappa Psi: we have experience with through entering a case competition with members of The Alpha Kappa Psi business fraternity and this granted us an opportunity to talk about a potential partnership plan with one of the biggest business societies existing at Berkeley. Sigma Nu: we are in negotiations with members of Sigma Nu, a widespread social fraternity, about using Loccasion for planning and providing sponsorship for their rush events next semester. Sigma Eta Pi: we have taken classes with one of pioneering members of Sigma Eta Pi, a fraternity dedicated to promoting entrepreneurial spirit in the student body, and he expressed his interests in using Loccasion for organizing one of its career info sessions and other social mixers. 3. Other clubs and organizations Hackers @ Berkeley: as active members of Hackers @ Berkeley, we will be encouraging other members to test-drive Loccasion before and after its launch, and also encourage them to make using Loccasion part of their daily habit. These early technology adopters will be able to give us useful insights needed to objectively evaluate our product and marketing strategies. Also, this saves costs in recruiting beta-testers to test our service.

Big Ideas @ Berkeley: 2012 Full Proposal

Korean Undergraduate Networking Association (KUNA): one of our team members works as an events management staff at KUNA, the biggest Korean society at Berkeley. He has already been discussing with the leaders of the association about using Loccasion for effective events management, and there has been an overwhelming positive feedback on this proposal.

3. IMPACT EVALUATION
Environmental Impact As Loccasion aims to promote a sense of environmental responsibility and sustainable lifestyle within the student body, evaluating its environmental impact is a direct benchmark of our success. We are going to take three different approaches to conduct the evaluation. First of all, we are going to repeat the method we used for calculating the inefficiency of flyering every semester, and compare the results to the figures we first derived from the initial surveys we conducted in Fall 2011 and Spring 2012. This will require our team to stand next to the trash bins near the Sproul Plaza every semester at two different time periods (high-traffic season and lukewarm season), and count the number of flyers being wasted. After this, we will also be interviewing campus copy center owners about the changes in their flyer sales. Pedestrians on Sproul Plaza will also be asked about the methods by which they receive information about clubs and events around campus. This will help illustrate a more holistic picture of how Loccasion is affecting the way organizations are engaging with students. Based on these findings - both quantitative and qualitative - we will be able to effectively evaluate the extent to which Loccasion is helping the campus become more eco-friendly and the extent to which we are helping organizations save money on printed materials. Usage Metrics Unlike the periodic measure of our applications ability to make any positive environmental impact, evaluating the efficacy of the circulation of Loccasion will be an on-going process - meaning we evaluate the application from a technical perspective using analytics tools we built into it. Seeing how well your app is doing in a particular market is not as easy as looking at the downloads count on the App Store. An application may have high circulation (a lot of downloads) but no engagement and it is really hard to tell how the users are exactly using the software using the default tracking tools in the Apple source development kit. We define engagement as the density of transactions (signing up for events, viewing flyers, subscribing to clubs, etc.) that are being instantiated every user of the application. We decided to integrate tracking software in our applications that collects data about how our user uses the app. Although, we will not be collecting any personal information, it is still important to ask the user for permission in the application settings to track their usage so we can improve the experience from their data. We will be using an analytics software called Localytics, specifically designed for mobile phone applications to collect usage data. The data we will be collecting predominantly focuses on certain event-triggers that would give us insight on how engaging our application is. For example an event-trigger could be whenever a user taps the button Subscribe to a particular club. By tracking the frequency density of these events, we are given an idea of how and how often users use particular features. In addition, our tracking tools also generate useful metrics such as user loyalty (number of returning users), session intervals (time of each Loccasion session) and day-part analysis (how the usage changes over varying times of day). Sometimes, when we are unsure if a feature will encourage engagement or not and the only way to find out is to deploy a version of the application live with real users to see if it has gained any traction. It is not uncommon for two versions of the same application to be released at any given moment so some users will get access to newer features before we deploy them to everybody. This is called A/B testing in which we see if a new version of the application leads to better engagement. These features may not even be tangible such as changes in the user-interface, but may also include user-experience changes such as using improved sorting algorithms for the suggested events feed or optimizing the page load times. If there is a positive feedback in engagement with the new version, we will deploy the new features to all users. Because there is always room for growth, this is an active and on-going process from Loccasions moment of launch.

Big Ideas @ Berkeley: 2012 Full Proposal

4. IMPLEMENTATION TIMELINE
Short-term Goals: May-June 2011: By leveraging the Big Ideas competition grant and winner title, we plan to start negotiating partnerships with various student organizations we mentioned above. At the same time, design prototypes will be confirmed and required tasks will be delegated to team members. Landing pages will be built for early-adopter sign-ups, and Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube pages will be created to keep the early-adopters updated with our progress. In the mean time, we will contact our mentor, Lawrence Coburn (CEO of DoubleDutch), and finalize our execution plans with his professional advice. June 2012: As part of our effort to attract more attention of students, we will become more active with our social media campaign. Press releases will be drafted and ready to be distributed to media outlets, including the Daily Cal and Cal Business Magazine. With continual help from more experienced iOS developers and mentorship from Mr. Coburns engineers, we aim to build the first working prototype. This will be deployed for beta testing, and our early-adopters will provide us valuable feedback for improvement. Meanwhile, our demo video will be released on the landing page. We will also start recruiting Loccasion scouts for carrying out our marketing strategies. July 2012: If it is necessary to raise additional funds from other sources, we aim to reach out to Mr. Coburns network of angel investors as well as our personal connections to secure our first funding cycle. We aim to raise $50,000 in the first round and a large portion of this money will be used to scale the backend to accommodate for more users. We will continue working on improving the product based on feedback we receive from our betatesters. Negotiations with students organizations must be done by this time, and we should have solid partnerships with at least 30 different organizations organizations. We will be sponsoring some of their events for advertising and marketing our product. We should also have Loccasion scouts recruited by this time, and the training should immediately start, so that they can be ready for the new semester in the following month. August 2012: Loccasion will be ready to ship to Berkeley students. Loccasion scouts will be performing various tasks to make this project a publicity success. It is crucial to launch before the academic year starts as to take advantage of the high-traffic season in Sproul Plaza. At this point, we will begin continually tracking usage and addressing user concerns to improve the user experience. Long-term Goals: By the end of 2012, we aim to forge more partnerships with a more diverse set of student organizations, and attract more users from various niche populations. Additionally, through our impact evaluation and analysis of usage data collected over several months, we will decide if we need more funding for continued growth. By the end of 2013, we want to be making deals with local businesses such as popular restaurants for providing beneficial incentives to our users. We will also be negotiating deals with these owners regarding their advertisement opportunities to relevant audiences. Additionally, we wish to expand our service to other campuses. Considering the geographical proximity, we believe that Stanford will be a good start. After Stanford, we will eventually expand to the east coast, and tailor our product individually to each campus. Eventually our goal is to merge these experiences together and launch an app to the greater public for events outside of college campuses.

Big Ideas @ Berkeley: 2012 Full Proposal

5. TEAM BIOGRAPHIES
Tony Chen is a first year undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley with an intention of pursuing a Computer Science and Psychology double major. One of his major interests in the technology industry is the issue of relevancy and how algorithms can be used to make a shift from simple social sharing towards relevant and personalized content. He is a proponent of the idea that relevant and personalized technology experiences contribute to the alleviation of information overload. At age 16, he made his first attempt to tackle this problem by founding BuzzBlaze, a social news reader that lets users follow their friends to see what they are reading. Within two weeks of launch, BuzzBlaze gained 500+ active users and was featured on The Next Web and Young Entrepreneur and more. Tony is also the creator of several highly trafficked community websites and blogs. Through these projects, he has acquired a strong social media presence and the required skillets for SEO and viral marketing. Tony is an user-experience/user-interface designer by experience and specializes in workflow design for mobile and web-based applications. As a self-taught iOS programmer, he is keenly interested in exploiting geo-location tools and touch interfaces to solve information overload issues. In addition to his experience with scaling web applications, he is fluent in Python, Java, PHP, Ruby on Rails and W3C standards-based HTML5+CSS design. Louis (Jeong Seuk) Kang is pursuing a Materials Science and Engineering/Electrical Engineering joint degree at the University of California, Berkeley (Class of 2015). Prior to enrolling at Berkeley, he studied Computer Science for a year on a full-scholarship grant, at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology with a focus on mobile development and advanced data structures. He was also awarded a grant to work on ultraviolet water-purification research at the School of Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the previous summer. Louis has extensive experience in working with many well-known startups. Under the mentorship of the Samwer brothers (European Founders Fund), he worked as an operations management intern at Groupon Korea. Louis also has experience in developing for the Android smartphone operating system and was approached by a Civil Engineering professor to build a technical dictionary application. Louis is familiar with the sustainable technology space and is always inventing novel ways of using technology for environmental purposes. In high school, he designed and built a survey processor in C++ for identifying healthy coral using motion detection and color mapping algorithms for research scuba divers. In addition, he founded a non-profit called the Hong Kong Youth Environmental Awareness that raised over $14,000 to fund several marine conservation projects and was named Underwater Hero by several local newspapers. Mentorship Both team members have had experience with scaling and deploying large applications in the past, but it is important to also have technical expertise from a professional mentor. We intend on collaborating with our mentor, Lawrence Coburn who is experienced with deploying applications in university markets. We will maintain this relationship past the competition period and it will be helpful to expand our network of entrepreneur mentors and potential investors.

Big Ideas @ Berkeley: 2012 Full Proposal

6. BUDGET AND NARRATIVE

Big Ideas @ Berkeley: 2012 Full Proposal

Budget Narrative The budget allocation for operations materials and personnel were comprehensively calculated to optimize costs and maximize gains. As a bootstrapped startup, the concept of done is better than perfect is often practiced. This means we try to use the cheapest resources as possible so we can ship features at a faster and more efficient rate. We decided to go with AWS (Amazons Web Services) because of its ability to scale very fast and efficiently. For example, running a sorting algorithms simultaneously when potentially thousands of users are using the application during the high-traffic periods requires more computational power and this array of cloud computing and data storage servers can scale up or down appropriately during and after these peak times. In addition, if we need to add more processing power as our userbase grows, AWS makes this entirely possible at a fraction of the cost of its competitors. As mentioned in the Impact Evaluation section, the need for data analytics tools is important for tracking engagement and making improved iterations of our service. We decided to use two different kinds of analytics. Localytics provides analytics on how the app is being used when deployed in users and gives us useful information about how we can make the product more engaging. NewRelic provides an analysis for our applications live performance. At first, this may seem as an exorbitant cost, but the idea of performance analysis means we have data to understand how we can optimize our application in the backend so we save money in the long-run in terms of upgrading servers and scaling storage. Loccasion will be built on an extensive codebase - one that requires organized collaboration so developers can build on prototypes on higher orders of software abstraction. Version control is important so different branches of the same software can be implemented and tested. We chose

Big Ideas @ Berkeley: 2012 Full Proposal

GitHub because we are most experienced with it and it is relatively easy to add new developers later on. BaseCamp is another project management tool which helps our developers stay on task and meet deadlines. For example, we may use BaseCamp to track several features that we want to push to the production code stack. One of our main methods of attaining online virality is through the use of MailChimp, a web-based email blaster that sends out email updates to our subscribers. By using MailChimp we save money setting up a SMTP server by using theirs instead. In addition the MailChimp backend provides analytics data on how our email campaigns are doing in terms of conversion rates and referral traffic. We have also allocate funds for offline marketing, specifically for sponsoring student organizations in exchange for them using our application to execute their events. This is one of the larger expenses and we calculated the $1000 figure based the number of clubs we initially want to partner with after our launch. We chose to sponsor a maximum of 5 clubs within the first several months and estimated that a $200 allowance per club is reasonable. For testing and development, we are going to use Keynotopia for rapid wireframing. These templates allow us to create many design versions of our product to get an idea of the general user-experience. The iOS developer program costs $99 to enroll and is necessary for our application to be submitted to the App Store. Personnel costs involve hiring multiple recruits for public relations representative and an operations management staff member. The public relations representatives are heavily utilized in the first few weeks of semester during the high-traffic period to introduce the application to students and networking with potential organization partners. We need several PR reps to be strategically positioned in the entrance points of Sproul Plaza and our calculations came to 6-7 working man hours per day over a 15 day period. Our operations management recruit will be a long-term non-technical position for tracking user concerns and managing social media accounts so the main team can focus on product development. We decided to omit the personnel cost for hiring a freelance developer that was in our last proposal because we intend on developing the application ourselves. Previous experience with outsourcing programming features to a freelancer arose many difficulties such as slow turnaround times and barebone implementations. As a result, such applications are not very scalable and may run into optimization problems when we try to expand our initiative. Through professional mentorship and our network of industry engineers, we hope to seek advice on the necessary core technologies, whilst focusing on building on a product that can scale for the long-term. Plans for Financial Sustainability Past 2013 After our application takes off in Berkeley, we will use this as a proof-of-concept to launch in several other campuses. Eventually we aim to take this concept off college campuses and to the general public. For example non-profits can promote their cause in spontaneous locations and individuals can create ad-hoc events. Eventually we see this as a great tool for individuals who share similar interests to connect and share real-life experiences with each other. Once our userbase reaches a mainstream level, we plan on opening our API for commercial use and licensing it out to companies who want to use location technology efficiently in their marketing strategies. Eventually, businesses may be able to use premium accounts with additional capabilities for reaching a larger audience as well as the option to pay for promote events (see appendix V) - events that get more exposure in the users app homescreen.

Big Ideas @ Berkeley: 2012 Full Proposal

APPENDICES
Appendix I. Loccasion design prototypes for the homescreen and events listing interface

Appendix II. The following chart indicates that by 2016, the majority of mobile phones will already be capable of using Loccasion natively.

Big Ideas @ Berkeley: 2012 Full Proposal

Appendix III. The following chart indicates that, by 2015 the number of smartphones in the market will surpass the number of feature phones.

Appendix IV. The following charts indicate that people will become increasingly more familiar with receiving and delivering information using mobile platforms over the next three years.

Big Ideas @ Berkeley: 2012 Full Proposal

Appendix V. The following chart indicates that Loccasion has the potential to become financially sustainable with advertising revenue of promoted events. Considering that Loccasion has the ability to deliver location-specific and relevant advertisements to users, the potential for ad revenue is promising.