Drew Cogbill | Thesis Blog

I met with DT faculty member Dave Carroll to go over my work for Pigeon.  We talked things technical, business, and academic.

Technical:

• Asterisk came up again
• He thought TXTML may be a good prototyping tool for SMS sign up, especially if it could be connected to my current Voxeo prototyping.  SMSs could be handled through some type of IMAP processing.

Business:

• If ad based, the ads could be contextual.  (As creepy as it sounds) messages could be decoded, and if someone mentions the Eifel tower an ad for France travel packages could play or be generated from a google ad words ad.
• Again the idea of some customers paying to support others came up.  I thought that perhaps at sign up users could sign up for a free account or a paying account which will support free acounts (similar to the Radiohead album sales and Good magazine’s newest subscription sign ups).
• Paying customers could perhaps get general or specific information about how their contribution is supporting users who can’t afford (e.g. “Your contribution this month has allowed 42 pigeons to be delivered”).

Academic

• New York Talk Exchange: the book - for statiscal data and essays on how international phone traffic is used by the extremes of the economic ladder.
• Mobile Persuasion - ed. B.J. Fogg
• Mobile Interaction Design - Matt Jones and Gary Marsden - good case studies in evaluating effectiveness of systems
• Mobile Democracy: Essays on Society, Self and Politics

Dave thought that the best case scenario would be to have a working alpha by the end of this semester and a working beta by the end of next semester (”with 5000 users”).