The version of chaopin that we demo'd at Techcrunch Battlefield is now available in the appstore in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan.
Introducing Catalogs
This version adds catalogs to help you organize and arrange the styles you like. For example, if you're in need of a new winter coat, create a winter coat catalog. Add the photos of coats you like so you can use it for reference later when you are off shopping.
Another good example is for weddings. Create a catalog of inspiring wedding dresses which you can take to the designer or shop of your choice so that they have a good idea of what type of dress you are after!
There are lots of different reasons to create catalogs. Need a new evening dress? Have a party to attend? New jumper for winter? Planning a beach vacation?
We were selected to fight it out at the Techcrunch Battlefield, something we can be very proud of achieving. Competition was fierce, there were more than 400 applicants and the final 17 were a high quality group.
High Quality Competition
Mean average funding amongst the finalists was just over $1.25M USD , the Median was $450,000 USD demonstrating the social proof that many of our fellow finalists had already created before reaching this stage.
Experienced entrepreneurs were also in the mix, with some of the startups having executive experience from companies such as Tudou and E*Trade. Another 2 of the startups were from the chinaccelerator incubation programme in Dalian.
Average company size was 15 employees, with a median of 10 of those that reported their employee numbers on Crunchbase or counted from Linkedin. Of the 6 companies who I couldn't find employee numbers, they had an average of over $1M USD in rasied capital, median of $830,000 USD.
The Preparations
It's a very well organised competition. Every finalist signs an NDA, so we were not allowed to let anyone know that we would be in the final, this meant telling many people that we were going just for the conference. We arrived a couple of days before the battle. A quick rehearsal was completed during the hackathon where the techcrunch team + advisors, gave some quick tips about the presentation.
After revising our notes, the day before was used for the tech rehearsal. This was where we glimpsed the other finalists. The role of this rehearsal was to make sure our technical requirements were met, e.g. audio, laptop connections, close-up camera incase you were demo-ing on a live handset.
The demo itself is expected to be live, and video should only be used as a backup.
The Competition
We went backstage about 45 minutes before we were supposed to present. Lot's of people rushing around behind the scenes. The presenters introduced themselves and we did last minute preparations to get ready. Then we went up on stage and presented -
With the new update to Fusioncam we've enhanced it in a few ways and we're having a special promotion. We're reducing the price to $0.99 for a week. If you haven't already got it, now is a good time. Here's why.
Faster saving time
We enhanced the app so that it saves faster, which means you can take more shots in a shorter amount of time.
Clearer Buttons
We realized that in bright conditions, some of the buttons were difficult to see. We lightened up the display a little so that the buttons are clearer.
When you press the save button, you will be able to transfer the app for more editing in other apps, if you wish. You will get more apps to transfer to as we add them to the list, without you having to update the app.
iOS5 Support
We fixed a few things that stopeed fusioncam from working properly with iOS5
iDarkroom is a full featured iOS photo editing app that has been the top 10 photo app in over 50 different countries, with a whole host of features such as filters, tilt shift, paper effects, light effectsand more.
There is also a handy randomize feature which selects a bunch of settings for you, so you can see what it can do without having to 'fine-tune' everything.
The Steply community and upload features are installed in the app. Press the 'People' icon at the top to see a list of shares, and to access the community. From here you can press the Steply icon to see the community in action, or press the Steply upload icon to share to Steply.
We've made some improvements to the camera to give you a bit more flexibility. You can now adjust the camera to take 4:3 or square photos. If you're a fan of square photos, it's possible to take those shots now.
For the 4:3 view, you can switch on grid lines to help you with the rule of thirds.
Opening the app has been improved, now it's much faster when you start Steply. If you have logged in previously you should notice the difference.
Social Networks & Finding Friends
We've simplified this. When a friend in an existing social network joins Steply, you will be informed via the notifications system. Likewise, when someone new joins Steply, we make it easier to find someone from an existing social network or to follow a suggested user.
Every now and then, it's good to take a break and do something different. Some companies, such as Facebook, do this with Hackathons. We did this to test if we could work using different development processes and to see what we could make.... to test our engineering and design skills.
The Experiment
Could we create, design and develop an app that allows us to test the China market?
Market Test
The China market is a different online animal to the West, and with our experience in photos, we wanted to test how it is different from the West, how people created, consumed, shared photos in social media services. With this in mind, we asked the following broad question -
How do people using Sina Weibo (Twitter equivalent in China) share/view photos?
Internal Test
We didn't want to spend a long term working on this, so a 2 week time frame was chosen to design, build and develop from the ground up. The question we wanted to ask was -
Could we create an app within 2 weeks, that is still beautiful, easy to use and helps answer the questions we had?
Idea Generation
We began with a few theories, that people in China are too busy to take photos in the same way that people in Japan and the West do. Cities are sprawling and those who regularly access social media have less interest / inclination to take/share photos. A little bit of study on Sina Weibo showed that people like to consume and re-share photos. Finally we reached an idea for an app that would help us to test a few assumptions/hypothesis -
People using Sina Weibo want a good photo viewing experience.
They are more likely to connect with their Sina Weibo account if it's not a pre-requisite.
There is a demand to view and rate fashion themed photos.
Enter Jiepai (Street Fashion)... later renamed to Chaopin (Trendy Fashion)
Viewing street fashion photos seemed quite popular, however the viewing experience isn't great, and just viewing photos is not very interactive, so we came up with an app that makes it a beautiful experience to browse street fashion related photos from Weibo, that allows you to discover and follow the people who are sharing these photos, rate the photos hot or not, see which are the hottest photos and re-share them all on Sina Weibo... All within 2 weeks, this meant designing the UI, coding the UI and interactions, as well as the server backend that stored the ratings and allowed people to connect their Sina Weibo accounts.
Development
We used a design-driven agile development methodology to create a 'minimum viable product'. The developers and designers had control over the process, with the designer creating the UI mockups which were then discussed and split up amongst the developers. Our developers created tasks and divided it amongst themselves to conquer. It was split up into design, server implementation, testing architecture, iphone app development and content curation. We had to gather the sources for good quality photos that could be used for consumption.
Discovery in Progress
During the 2 weeks we discovered a few things that meant adjusting what we were developing.
During the content curation process, we discovered there weren't enough street fashion photos available on Sina Weibo, this meant we had to find photo sources from a larger pool, therefore we adjusted the scope of the app to cover trendy fashion rather than just street fashion.
Changing the focus to trendy fashion meant the app needed to be redesigned to articulate the app's new content. This had an impact on the iphone development because some of the UI elements needed to be redeveloped.
We wanted to keep the 2 week limit, to do this, we had to cut features, therefore the design needed to be adjusted to reflect the slimmed down version.
Lesson Learned... so far
Whilst procuring sources for the photos, it helped point us towards a more appropriate market. This helped us to adjust the focus of the app towards something that had more material and hopefully, a better market fit.
Stripping out features because of the time frame really helped us to focus our thinking about what is really needed for the first test of this "minimum viable app".
Creating an hypothesis to test helped to focus our thinking. What features are needed to test the assumptions?
Going through the process helped us to learn more about this style of development. The Lean Startup methodology (coined by Eric Ries) advocates parts of what we were trying in its process. We are still to go through the customer feedback process and this will help us to know if our assumptions are correct and to do this we have to release the app... That day is today!
We have filters for all different types of flavours and moods... the best thing is that this is only the beginning. We have more exciting things to come in the future that enhances your photo taking/editing experience more.
Followings
With the previous update it was more difficult to see who updated when. With this update, when you look at your own following list, you can see when they last shared a photo.
Hope yo enjoy this new brand new version of Steply!
