Advanced Online Media – Blog Post 13 (Pitch, idea pros and cons)

So my two ideas for the online media product for the pitch assessment were explained in my last post, which can be found here. In short, it is a local news aggregation app using a map, and a supercar spotting app.

There are plenty of advantages and disadvantages to both, which made it tricky to decide on the final idea. The pros for the local news aggregation are that it incorporates several different elements – local news, aggregation and location. It could be handy and useful for people travelling too, which got me thinking about possible secondary features.

As well as local news, the app could also bring in local events and weather. I thought an attractive design could be a pin-point symbol on the location you want, with a circular band arriving around it, which local headlines to scroll through, weather, events and maybe traffic updates as well. These could be viewed by scrolling around the circle, increasing the section selected.

The app would be a way of supporting local news, being informative and engaging. The additional features would give it more substance and make it more appealing to those travelling. It is a service that I could see a lot of people using, but it draws in a lot of different features, meaning development could take time and be more expensive.

Other negatives could include a complicated user interface, more scope for errors to occur, the pure effort it would take to get local media outlets on board and part of it and also the fact that for the amount of work and development, the app would probably have to be made available for a cost – more so than the other idea at least. It’s also an area I am least interested in when comparing the two.

Switching focus to the supercar spotting app, I think it could go two ways. It could be a stand-alone app, or it could be matched to a automotive website, magazine or social media account. Examples of this could include Car Throttle, Road and Track, Autocar and Supercars of London. This would open up more opportunities for features, improve funding and could give it a better draw promotion and development wise.

The app could be complicated to develop and set up, but when it is created, I think the user interface, experience and additional content could be really popular and look good too. The simple part of it would be marking the locations of supercars on a map using your current location, with a photo and comment of what the car is.

I was thinking about how people could get around this and obviously people could upload previous pictures of supercars but tag them in locations where they are not. So I thought, to solve this, the camera function could only work where you have to take the photo then and there. You can’t scroll through your galleries and previously saved visual content. It opens up the camera and one shot is taken, which then moves the process on.

I then started to look into other areas to go down. I was thinking comments could be posted on the pins, with opinions on the car, colour, location, if they have seen it before etc. I think a good duration for the pins to stay on the map would be between three and five hours. Then people could also add their social media details to their accounts, which would be displayed below the pins, to draw people to their accounts.

Partnering up with a car website or magazine could also lead to additional content like features with tips, advice and the best cars uploaded in certain areas. These could be presented as snippets, with the full articles viewable by visiting their websites/apps/online versions of magazines. This would be a big draw for people investing in the app as they would get something else back other than advertising revenue from the app itself and from the costs of the app itself to consumers.

I also thought about other potential features like being able to save cities like London, Los Angeles, Miami etc so you can easily access and go to them. You could also add people’s accounts and have a stream where it states when someone has posted, the picture and where it was. So even after the pin has disappeared, people can see what others have been up to and seen.

But this app could be costly and time-consuming to develop depending on the features involved. It also could become overly complicated to use, so simplicity must be the main objective with the look and user experience. It also is very niche and doesn’t have the same mass market draw as the previous idea.

Advanced Online Media – Blog Post 12 (Pitch, idea development)

As soon as I learned about this assessment on the Advanced Online Media module, I started to think about the potential areas I could explore. Through the next few weeks, I started brainstorming ideas. I had quite a few different options but two really stood out to me.

The first is a news aggregation app for local outlets, where people can set a location – it could be where they are at that point, or where they are going – and see all of the local news in the area. The idea would pull together different media platforms in the region to bring up the latest stories and features.

I thought this idea would be well-suited to the module because it brings in the media industry and does something different with it. The initial thought popped into my head when I was wondering what was going on in my local area while still in London. Main news platforms like BBC News and Sky don’t narrow down the content that much, so the main stories from my home town and local area around it would rarely be included.

The app would draw together the websites of local media outlets, giving them a new audience and giving users the chance to catch up with all of the latest goings on and see if there are things happening that they should be aware of. That was the basic idea, relatively simple but one I thought could be developed.

 

The second idea I thought of was a supercar spotting app, aiding people in major cities around the world, where nice, powerful cars are more common. Supercar spotting is actually a rapidly evolving hobby and one that is becoming more and more popular. I have been supercar spotting quite a few times over the years in London and notice each time that more and more people are getting involved.

The rise of YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat have meant people have been able to turn supercar spotting into a career and make money of the content. But often they are blind when out in the city trying to spot the cars and miss them too, I have had many a frustrating afternoon seeing loads of supercars on Instagram and looking around, finding none of them.

It’s actually something my friend and I discussed at the time, how a supercar spotting app would be big help. The main feature for the app would give people the chance to pin point the locations of the supercars, with a picture. It would remain on the map for several hours, giving people a much better chance of finding them.

That was the simple, basic idea. It incorporates something I am really interested in, as well as having a lot of potential for expansion. These were my two main ideas, now it was time to weigh up the pros and cons.