Facebook Seminar

The Facebook Seminar was yesterday. I was way off the mark in expecting that it would be a boring evening, listening to one presentation after another. Generally, all teams did a great job with a few surprises such as the excellent video about the marketplace by Joshua and his team. :)

During the first lecture of CS3216, I learned that ideas are not enough for success and that execution matters. After yesterday seminar, I realized that on top of the above point, it is also very important to protect our ideas and applications through patents, trademarks or some other means. Although it seems difficult to do so, we must find ways to prevent other people from stealing our ideas easily like the Zynga stole the Cafe World idea from the Playfish's Restaurant City. It would be great if Prof Leong would organize a workshop or a discussion on how we could protect our applications other than using patents and trademarks which are pretty expensive. :D

As for the application critique, I am assigned to write on the Cafe World application. Overall, I feel that the Cafe World is a well executed game with a lot of interaction between users such as sending gifts, visiting friend's cafe and inviting neighbours. The ability of a user to expend and customize his or her store gives a sense of possession and pride to the user and hook the user's interest. Also, time sensitive game play such as cooking time makes it necessary for the user to log on to the game frequently. Apart from occasional bugs, the Cafe Word is overall a great game with a good user interface.

During the presentation, Jonathan focused on the importance of having huge fan base and heavy marketing to the success of the application. He pointed out that although the Fishplay came out with the Restaurant City six months before the Cafe World by the Zynga and both have similar game play, the Cafe World is currently doing a lot better than the Restaurant City in terms of monetary return and number of active users (30millions and 14 millions active users respectively). The success of the Cafe World may be credited to the fact that the Zynga has a very huge fan base due to it's other popular games such as TexasHoldem Poker. Also, the Zynga has spent 50 million US dollars on marketing last year alone. This shows that good applications also need intensive marketing and proper building up of fan base to be a huge success.

Another notable point from the presentation was on Lead Generation. It is a marketing term for the creation of potential customer interest. A brief research will show that there are two different types of leads, namely sales leads and marketing leads. If properly used, Lead Generation is a win-win situation for both buyers and sellers as it acts as a profile matching tool. However, as mentioned by Jonathan during the presentation, Lead Generation is usually abused by scammers to trick users into buying items or registering for services unknowingly. For Zynga, Lead Generation is one of its main income, bringing in millions of dollars every year. However, in my point of view, it is indeed a very unethical practice by the Zynga to let scammers use Lead Generation on their applications such as the Cafe World. In the long run, the Zynga will lose its trustworthiness among customers and will lose out to other companies which are more trustworthy.

Another point that I would like to raise here is that how we could keep our conscience clean and still succeed in life when "the world is in deep shit!" as Prof Leong claimed. Many people may become overly greedy and take unethical actions to succeed. They may argue that it's good to be greedy as it motivates oneself to succeed. But in my point of view, an alternative and better motivation will be the love for work. When people truly love what they are doing, greed takes a back seat in their journey to success. Many successful people may even attest that greed may even be a distraction in their work as greed will lead to selfishness and cause distrust among family members and colleagues. Up to now, I still believe that a person can be successful in business or life while still being morally upright. I may be wrong. I may be right. But I do hope that I am right on this issue.

In conclusion, I would like to repeat that the Facebook seminar was a joyful and valuable experience and a few points including the relation between ethical issue and the profit making kept me thinking. About the Cafe World, it is very much a complete application although some improvement can be done on the design of the individual characters. Finally, I would like to encourage everyone, including myself, to be ethical in our pursuit of success as what go around usually come around in life.