Lecture Post: Cloud Computing

The Encourage Me application is intended to lift people up in stressful times during their lives. Know a time when you are especially stressed out? Mark it down through the optimizer application and you will be blasted with a text message of encouragement from a famous inspirational person of your choosing.

Cloud computing is important for my application because, although it is not an application invented for storing items, online storage on the "cloud" is essential. This is due to the necessity of inputting personal information from the user; who they want to be encouraged by, what times they want encouragement, etc. Because the user needs to store information online, they are essentially adding their data to the cloud.

Additionally, the usage of cloud storage for the company is also a necessity. This is because the Encourage Me application can pool in quotes and information from other websites on to a place in a cloud for storage. Doing this will allow the application to essentially have its own online database for quotes, storing a lot of information without slowing down the system unit.

Furthermore, the user of the Encourage Me app can take advantage of cloud storage by allowing users to insert information about good points about their day in order to encourage them to reflect optimistically about their lives. Although storage would be simple like like that of creating a blog post, it would still be useful for this application.

Competitive Analysis

     The Encourage Me application is intended to lift people up in stressful times during their lives. Know a time when you are especially stressed out? Mark it down through the optimizer application and you will be blasted with a text message of encouragement from a famous inspirational person of your choosing.

Live Happy 

URL: http://www.signalpatterns.com/iphone/livehappy_std.html

Overview: Live Happy is an application you can get from the App Store on iTunes. It is an application which promotes happier well-being and lifestyle changes which can increase happiness of the user. My application, Encourage Me, is similar to Live Happy because they both promote happy lifestyle by letting the user receive positive reinforcement. For example, Live Happy has an option called "replay happy days" which allows the user to see things that happened in their past that put a smile on their face. Similarly, my application also sends positive messages to uplift the user through encourage words. 

     However, when it comes to the details, these two apps are not all that similar. For instance, live happy requires the user to input a lot of information such as photos, personal anecdotes, and goals in order to have the application function to its best extent. While on the other hand, my application simply requires the user to input their role models and the time period they wish to be encouraged.

iStress

URL: http://www.psiappsinc.com/
Overview: iStress is an application which you can also purchase at the App Store on iTunes. This application is similar to Encourage Me since it also promotes positive living and a happy attitude. It does this by giving the user stress-relief techniques and information on relaxation. iStress differs from Encourage Me though since its target audience is specifically users who take psychiatric medication, and it is more medically aligned. 

Although both applications are both beneficial to people who need to be encouraged and/or cheered up, neither are extremely similar to Encourage Me. Live Happy is an application that promotes lifestyle changes and requires a lot of user input and iStress is a relaxation applications which is meant for users who take medicine. My application is simply a pickmeup for anybody in need for a bit of encouragement from people they find important.

Lecture post!

Entrepreneurial Idea Overview:

The Encourage Me application is intended to lift people up in stressful times during their lives. Know a time when you are especially stressed out? Mark it down through the optimizer application and you will be blasted with a text message of encouragement from a famous inspirational person of your choosing.

Lecture

     System units are certainly important when it comes to this app. Since it's electronic and communicates with other devices it is going to need to be controlled and created by a device with a system unit in order for other devices with system units to be contacted by it. For example, I can create this app on the computer and build the program for smart phones like iPhones and Droids.

     Computer forensics is important for my application since I will have the phone information of my customers and email information (if they choose to subscribe to my application's email blasts) so in order to keep their privacy after the application is eliminated, it is important to destroy the hard disk drives immediately after.

     I think Computer forensics is really important for my project. Especially since if I add in an option for payment to my product I will need a way to delete credit card information of my customers. This will help me prevent getting sued and people's identity thefts as well.

Lecture Post

The Encourage Me application is intended to lift people up in stressful times during their lives. Know a time when you are especially stressed out? Mark it down through the optimizer application and you will be blasted with a text message of encouragement from a famous inspirational person of your choosing.

As previously stated, Encourage Me is an application. When making this application, I will use Facebook to update people who "like" the Encourage Me app's Facebook page by periodically posting about new famous people added to the Encourage Me quote base. I will also use Twitter to do this as well. I think it would also be useful to have people tweet @ the Encourage Me twitter to see positive and negative feedback.

Positive and negative feed back is the most important aspect of the usage of social media for Encourage Me. Although it is not 100% accurate, it is pretty good since it is free research I can use to improve my application. Additionally, it could show me what people want from the application and what they think is frivolous.