Today on the 25th of April we submitted our final year project iDMe, we also printed a hardback copy for submission to the school of computing.
Over the last couple of weeks we have been finishing up the documentation and adding final details to the application. We are delighted to have finished and submitted our project having worked continuously on it throughout the year.
We are now in week 11 of our second semester, we are continuing to work on the development of the prototype we hope to implement a QR Code reader and Scanner in the coming days following an meeting with our supervisor Cathal Gurrin. We are happy with the development stage we have reached, the submission date for the project itself is the 20th of April therefore we are approximately 2 weeks off the final submission date.
We are currently exploring various security aspects of our application to ensure we have looked at the security legislations from all angles for that final submission. We are looking at creating a second application which is specifically for the nightclub owner or user which will incorporate the QR code reader of the application itself. We are looking forward to getting the project complete in the coming weeks although we are aware there is a lot of work to be done.
We are not in week 9, today we had a meeting with our supervisor. We have been working towards our end goal of the prototype delivery. To-date we have a log in and register functionality working which brings the logged in user to their home page whereby they can see the identification and verify the age of that user. We have been basing out User Interface on the sketchs inserted in previous blogs.
We are currently using a web host called 000 web host which provides us with carious tools such as Cpanel. From this web host we can insert out php files and also browse our database.
We have also been working on our documentation as we are seeking further market research with various other sources that may be able to provide information to us.
In the coming weeks we plan to continue to develop our application and documentation.
We are now finishing week four of second semester, this week we met with our supervisor Cathal Gurrin for our weekly meeting. We discuss the developments we made since the previous week Which was how we had met with Dr.Donal Fitzpatrick to seek advice in the selection of using our own server or using the Computing.Dcu Server. He advised us to speak with Gary Conway in order to get our database set up on the computing server to ensure the IP was the same at all times.
We then met with Gary Conway who spoke with us about the use of a myPHP database and the linking of this database to an android studio application. He provided us with access to our own database called 4thProject17_1 on the student.computing.dcu.ie host.
Evelyn and I have also began working on our documentation whereby we met with Marcus Helfert who is our course convener to discuss the business plan we had submitted for our application iDMe. He gave us some tips to improve which we took on board and hope to use to improve our final document.
We are containing to practice Android Studio in order to overcome the learning curve of application development threw java which is our challenge at the moment.
We have another meeting with our supervisor early next week on Monday the 27th where we hope to continue meeting our goals to get to the end delivery in time.
This week we have began researching the various aspects of the delivery of our prototype. We have been testing out android studio which is where we will be developing our application.
It is now week 2 of our second semester and to ensure the continuous improvements and development of our application we have set up weekly meetings with our Supervisor Cathal Gurrin. We met with him this week and have set tasks to be completed for the coming weeks. We also met with Donal Fitzpatrick who was a lecturer of ours for the past 3 years. He gave us advice on where to set up our servers and databases and platforms which are best to use for this. For example we had researched using MAMP as our server provider etc. Although we are not going to create our server on the computing.dcu server.
We will now have weekly meetings on Monday mornings with our Supervisor to ensure we keep on top of the work and share our ideas in order to produce our prototype.
Back again, Christmas and exams done and dusted! After a lovely few weeks off it is time to get back into the swing of things.
Above, you can see we have decided on the type of interface we want to implement. Which is a simple design with a fixed colour scheme.
Having submitted the midterm delivery we have a more detailed idea of what we want to do and produce for our customer. With this in mind we have began our research for the development of our iDMe application. We are currently researching and watching tutorials on the use of Android Studio in the hope to educate ourselves on the best use of the software.
We will be meeting up with our supervisor tomorrow in order to seek advice and guidance in our progression of the application.
We have finished our first semester lectures, with a couple of weeks before Christmas Evelyn and I have decided to dedicate this time to our second Submission of our Midterm Delivery. In order to complete this correctly we feel there was a lot of research to be done. In order for us to get a better understanding of the development of an application the security and different resources we will utilise we decided we needed to speak to an expert. Therefore, we decided to get in touch with a family friend who is an application developer and has previously designed software for various platforms.
On the 15/12 we headed out to Tallaght where we met the COO, Dr.George Mitchel of Realise it. We met with him for over 2 hours where he expressed many ideas and challenges we would face including tips to overcome these challenges.
From this we had a basis to begin our technical delivery and felt we were in a more informed position to complete various aspects of the Midterm Report.
We also met with Dr.Alan who also was an aid in our understanding of the technical delivery.
Our aim for over Christmas is to distribute the work and research in order for us to be able to complete the report and focus on our exams in January.
Thursday 10th November:
I have just come out of our second presentation and it went very well. We were talking about our business proposition in the context of our business, competition, market and research and development.
We were very happy with how the presentation went and the feedback we got on our idea and technical delivery as that is what we are currently focusing on. We presented to Marcus Helfert and he said our idea was ‘Too-good’ which were very impressed with.
We are currently exploring the different technical deliveries we could go with one of which is that we could eliminate the database we are saying we would provide as the security would be too high etc. and it would be an easier concept to actually just have something like an e-signature to verify that the person is in fact themselves.
Our initial delivery is due on Monday for our final year project. It outlines our original thoughts and information we have gathered to date such as finances to date and our market research. We are working hard to get it finished and ensure we have everything we need in the report to show off our idea and the potential of this particular idea.
We hope to make progress on the technical delivery and speak to our other customer the nightclubs next week too.
– Orla
We are now looking further into our financial Projections following a lecture with Tony O’Brien we have been given a more detailed insight into the business and technical needs of our overall application.
We are undergoing cash flow forecasts, profit and loss accounts and balance sheets. Which will hopefully give us an indication of when we will begin to make profits and be able to pay back the loans we plan to take out originally to employ our developers and get the application publicised. We have come to some assumptions into details such as accountants and developers. We hope to only need 1 developer and get a starting of graduate accountant to save funds.
We have also been further looking into our Market Analysis and due to the previously mentioned survey I spoke of in my last blog we can give exactly how many people will utilise and pay for our application. To have this information is of huge advantage to us as a pose to where we are currently feeling like we are making a lot of guesses and estimates in relation to costs, expenses and profits within our first 3 years. To be able to back up our market analysis with the information we have gotten of these 350+ people is priceless research.
We have been looking into secondary research online to see who ae available market and target market are and who will be able to target long term.
We have our first proper presentation next week on the 14th November and we are busy preparing our Technical delivery/ Timelines and workload distributions.
One issue we actually came across was our competitor in that there is no similar application on the market to date apart from the traditional way of using identification. This is our only competition at the moment we felt we could mention and also to keep developing in the case that there is a similar product released in the future we are top of the market and will stay there.
Following our presentation a couple of weeks ago we felt we needed to undergo our primary market research. Primarily our main issue was to find our if there is a gap In the market for our application and who would be interested in doing this.
Taking into consideration we have no funds to market this idea, we created a survey on survey monkey and began sharing it on all of our social media platforms. By asking friends and relatives to do the survey for feedback. Within a few hours we had 200+ surveys complete. Within 24 hours we had 350 with 90% of these people saying they think our survey is a good idea and would be interested in paying for this facility. The feedback we got from the survey was triple what we had originally expected and at zero cost.
This has given us a head start and greater insight to what our market will pay as one of the main questions and issues around the creation and publication of any application of software is financial issues. Here we can ensure there is a constant cash flow. With other funds such as investors and our partners of nightclubs we hope to break even a lot erlier than many other application ideas.
The survey itself was only 7 questions and offered the illustration of the results in charts for easy legislation and input into our business plan.
We have also come up with an idea of screen shooting the feedback we were getting online. Such as ‘great app, would definitely use it’ within our presentation as something extra that may grab the attention of the buyers.
Along with this we are going to do a video timeline of the progress we are making on the application and the hurdles and highs of that process.
orladunne 