INST 346
Technologies Infrastructure and Applications
Fall 2017
Assignment L6

In this lab you will create parts of a business plan for development of a new Internet-enabled application. Start by choosing some new application for which the enabling technology currently exists. By new, I mean BOTH that (1) there no current widely used system that addresses the same goals, and (2) your idea is different in some important ways from any prior or existing (but nor yet widely used) system for achieving the goals. The first requirement means that you can't propose to create anything like Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, etc. The second requirement means that you can't exactly recreate Dogster (http://www.dogster.com/), or anything else that already exists (or ever has). You are free to create any Internet-enabled application that you like, but to get you started here are a few ideas:

• An online improv comedy club in which people are automatically selected from the audience to improvise (on webcam) a comedy skit with one to three other randomly selected audience members. [This is patterned after https://www.jamkazam.com/, which does something similar for musicians.]
• A language learning service that pairs people who speak a language with others who want to learn that language for conversations on a broad range of topics, and that uses automatic speech recognition to help the language learner to look up words that they find difficult during the conversation.
• A system for contributing CPU time on your personal computer to meeting the computational needs of specific charities (e.g., for sequencing the genomes of pets with specific genetic diseases, or for mining bitcoin for Habitat for Humanity, or for decoding the Voynich manuscript). [This is patterned after https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/].
• A virtual reality tourist service in which a guide with a shoulder-mounted 360-degree 3D camera walks around some actual tourist attraction (e.g., Pompeii, the south pole, or Easter Island) and gives you a live personal tour.

Your next step should be to write out the details of what your service will do. This should include two parts. First should be the functions as seen by each type of user. Note that you might have more than one kind of user (for example, in the language learning app, you would have at least the language learner and the person who already knows the language). Second should be a description of how your app uses the Internet. This second part should include technical details based on what you have learned in this course. For example, do you use TCP or UDP? Client-server or peer-to-peer? What are your network speed and latency requirements? What types of cybersecurity considerations arise? Those are just examples, you can surely think of more.

Now that your idea is written down, it is time to give some thought to what this is going to cost and who is going to pay for it. Tourist guides at the south pole are surely expensive. And internet bandwidth from the south pole may be even more expensive since it will need to come by polar orbiting satellite. Sharing your CPU time would be cheaper, but still someone is paying for that closet full of computers at Berkeley that runs SETI@home and someone will need to pay for whatever hardware and programming you need too. You don't need precise estimates of the costs, but you should know what costs there will be, which are large and which are small, and who it is you expect will pay for them. Don't get hung up on this part of the assignment, but do sketch out some of the financial details.

Finally, tell us how you would go about making this a success. To be successful, you need to do at least two things. First, you need to build something that works well, where what "works well" is decided on by your users, not by you! So you can't just cook it up in your basement and then deliver it to the world fully baked. You need some way to LEARN what works well and what doesn't. How will you do that? Second, you need to get people to use it. Lots of people. So you can't adopt the approach from the movie Field of Dreams ("if you build it, they will come ..."). Somehow people need to learn about your cool new thing. How will that happen? More to the point, what will you do to help (or cause!) this to happen?

That's a lot for one assignment, so for practical reasons you should limit yourself to 3 pages total. (roughly 1.25 pages for the first and last part and 0.5 pages for the financial part in the middle). You will do better at this assignment if you first write a bit longer than that and then edit what you turn in to be more tightly and compellingly written.

Submit this on ELMS before class on the date indicated on the schedule.

For extra credit, obtain venture capital funding, actually create what you have described, and rapidly get to at least 10 million users.