Descheduling Application

Executive Summary:

DeScheduling (DS) is a smartphone application that aims to provide students with an all-in-one scheduling software. This scheduler will help balance the typical university student's class life & personal life. The software will run an algorithm to optimally schedule student tasks. Want to know when major campus events & Boston events are happening so you can make room for it? Want to know when you have time for group meetings and study sessions? This product will help to incorporate these into your schedule.

This product will be offered through both the Android and Apple application store. The smartphone application industry size is extremely large and only increasing in size each year. This offers us a lot of potential for success and growth, especially in the Boston area where over 250,000 college students reside. DeScheduling will be offered completely free for download, and profitability will be derived mainly through advertising revenues.

Competitively, DeScheduling offers services and multi-functionality that no other app currently offers. ChromatiCal, TimeSpread, and Njoy TimeTable are all competitors who offer a similar mobile scheduling app. However through our collaboration with Blackboard, our application stands out with its user-friendly integration system and focus on a student's busy life schedule, which includes many activities and events outside of the classroom.

Through our analyses of the strong industry and target market conditions and outlook, our product will prove to be an innovative and practical mobile scheduling app that has very favorable potential for growth.

Mission Statement: Need to figure out who was in charge of putting this together, believe it was Arturro.

Situation Analysis:

Company SWOT Analysis:

Strengths:

* Low startup costs. Intimate knowledge of the market.

* Collaboration with Blackboard

* Low initial risk and elasticity

Weaknesses:

* First time going into business. No programming skills (must hire). Revenue solely through advertising.

Opportunities:

* Underserved category of the market. Huge student population across the US (1/4 new every year)

Threats:

* Existing competition. Relative ease for competition to emerge.

* Future advancement in technology

Product SWOT Analysis:

Strengths:

* Ease of use and directions given for beginners. Free in the app stores. Can always be updated to improve based on feedback.

* Target Market is clear & concise focusing solely on college students which is beneficial from an advertiser standpoint

Weaknesses:

* Potential negative perception of mobile advertisements within application

Opportunities:

* Can catch viral amongst students and spread like wild fire into a large student population & further expand market share

Threats:

* Must be original and still be competitive with other similar apps

* Failure to incorporate future advancement in technology

Competitive Analysis: Believe Cody has it on his laptop so need him to submit in FB group. Also upon her comments from our earlier submission, we need to add additional work into it.

We, being college students ourselves, think that we will have a major competitive advantage in understanding and relating to the general student market. We feel that college students will be eager to try this free scheduling app that integrates blackboard assignments, campus events, local events, and local promotions. Local restaurants, bars, clubs and venues will want to advertise events and promotions on DS once realizing its potential popularity among college students. Also no competitor offers a product that uses an algorithm to optimally schedules days based on personal preferences. After the first year we will expand to other universities/colleges in Boston, integrating each of their campus events, bars, etc. After continued success, we will expand to other cities across the country, earning our revenue through the advertising.

While the main roles and tasks of students are going to class, doing homework, and studying, they also have many other events going on. Apps such as TimeSpread and Njoy Timetable allow for students to input their class schedules into tables for easy reading access, however they lack multi-functionality. They also do not take into account a student's out of class activities, such as social events or part time jobs. Our app will allow these users to be able to put all of those different activities onto one scheduling calendar, so that they will not miss out on anything.

Currently, our closest competitor is ChromatiCal, which offers a similar scheduling service for all aspects of a student's life. However, ChromatiCal is complicated to use at first startup, and does not integrate with any other outputs; all events and settings must be manually inputted. Our app will allow users to connect to their BlackBoard and social media outputs to automatically input their class schedules and events into their calendar. From there, they can then choose to hide or show certain events and activities. With social media and the internet so rapidly growing, our automatic integration system will make students' hectic lives easier by filling out their calendar for them just by connecting to their BlackBoard or Facebook.

In addition to our automatic integration system, our app also has a big differentiating advantage in its focus with students' out-of-classroom activities by offering suggestions for local promotions and hot events going on. We will also offer our app completely free, with no need to purchase a premium upgrade for access for full services.

Customer