Creative3 Pitch 101 Webinar

Today, I logged into the Creative3 Pitch 101 Webinar, hosted by Philippe Ceulen of QUT Creative Enterprise Australia (CEA). This was my second go at attending this event. I originally signed up for the physical workshop that took place in QUT Kelvin Grove. But it was not to be and so I was grateful for the webinar 2nd chance!

While I attended a few Startup Weekends, I always seem to miss the pitch workshops. Mostly because I wasn't going to be the one doing the final pitch and usually there was something else that needed to be done while the workshop was on. I also missed to the pitch afternoons that were part of pre-events. As a result, this was my first time I got an extended presentation on pitching.

I am not going to recap everything Philippe covered, but I wanted to highlight three resources that Philippe highlighted. Namely, the Only 10 Slides You Need in Your Pitch which remains the gold standard for pitching but that Philippe extended by two slides. I did take a screenshot of Philippe's slide list but I can't find it. But I know the last slide was "contact" and we had a discussion about how it's important to make sure the contact slide contains up to date information.  Might seem like a small thing but the early life of startups is about transitions. So it's not unusual to find broken websites and emails that bounce. Unfortunately, every failure to connect is potentially a lost opportunity. So the "contact us" slide is very important.

Figure 1: Dramatic Structure

The other two resources Philippe shared were around the need to tell a story. I think we all know that most humans are not good with facts and figures but we do remember stories. Whenever pitching is mentioned, the "tell a story" aspect is always emphasised. But Philippe made the explicit connection to the dramatic structure, using Figure 1.

Being a fiction writer who is actively writing a fantasy novel, I am of course familiar with the dramatic structure. But I didn't think about trying to think of a pitch in that context. To that end, Philippe pointed us to "The mountain pass, the berries and the princess" by Alan Jones, who is an entrepreneur in residence at QUT's accelerators. I am looking forward to reading the article.

So yes, Pitching 101 as an afternoon well spent, in my opinion! To finish this post off, I'll just mention that the workshop was held to promote and get potential participants ready for Creative3 Pitch competition. I am keen to see how the event unfolds. It should be fun!

Tanda Hackathon 2018

Last Friday I attended the opening night of the Tanda Hackathon 2018 with the theme of employee experience. I did want to take part when I signed up for the event. But, unfortunately, since then I had other commitments come up that meant that I didn't want to devote my entire Saturday to this event. Also, the friend I wanted to do the event with is now busy with an application for the RCL accelerator, that too played a part in deciding not to participate in the full hackathon. So I decided just to go along, listen to the pitches, see what ideas people had for products to improve employee experience and enjoy the evening. I also ended up pitching two ideas because why not!

The ideas on the pitch night were interesting. There were two ideas that caught my attention. 1) an app for tracking and rewarding good behaviour when not at work. I don't think this was going to be practical because of privacy concerns. But when one bad tweet can get you fired, there is merit in considering rewarding employees for being good netizens. Also, there is merit in the idea of rewarding employees for taking care of their body and mind.

2) An offboarding app and process that follows up with employees who were fired. Again, not sure about the practicality of this because I imagine a lot of fired employees would be angry and not keen to hear from the employer. But then again, I think a lot of employees would appreciate the attention. Especially if its meaningful in that the offboarding involves pointing the former employee towards programs and services that could help them land their next job. 

The two ideas I put forward were 1) Core Skills - which was about benchmarking your skills today and tracking how they develop over time. Crucially, the app would also keep track of market trends, giving employees active feedback about how the most valuable product they will ever work on, themselves, is coming along.

My other idea, which I came up with then and there, was 2) Emotion Tracker. The emotion tracker idea came about because at least three of the pitches was about rating other employees, managers etc. Unfortunately, studies show that our current form of active reviews, rating and feedback don't work. But given that emotion tracking wearables are already a thing, why not use them to track how employees feel during a shift. Properly analysed, the trackers could expose bad managers who demoralise employees, or co-workers who sap the energy out of the room. Conversely, it could also help identify good managers and co-workers.

Obviously, since I wasn't planning on sticking around, I didn't try to form a group around my ideas. I probably should have informally polled the audience to see what they thought. But I didn't think of that on the night. So the night ended with pizza and a pleasant walk back to King George Square bus station. Not a bad way to spend a Friday night, I think!

My First Bangla App!

Virgo 19 has released its second major app! My First Bangla App is targeted at kids up to the age of 5. It teaches Bangla nouns for many pets, farm animals, body parts, wild animals, fruits and vegetables. We have plans to expand it to include counting games, fun quizzes and the phrases. But for now, it has over 70 nouns that can be taught to my niece, I mean, your kids!

Learning R

I have wanted to learn R for awhile. I have heard a great deal about its powers and any tool I can use for easier visualisation is great for me. Because, as noted before, I am not very good with the "pretty graphics". So learning R was a bit of a no brainer. Especially since I am keen to analyse some of the GovHack datasets. Also, I have been looking into the food retail landscape recently and I'll be looking to do some heavy duty data analysis on that front. As such, I decided to take this R course on Udemy. Above, is the last visualisation I made as part of the course using the provided Movie dataset. I enjoyed the course and looking forward to completing the advanced version of it. I will, of course, post interesting data analysis stuff here. So watch this space!

Online Training Website

Despite my resolution to post more, I clear have not. Obviously, this is an issue and I am going to start remedying it by posting something, hopefully useful, at least once a fortnight! For my first topic, let's talk online training website.

Online training is one of the greatest things about the internet. Lifelong learning is more important than ever and thanks to the internet, easier than ever. Or is it! Well, yes, it is but I think it is important to find the right way to learn.

To that end, I looked into a few online training and tutorials related to digital photography. I, of course, am an avid photographer but I have mostly been taking photos in automatic mode with point and shoot cameras. This is okay for photos I take merely as a memento but not ideal when I do want to capture a scene because it invoked a particular emotion in me.  If I had a dollar for all the times I took a picture of a fairly ordinary scene because I was feeling something, only to come home and realise that I had totally failed to capture it, I would have money enough for a lot of different lenses.

There was also the time the photographer for my brother's Bangladeshi wedding reception was in a car crash the day of the wedding. Thankfully he is okay but it did mean that we didn't have a photographer for the wedding. So I stepped in as the unofficial official photographer. Most of the photos were okay but a few too many had blurry parts. Also, I was shooting by trial and error, which is a silly thing to do when you have a wealth of knowledge just a few mouse clicks away!

As a result, I decided to look into some online training. I tried reading some photography tips and tricks websites, as well as watch some YouTube videos. But I do better under more structured teaching environments. It can't be too structured, I need time and space to go off and try things on my own, but completely informal makes me procrastinate too much.

So far, I have tried taking online photography courses through Alison and Udemy. I also had a poke around Lynda but decided to avoid triggering the free trial at the moment.  Alison was completely free, but you could pay a fee to remove ads. But honestly, I do not think Alison is worth even the effort of disabling AdBlocker. The courses seemed cobbled together with the photography course I was looking at literally being a recording of a university lecture. A particularly bad recording I might add. Making it a complete waste of time. I ended up asking the Alison support to delete my account because I could not see myself ever returning.

On the other hand, Udemy has proven to be much more useful. The photography course I am taking is currently offered for free. Yet it is clearly a planned lecture designed for an online environment. As such, I am getting much more out of it. I would definitely recommend Udemy to others. I certainly hope my photography becomes more intentional, and less at the mercy of whatever the camera decides to capture after I finish the course. We shall see.

I would like to point out that all three website I mentioned also offer extensive courses on programming, software design and other computer science topics. Even for these, I would recommend Udemy with the caveat that I haven't tried Lynda. I would like to try Lynda at some future time and do a proper comparison between them and Udemy. But for now, I will be concentrating on Udemy.