Overview ​

To start, I just wanted to say that I thought all of the pitches from the Monday's class highlighted some creative and interesting solutions to important, real-world problems. I loved the variety across various problem domains among the groups. I am super excited to hear the rest of the groups present their impact cases on Wednesday!

Specific Pitches ​

After hearing all of the great pitches, I have some questions, ideas, and suggestions for a few of the teams. I didn't share in-person due to time contraints, or hadn't thought of the feedback until after the fact. I forgot some of the team names, but it should still be clear which team I am discussing.

Studying w/ Songs ​

I think this is a really brilliant idea. On the surface, it seems like a relatively simple implementation and would be super useful. Not sure what conrete evidence the team found regarding any studies, however I have certainly used mnemonic based studying strategies in the past. One small piece of feedback I had was I think the pitch would have been more compelling live in person versus the video. It would seem less scripted, and would bring more energy to the room when hearing about their solution live and in-person.

Assist ​

Assist is a very interesting idea that coupled with user engagement could be a novel app. I believe this contingency of user engagment will be a tough task though. From my experiences, I would think that the requests made on a more personal level would result in getting more help to complete a task. For instance, texting a few of my friends 1-on-1 for help has been more successful than texting a groupchat of the 30 guys that live in my fraternity. Maybe my view is skewed, but I think this is a pretty large conceptual disconnect in this app. In my opinion, personalizing or incentivizing other users to help in some way is a critical aspect of this application.

Rentcourse ​

This is an awesome idea. Last summer, looking for housing over last summer for my internship was a total hassle. From their presentation, it was clear that the group had thoughtfully constructed their impact case. The only concern I would personally have is that with all of the features they mentioned up, the implementation may be infeasible. What do I really know... but I would personally suggest to begin with a small subset of the features they mentioned that would create a useful application, and then build up from there.