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IS480 Team wiki: 2012T1 6-bit Project Deliverables

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6-bit's Chapalang! is a social utility that connects people with friends and new friends
by offering a place for exchanging ideas and information on its public domain.
http://www.chapalang.com

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Project Scope

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As-Is Problem Scenario

Problem 1: Existing e-commerce platforms lack social media presence
Modern social media has incorporated many features which are traditionally independent such as photo hosting, micro-blogging, games, information sharing and other collaborative tools. However, it appears that e-commerce has not hit the perimeters of social media if we do not include informal setups of Facebook Groups by small online shops for the purpose of sale.

Facebook had initiated to include an e-commerce application, but it did not appear to be successful. While other major e-commerce players have started to support the sharing of their links on social media, and using social media accounts to login into their portals, social media presence remains sparsely integrated with e-commerce.

This offers a gap in social media where we could have better understood our friends’ online shopping patterns, the things they like and dislike. The integration could have also introduced viral sharing of promotions and discounted products to more people. Furthermore, the wealth of user’s Facebook data could also be put into valuable use by filtering out relevant products and activities of a portal for a user, alleviating information overload.

Problem 2: Dilemma in buying gifts for friends, and hassle in sharing the costs of gifts
In real world social context, it can be a longstanding dilemma on what to buy for a friend on special occasions such as birthdays. Though social networking has helped us connect with an unprecedented number of friends concurrently and conveniently, many of us lost the same quality of close friendships of yesteryears. It is usually a struggle on what to buy for a friend, because we don’t know for sure if they need something, whether it’s already given by someone else, or even if they will like it.

Adding to that, busy people or those with a smaller gift budget will opt to share the costs of a higher priced gift with other mutual friends. Typically, someone will buy the gift and pay in advance and then start to collect equal shares of money from contributors. Contributors pay the organizer via cash or bank transfer.

However, it is sometimes difficult to recover the full costs of the gift for a variety of reasons. Some of them include,

  • contributors who back out at the 11th hour,
  • insufficient contributors and hence the average contribution amount is above budget to some contributors,
  • busy contributors may have forgotten to pay, or delay payment till a long time later