Week Two: PHX Startup week!

Hi everyone, and welcome back to week two!

During the second week, we discussed more about what was going to happen at the Phoenix Comicon in terms of getting volunteers and just more updates on the event.

I want to talk about what happened in the aforementioned four areas: Surveys, Video, Website, and Community-building.

Surveys: The survey is basically finished and ready to send out when the time is right (more about this next week).

Video: I have a basic script of the video done, and my mentors like the idea. We will get to making the video soon.

Website: There's not much in terms of updates on this one, we've put this one on hold while I work on the other stuff. I've talked about my ideas with the website and we will get to it once the more pressing matters are handled.

Community-building: I will be dropping this category because it isn't of much value. They already have their social media active for the things that they want to address and adding more stuff will not add any additional value. I may see if I can help with their existing social media later on.

Now..

I went to PHX Startup Week yesterday! It was incredibly exciting to meet like-minded people in the entrepreneurial mindset and I learned a lot from numerous presentations. I actually gave a mini-presentation of my own! Basically, one of the speakers asked for three volunteers and I volunteered without any idea as to what I was getting into. Turns out, we were all going to play an improv presentation game (I forget the name they gave it). Essentially, each of us have six slides each, automated to switch every 15 seconds (so a total of 90 seconds). We had no idea what was on any of the slides and we had to come up with a presentation/story for the slides on the spot, not knowing what the next slide would be! By the way, this was on the main stage of the event with many people present in the room. It was a fantastic experience!

Well, that's it for week two, come back for more next week! Thanks!

Week One: The Beginning

Hi everyone, and welcome back to week one!

So the way this blog will work is that I will be blogging about the previous week as soon as the new week starts (in this case, each new week starts on Wednesday).

During the first week, we discussed what was going to happen at the Phoenix Comicon (http://www.phoenixcomicon.com/). This year, Game CoLab will be in the main convention center! This is a great opportunity for them and all the developers in the area that want to showcase their projects through them.

I decided to split my work at Game CoLab into four areas: Surveys, Video, Website, and Community-building. You'll notice that some of these categories will evolve or even disappear week by week, depending on what is relevant to them and what work I get done.

For this week, I did not have any tangible work to show, but rather I was getting an idea of the approach I wanted to take with each of these areas.

Surveys: Last year, a student at BASIS Chandler did an internship at Game CoLab and he did a survey to scope the market. Part of my survey will encompass his questions as well as expanding to some of my own, related slightly to the technical challenges in the market. We decided that it didn't really make sense for me to just ask about technical challenges; but that it would be more beneficial to them and to everyone else to expand upon what was done last year:

Video: When you visit the Game CoLab website (www.gamecolab.org), you don't get a good sense of what Game CoLab is about unless you click the About page, on the left. What we'd like to do is have some kind of a video trailer/commercial on the front page describing what Game CoLab is about.

Website: I decided to put myself in the shoes of a first-time user of this website, and thought about the possible things I would want to see improved assuming the entire website wasn't being redesigned. Essentially what I came up with is that the menu items on the left side needed to be larger and spaced out a little more, and that the gallery should tell more of a story than it does at the moment (this is aside from the aforementioned video).

Community-building: I thought about possibly starting some kind of Facebook group to get people talking to each other. I also considered a possible forum on their website. The challenges in the first week were to figure out what audience these would be for (business to developers, developers to developers, public?). More on how I dropped this area (more specifically, adding more things that people had to join) next week..

Well, that's it for week one, come back for more next week! Thanks!

Week One: Pre-Beginning Post/Project Goals?

Hi everyone and welcome to my blog!

I'm Anirudh Ravichandran, a high school senior at BASIS Chandler. Please check out the "About Project" page and the "Research Proposal" page to get an idea of what this project is about! I will be blogging every week for the next ten weeks. This post just includes a few thoughts of mine before I get started at Game CoLab soon.

Due to the nature of this project, I do expect things to change as I go along. I wrote the proposal a few months ago and my goals with the project have already changed since.

In terms of presentable project goals, I hope to conduct surveys to get some quantitative information that would be useful to Game CoLab. My largest goal (assuming it matches what Game CoLab is looking for) is to help them grow an online community, using all the amazing connections they already know!

In terms of my own goals personally, I hope to make many connections and learn anything and everything I can!