It was my opportunity on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 to present a cutting-edge collegiate, socially-enabled web 2.0 application to students in the Orfalea School of Business at California Polytechnic (“Cal Poly”) in San Luis Obispo. Professor Jeffrey Danes of the Orfalea School of Business invited me into his entrepreneurial marketing class, the third in a four-course sequence. I described the business and technology strategy of a web startup that I’ve been helping out over the past year, to the 45 business school seniors enrolled in the “Entrepreneurship” program.
California Polytechnic University
I described the vision for this startup, how it is unique, and technology behind the “proof of concept” Drupal 6 site that we’ve built out to where it is ready for soft-launch Beta testing. I demonstrated our Flash-based iPhone companion application mockup, and described how we are using the program interface to Facebook through the Facebook API. I also set the broader picture for this type of application, touching among other trends, upon important trends between the “big 3″ of social networking — Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. I also presented our perspective regarding competing and complementary collegiate web 2.0 startup companies (Cal Poly students then performed a competitive analysis for us).
Because we were meeting in the business school’s computer lab classroom, the students were able to submit questions to me using “Dialogr“, a twitter-like (but private) database application that facilitates virtual brainstorming and development of ideas. Dialogr is an web tool developed by Professor Danes to facilitate for group discussion, brainstorming, deliberation, consensus, and decision-making. Mr. Danes and his colleagues make very effective use of this tool, in several different modes, in classroom settings.
OpenSourcery of Portland, Oregon also visited with the student Beta testing teams via teleconference, detailing certain aspects of this large-scale Drupal 6.0 development program, which was launched back in August 2008. I partnered with OpenSourcery in February 2009 to take the Drupal 5.0 prototype that I had coded working with a number of top Freelance Drupal and PHP engineers, into Drupal 6. OpenSourcery ported it, theme it to my specs, enhanced some of the functionality, managed it using Agile-mode application development, and has been interacting with the Cal Poly Beta team during Beta testing.
We look forward to working with the our new friends at the Cal Poly School of Business over the coming quarters.