All4Students
Ultimate Portal for Students.
This document presents All4Student group’s project
contents and work plans.
Felix Huguenin-Virchaux, Ulugbek Kamilov, Hamidreza
Khadem, Kazim Rehman, Peyman SafarzadehSamarghandian, and Achraf Tangui.
1/12/2010
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All4Students.ch
Project Planning
Contents
Project Content ............................................................................................................................... 3
Executive Summary ..................................................................................................................... 3
Service Description ...................................................................................................................... 3
Overview.................................................................................................................................. 3
List of Services ......................................................................................................................... 3
Further developments ............................................................................................................. 4
Management Team ..................................................................................................................... 4
Marketing .................................................................................................................................... 4
Overview.................................................................................................................................. 4
Market identification ............................................................................................................... 4
Market Analysis ....................................................................................................................... 4
Porter’s 5 forces framework .................................................................................................... 4
SWOT analysis ......................................................................................................................... 6
Marketing strategy .................................................................................................................. 6
Collaborations and Strategic Partnerships .................................................................................. 7
Implementation Plan ................................................................................................................... 7
Financing ..................................................................................................................................... 7
Opportunities and Risks .............................................................................................................. 7
Work Accomplished......................................................................................................................... 7
Background.................................................................................................................................. 7
Work on Portal ............................................................................................................................ 7
Working Methods ........................................................................................................................ 8
Work Plan for the Coming Semester ............................................................................................... 8
References ....................................................................................................................................... 9
Other materials ............................................................................................................................... 9
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All4Students.ch
Project Planning
Project Content
Executive Summary
All4Student.ch has an ambition to become the principal site visited by students in
Switzerland. It aims at providing all relevant information and tips relevant for students, a unique
portal that contains information is normally scattered across several other web sites.
The available services of All4Student.ch range from public transport schedules, intelligent
calendar designed and adapted for students to support their academic success, accommodation
finder, job search tool, night life planner, directory of past internship and exchange reports and
tips, previous years exams database sorted and structured to simplify browsing, private tutor
hire and search tool, and relevant interesting deal finder.
Additionally the idea of a dating platform for students hosted on the portal is considered.
Unlike current traditional community sites, which lack offers directly targeted to students,
and traditional student sites, which lack the community based approach found in many of the
Web 2.0 portals like Facebook™, All4Student.ch is designed to keep user informed as well as
motivated to contribute and communicate. The idea is to create a reward/bonus system that
will push users to become active members of the community.
In a country where the student community counts up to 117’000 people, with only few
dedicated sites, we believe there is a room for a new entrant that will focus on meeting the
needs of all these consumers.
Service Description
Overview
This section describes the services that All4Student.ch will hold on its site. A short
description of each service is also given.
List of Services
Keeping in mind that we want our users to have easy access to our services and not be
overflowed by information we have decided to concentrate ourselves to a number of selected
services. A detail of each one of these services is given below.
 Internship / job offers
This service will have a listing of current internship and job offers on the market.
Companies will have the choice to limit their offers to certain institutes and faculties so
that only registered students of selected institutes and faculties can see them.
 Organized directory of past exams
Here students will find past exams of the subjects that they are interested in. The exam
directory will be organized in function of the institute, school, faculty and year of study.
 Forums
The point of the forum is that students help each other. For example, if a student has
doubts about the class he/she wants to takes he/she can post a message on the forum
and those students that have experience with that class can give him/her guidance.
 Automatic scheduling
This is a calendar which can automatically add the time table of classes on to it given the
name of the class. The calendar will be intelligent so that searches can be made by the
name of professor or part of the class name. Also all core classes can be automatically
added if the student is registered and updates his/her information.
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Project Planning
Night life
This section will keep the students up to date on what’s happening and where to go.
Night clubs, bars, restaurants, etc. can be rated by students and therefore students
decide what’s “in” and what’s “hot”.
Tutoring
This section will help students find “tutor students” and vice versa. We also plan on
adding a rating system here so that students can rate their tutors.
Instant tandem
This service will allow users to look for online tandem partners and instantly contact
them to have an online conversation using their IM (skype, MSN etc.) account.
We think these services are the most attractive to students. We do however plan on adding
additional services if the demands are favorable and if the service is of value to the student
community.
Further developments
Additional services that we would like to add in the future upon further market study and
user interest are:
 Good deals
A place where students can share the best deals they have found.
 Internship and exchange reports
Submitted by students and a source of reference for others. Organized and presented in
a structured and easily browsable manner.
 Dating
 Transport time tables
This will give a listing of the timetables of all public transports including night buses.
These services will be studied and eventually launched after the start of the portal.
Management Team
Here experience and skills of the team members will be discussed.
Marketing
Overview
Market identification
Market Analysis
We used two methods to analyze the market situation: Porter’s 5 forces framework and the
SWOT analysis. Whereas the 5 forces framework will focus on the industry the SWOT analysis
will focus on the internal and external risks and opportunities.
Porter’s 5 forces framework
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Using this framework we break down the analysis into 5 different elements.
 Threat of new entrants
There are many factors which make the threat of new entrants
fairly high for this market.
Firstly, websites are not economies of scale nor do they require
heavy capital investment. A website can initially be started for
under CHF 200 a year1. However, for a commercially oriented
website a company might want to have their own dedicated servers, high bandwidth
connections and eventually an office. Though that brings the price up it is still very low
compared to any traditional non e-market.
Secondly, even though there might be some proprietary product differences they are
not highly differentiable from rival products. Just about all of the free services provided
by any website can usually be easily copied by another website or an equally interesting
alternative is proposed. For example there are tons of websites today that propose free
space to upload photos, videos, documents, emails, etc.
Another factor which pushes the threat of new entrants up, are the almost non-existent
switching costs for customers. The users can stop using a website without losing much.
Most of the time there is no loss at all for the user.
 Bargaining power of supplier
The bargaining power of the supplier which in our case could
eventually be the host of our website is very low. There are
numerous hosts to choose from and the competition among them
is fairly intensive. In Switzerland itself webhosting.info reports 420
hosts and this number goes to 23’823 for the US2.
The other supplier for our product will be the students themselves as they are expected
to contribute to the growth of our portal. Their bargaining power solely depends on how
much we motivate them to participate so again it is quite low.
 Bargaining power of buyers
Once again we can consider two types of buyers. Our main buyers
will be the companies which would like to target students and
advertise to them through us. Given the number of websites that
exist on the internet their bargaining power is high.
The other “buyer” to whom we are “selling” our services for free
are students. They too have a vast choice of websites to choose from, including a few
that might seem similar to our portal.
 Threat of substitutes
As mentioned before there are numerous websites on the internet
and this also applies to the number of new websites which keep
growing. DomainTools3 gives an estimate of 116’421’420 total
active domains out of which 144’629 are new domains registered
just on the single day of 14-03-2010. This suggests that a website
can be easily supplanted by a new comer if competitive advantage is not kept.
Therefore, the threat of substitutes is very high.
1
Domain name registration costs around $10 and web hosting from $75-200 depending on the
traffic. Estimates given by various webhosting and web design services. Ex: www.webpagefx.com
2
http://www.webhosting.info/webhosts/globalstats/
3
http://www.domaintools.com/internet-statistics/
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Project Planning
Intensity of rivalry
From the above study one would rightly suppose that the
intensity of rivalry in this market is quite high. Indeed, that
would be the case if All4students.ch were to cover a more
global area. However, considering the region where
All4students.ch focus’s which is Switzerland and more
precisely the French part of the country there are only two
well known competitors, students.ch and etudiants.ch.
In a survey4 in which we asked students if they used such
websites only 5% of the respondents claimed to use it
frequently and only 17% said they use such websites from time to time. At the same
time 80% of the respondents said they would use a website if all of the services which
we would like to integrate into our portal existed on a certain website. This leads us to
think the intensity of rivalry is low to medium.
SWOT analysis
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Strengths
The strengths of our project can be broken down into the following factors:
o Founders are all students and therefore well aware of their own needs as
students. They know what the currents student oriented websites lack and what
is attractive for their comrades.
o Given that there are only a few members the organizations is dynamic and will
easily adapt to currents needs.
o The team is located right at the heart of one of the Switzerland’s educational
hub. With EPFL, UNIL and IMD, Lausanne has three big players in the vicinities.
Weaknesses
o Unknown entity for the moment. It will take some time to get the word out to
students and have a following.
o Students will be reluctant to sign-up and share their personal information with
us.
Opportunities
o Our survey results show that there is a big demand for a portal which offers the
services that we propose.
o Internet is a fast growing market and there is still some place for new
businesses.
Threats
o Possible legal copyright issues with user shared content.
o Inability to protect user data due to weak security system
o Reputation is volatile. A few bad experiences can destroy the overall value
o High competition with other startups.
Marketing strategy
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o
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A - Attention: attract the attention of the customer.
I - Interest: raise customer interest by focusing on and demonstrating
advantages and benefits
See survey questions, results and graphs in annexe
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Project Planning
D - Desire: convince customers that they want and desire the product or service
and that it will satisfy their needs.
A - Action: lead customers towards taking action and/or purchasing.
S – Satisfaction: satisfy the customer so they become a repeat customer and
give referrals to a product.
Collaborations and Strategic Partnerships
Here we explain how the values for our users will be created and relevant partnerships that
will add the complimentary value for our service.
Implementation Plan
The most important activities and milestones for the development of the business are
discussed here.
Financing
In this section financial planning of our enterprise will be presented. We will cover our
source of income and the capital needs of the company.
Opportunities and Risks
Here we cover specific opportunities and identify main challenges (SWOT analysis).
Work Accomplished
Background
From the beginning of the semester and with the help of regular meetings and
brainstorming we have slowly concretized out product idea.
Initially, we started with the idea of developing an online scheduling tool to help students
easily organize their personal schedules (code named ScheduleMan by our team). This fills the
need which has not been efficiently met yet. Logically, building on the idea of making life of
students easier, we have decided to work on an online portal which would serve the student
community by offering a lot more than just personal timetable generator.
Work on Portal
First of all we have given our portal a name. We plan to call it All4Students.
Afterwards we considered and identified possible revenue sources which are:
 Ads: banner ads hosted on our portal.
 Sponsors: companies which would like their logos permanently on the site and will have
special privileges.
 Transaction fees: We are planning to charge certain amount of money for some
transactions made on our portal. Ex: Student hires a private tutor through our page.
We have also made a list of services that we plan to offer:
 ScheduleMan: semi-automatic scheduling of individual class time tables.
 Tutoring: sign up as a tutor, or look for a tutor.
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Project Planning
As a complement to our services the following helpful information and services will also be
provided on the portal:
 Job offers: companies and individuals can post their job offers free of charge.
 Night life: information on different night clubs and events in the city and surroundings.
 Good deals: a place where students can share the best deals they have found.
 Internship and exchange reports: submitted by students and a source of reference for
others. Organized and presented in a structured and easily browsable manner.
 Past exams: organized in a manner to simplify access and research.
 Dating: We plan to offer student dating portal with tips on dating and actually
connecting individuals.
Working Methods
As a common base for our work the group members have jointly decided to use a blog5. On
this space we can all save the work that is to be shared among all members. General discussions
and organization of group meetings will also be done through the blog.
It has been decided for compatibility reasons that everyone will use Microsoft office to write
the project report and use a “.doc” extension. Standard MS Office fonts and styles will be used
(e.g. Title, Heading 1, Heading 2 and etc). To keep track of the advances a version number will be
added to the report. Every time someone modifies the report he will increment the number. For
example if the name of the original report is “reportSM v1.0.doc”, when someone adds or
modifies the report he will then save and upload the file to the blog with the name “reportSM
v1.1.doc”.
Work Plan for the Coming Semester
We
eks
Dates
Weekly program
1
04.01 10.01
Exams
2
11.01 17.01
Exams
3
18.01 24.01
Exams
4
25.01 31.01
Exams
5
01.02 07.02
Holiday
6
08.02 14.02
Holiday
7
15.02 21.02
Holiday
5
Deadlines
Meeting with supervisor
Our blog is public and can be accessed via the following link: http://blogs.epfl.ch/strategy.
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We
eks
Dates
Weekly program
8
22.02 28.02
Subgroup work + Weekly
meeting
9
01.03 7.03
Subgroup work + Weekly
meeting
10
08.03 14.03
Subgroup work + Weekly
meeting
11
15.03 21.03
Subgroup work + Weekly
meeting
12
22.03 28.03
Subgroup work + Weekly
meeting
13
29.03 04.04
Implementation of subgroup's
work +Weekly meeting
14
05.04 11.04
Send the report to the
supervisor
15
12.04 18.04
Corrections + Weekly meeting
16
19.04 25.04
Corrections + Weekly meeting
17
26.04 02.05
Send the final report
Project Planning
Deadlines
Meeting with supervisor
During these weeks arrange a meeting with the
supervisor (week 8 to week 11).
Subgroup's
deadline
First
deadline
During these weeks arrange a meeting with the
supervisor (week 14 to week 16).
Final
deadline
References
Porter, M.E. (1979) How competitive forces shape strategy, Harvard business Review, March/April 1979
Other materials
5 forces icons have been broken down from the “Porters_five_forces.PNG” image available
from Wikimedia Commons
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