Executive Summary
Organization: The Augustine and Culture Seminar Program, Villanova University
800 E. Lancaster Ave.
Villanova, PA 19085
610-519-7325
Contact: Noel Dolan, Dr. Marylu Hill, and Fr. Allan Fitzgerald
Type of organization: The Augustine and Culture Seminar (ACS) Program is an educational
department under the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Villanova University that teaches a
required freshman seminar course (Augustine and Culture Seminar) to educate students about its
Augustinian roots.
Mission: To provide individuals and communities who are studying St. Augustine with an
enhanced, interactive learning experience by developing an enriched content mobile application
of St. Augustine’s book, The Confessions on the iPad.
Management: The owners of the ACS: The Confessions project include three faculty members
of the Augustine and Culture Seminar Program, Noel Dolan, Dr. Marylu Hill, and Fr. Allan
Fitzgerald. The software development team includes three Villanova students from the
university’s Mobile Device Programming class: Xiaojie Jiang, Jon Heller, and Vincent Garcia.
The student team is guided by Dr. Frank Klassner, a professor from the Department of
Computing Sciences, and Dan Kelley, a developer consultant from Transmogrify, LLC.
Product Description: The Confessions mobile application on the iPad that is an enriched core
content application/ Core content is a key text, one that all students encounter in their first-year
seminar. Core content is a key text that requires first year reading in college students’ first year
seminar. Villanova University’s ACS class uses St. Augustine’s The Confessions as its key text.
This book is used to address the ACS question “Who Am I?” and identifies the University’s
Augustinian heritage. The ACS Program
Because technology is more advanced and accessible, more and more consumers are starting to
move from their traditional reading material to e-readers, such as the iPad, because of its
convenience and various interactive and social capabilities. This mobile application acts as a
centralized source of information about St. Augustine which engages users in the text to get a
deeper understanding of his writings. This is especially useful in the classroom setting, where
everyone will have the same copy of the book to prevent confusion and opens up communication
and discussion between users.
The textual features of The Confessions mobile application include visual text, highlighting,
table of contents, search, terms and definitions, note taking, aggregate notes, and bookmarking.
Its multimedia features include expert commentary, audio, note sharing via Facebook, and videos.
Marketing: The market consists of all individuals and groups who read The Confessions or are
interested in St. Augustine and his life. Within this market, there are numerous upward trends
that display the rising usage and interest in mobile reading. Specifically, context-enriched
services, content-enriched content, e-books, shift of print to digital use in schools, media tablets,
and social media used in schools.
The ACS Program targets a primary and secondary market. The primary target market includes
university students and faculty. Specifically within Villanova University, first year students in
the required ACS class would all be using the application. Approximately 1600 Villanova
freshmen students and 35 faculty and staff would be using the application. There are also 244
Catholic universities in the United States, as well as hundreds of other Non-Catholic universities
that may be interested in using The Confessions mobile application. The secondary market
includes friars, congregants, researchers, parents and alumni, and public/general readers.
Researchers would include the religious Augustinian communities and lay people. There are
about 4.3 million Augustinians. One of the biggest religious orders amongst these Augustinian
communities is the Order of St. Augustine. US and Canada has 402 members, South America has
814, Europe has 1107, Africa has 145, Australia is 37m and Asia has 180.
Competition: There are several direct and indirect competitors involved with our business.
Directly on the mobile side, there are both semi-interactive (does not have social media features)
and interactive devices and applications. iBooks is the standard application on Apple devices for
mobile books. It’s features are semi-interactive where one can define words through the web,
highlight, and take some notes. Additional Semi-interactive devices include the Kindle
(Amazon) and Nook (Barnes & Noble). Kindle’s features are audio, bookmarks and notes, and a
dictionary. Interactive devices include the Vook which has text, video, links to the internet, and
social media. Some others include Inkling, and Touch Press. The indirect competitors come from
traditional forms of books which are not interactive. Book stores that sell The Confessions book
in paper and audio form as well as internet versions of the books are indirect competitors that
could defer people away from using The Confessions app.
Unlike competitors, The Confessions app is a centralized source of information that has various
enriched capabilities that are not included on the other devices and applications, which increases
its ease of use. Some of these include a built in definition for important and unique terms in
context with the text and a built in audio for the book. Also it will have built in commentaries
and videos as an extra learning resource for the user.
Development Plan: The implementation of The Confessions mobile application will occur
through a cycle of two different phases. Phase 1 is the initial rollout of The Confessions project
where the goal is to create a 0.99 version. During this phase, the student development team from
the Mobile Device Programming class focuses on creating basic enriched core text and
multimedia features. Phase 2 is where The Confessions project is turned into a student summer
project. Here, hired student developer interns and research assistants will work together to
further advance the development and test the application. As the academic school year begins
again, the project will again be handed to student developers from the Mobile Device
Programming class. This cycle will continue until the mobile application is ready to be first
released to the primary target market, Villanova freshman students and ACS faculty.