Hey everyone! This is my final IEOR 190E VideoBlog post.

It has been a great run in IEOR 190E. My group has come up with a bunch of ideas and contrarily to what I believed coming into the course, the ideation is actually the easiest part of the process. Now that we have executed or are in the process of executing it feels great to finally run with our idea.

I also want to congratulate the rest of the team for all the great work that they have done. We made it even harder on ourselves by pivoting about a week ago but now that all is said and done I believe that stockademy is going to be great!

See you all on Tuesday and have a great rest of the Year!

Cheers!
Oliviero

Hi all! this is my thirteenth Special Edition Thanksgiving Week IEOR 190E video blog post.

We have decided to go with Stockademy and I am making logo and designs... I know that Zach and Neil are busy working away at the code and have made some progress. I think it is already in iOS and they are working on making it a web app and android as well.

See you next week and have a great Thanksgiving!

Cheers!
Oliviero

Hey all this is my twelfth IEOR 190E Blog Post.

This week we are coming to consolidate our last idea as this is probably the last time we can pivot due to the logistics of making the app....

See you in class and we look forward to hearing your constructive criticism!!

Cheers,
Oli

Hey all this is my eleventh IEOR 190E Blog Post:

See you next week!

Cheers!
Oliviero

Hi all!

This is my tenth IEOR 190E Video Blog Post

We have decided to pivot yet again! We present: Sizzle...
And were looking forward to hear what you have to say about it!

That's all for now!
Cheers,

Oliviero

Hi all!

This is my 9th IEOR 190E Video Blog Post.

This week we got to use the Critica platform to critique each other's projects...

That's all for now!

Cheers!
Oliviero

Hey Everyone!

This is my 8th IEOR 190E Mobile Applications Blog Post.

We have are deciding whether or not to pivot slightly and look forward to presenting our new idea 'Tastes' to the class today.

That's all for now!
Cheers,

Oliviero

Hi all,

This is my seventh IEOR 190E Mobile Applications class blog post.

This week we made a survey to get a better feel for what people of all ages thought about our app idea. Looking at the data we could make a lot of interesting inferences...

That's all from this week!

Cheers!
Oliviero

Hey everyone!

This is my sixth IEOR 190E Mobile Applications class Blog post.

This weekend my team's engineers went to the hackathon and I spent a large amount of time educating myself in design. A close friend has spent a couple years interning in the design industry in San Francisco and I took the opportunity to pick his brain over lunch.

Not only was I pointed in the right direction for resources to start both low and high-fidelity prototyping myself, but most importantly I was introduced to the vast pools of projects that people have uploaded to the internet on sites like Pinterest, Behance and Dribble. Browsing these sites for inspiration, I have already thought of many ideas that I think would compliment our app well.

I'm looking forward to continue exploring design to help further aid our team in this process.

That's all from me!

Cheers,
Oliviero

Hi everyone! This is my fifth post to my IEOR 190E blog.

After getting some feedback in class regarding our team's two ideas for the application, we regrouped and further discussed the pros and cons of pursuing either app. This took some time but we have seemed to reach a consensus for now.

We have discussed a few more features of the application and solidified its mission.  I was surprised as to how helpful the feedback from our fellow classmates was. I've always been one that searches for constructive criticism to improve my work, and some of the advice that people were giving us was really insightful! I'm very glad to have such a large pool of people to share ideas with near by, as they might be my team's greatest resource to work with.

That's all for this episode!
See you next week

Cheers,
Oliviero

Hey everyone! This is my fourth post to my IEOR 190E mobile applications class blog page.

This week as we are now a month into the semester, we have finalized our groups. After having gotten to know various people in the course, I have decided that I will be working with Niel, Zach, Riley and Jimmy.

This past week we have been trying to figure out what exactly it is that we want to build. We all decided that we would brainstorm a bit on our own before meeting up to share our ideas and try to decide on a final idea.  I did this first by thinking of issues that frustrate me and of things that could simply be done better and I came up with a few ideas.

I then met up with my team and after some discussion we seem to have narrowed down the multiple ideas that we brought to the table to mostly two ideas. I am looking forward to seeing what our classmates have to say about our ideas as they can hopefully give us some feedback as two which of the two ideas is the most appealing.

That's all from me for this week and you'll be hearing from me soon.

Cheers!

Oliviero

Hey everyone! This is my third post to my IEOR 190e mobile applications blog.

This past week I worked together with Alex, Julia and Riley to build a lego model airplane. We divided the team as such: Julia and I were the architects and Alex and Riley were the engineers.

On Friday Julia and I went to the CET building to receive instructions.  As soon as the task was presented to us, I could already start to see the difficulties that would arise during the assignment. We decided that I was to be the architect who would write the instructions for the engineers and Julia would describe to me to the best of her abilities how she thought the plane was built. The fact that she was restricted to not be able to touch the plane and move it around made the task of figuring out its' blueprint much harder. Personally I found it very challenging to convey into precise step-by-step instructions what the engineers needed to do to build the parts that Julia was describing to me as I myself wasn't even 100% sure what they looked like having never seen the model or any drawings of it.

After a couple of hours I had put together the set of instructions. Unfortunately Julia wasn't able to recognize a lot of the precise lego pieces that were used in the model so the instructions to a few parts of the plane lacked what I considered the necessary detail needed to build the model as Julia saw it.  Nevertheless, hopefully our team of engineers was able to make something out of our work and I am excited to see what they produced today!

That's all for now!
Cheers,

Oliviero

Hi all!  This is the second post to my IEOR 190e blog.

This week I worked with a new team of people that I had never met before: Zach, Tyler, Clare and Ryan.  Our task was to go out and make unusual requests to absolute strangers in an attempt to get your offer both rejected and accepted at least once.  The first thing that came to mind was: "this is going to be awkward" and soon all I was thinking about was what stunts to pull on these innocent by-passers.

I had never done anything like this before in my life, but had seen plenty of videos on the internet of people going around making absurd requests so I was aware that things could take a turn for the better or for the worse very quickly.  This led me to prepare a sort of premeditated script of things to say to people to try to steer them towards the answer that I wanted. I did not expect what was about to happen when we actually took the streets...

What in my mind seemed like unusual and unreasonable requests obviously weren't to the average Berkeley resident as it was SO hard to actually get a rejection! Or maybe I just had a misconception on the things people are willing to do for each other... Either way my premeditated script was not steering people in the direction I wanted it to so I decided to ditch it and just start "going with the flow" approaching people and pointing out things that I thought were odd or fascinating about them and sparking conversation... I learnt that after opening up to people they were both more "compliant" and easier to read. This made the assignment more interesting as I could tell whether the people were leaning towards rejecting or accepting me, and trying to convince them to take the opposite action was what made this fun.

Figuring out smart ways to videotape my team members was probably more challenging than actually talking to the people as the by-passers started looking at me on multiple occasions possibly aware that I was recording them or at least a little bit freaked out that my phone was pointed in their direction. I found that the best ways to take the videos were: to pretended to be taking a call, to sit at a neighbouring table or to simply put the phone with the camera pointing outwards into a shirt pocket.

This was a fun and exciting weekend and am looking forward to what we will be assigned next!
Cheers,

Oliviero

Hi! My name is Oliviero Figus and this is the first post to my IEOR 190e mobile applications class blog!

This week I met with my team members Riley, Laith, Kek and Shao. We decided that the app that we wanted to vivisect was Venmo: a peer-to-peer payment app that is rapidly growing in popularity.

Venmo is special because it enables users to send money to each other using an interface comparable to a text message as well as combining the payments with a small social media.  I assigned myself to analyse the app's design principles as my other group members researched the user-interface, back-end and business model.  I learned that the design is oriented about being "content-first", fast, mobile and trustworthy.  The new venmo design was finalised after having studied a world-leader in application design, apple, and its iOS7 applications. The venmo co-founders want the apps design to evoke: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjuRhETwbI0

After having finished research and preparing information to share with each other, we met up again and put together a 5-slide deck to present our findings to the rest of the class.

That's all for now!
Cheers,
Oliviero