All4Students



|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 Safarzadeh-Samarghandian, and Achraf Tangui. |

|1/12/2010 |

| |

Contents

Project Content 3

Executive Summary 3

Service Description 3

Overview 3

List of Services 3

Further developments 6

Management Team 6

Marketing 6

Overview 10

Market identification 10

Market Analysis 11

Porter’s 5 forces framework 12

SWOT analysis 13

Marketing strategy 16

Collaborations and Strategic Partnerships 16

Implementation Plan 21

Financing 21

Opportunities and Risks 26

Work Accomplished 26

Background 26

Work on Portal 26

Working Methods 27

Work Plan for the Coming Semester 27

References 28

Other materials 28

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 121’000 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.

We plan to develop the site in three languages: English, German, and French. The main reason for this is that in a multi-lingual country like Switzerland language barriers are evidently a problem. According to the Federal Statistical Office (FSO) of Switzerland, foreigners represent almost 22%[1] of the population; hence English was selected to make the portal appealing to them.

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. It will be possible for the user to see the offers s by type, field, region or language they are interested in.

The type of jobs are separated into the following four:

o Graduate student job

o Internship

o Part time job

o Summer job

The list of fields will be the following:

o Architecture and Construction

o Consulting

o Engineering

o Finance & Accounting

o Food

o Health Care

o Human Resources

o IT & Telecommunications

o Legal

o Manufacturing

o Marketing & Communications

o Operations

o Research

o Sales

For the moment we will concentrate on the Swiss market and so the regions will be:

o German Switzerland

o French Switzerland

o Italian Switzerland

The language field will only show the job offers posted in the selected language. Possibilities will be:

o English

o German

o French

o Italian

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.

• Study Material

Our survey indicates that a well organized directory of past exams is one of the most important parts of a good student portal. We decided to generalize the concept to include more items.

o Directory of past exams

o Class notes

o Cheat sheets

o Reports

o Student Tips

• 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. We plan on dividing the forum into the following discussion boards:

o Random Talk

Here users can discuss anything which does not fit into the more specific boards.

o University

Students can use this board to discuss any university related issues. Each university will also have a sub board for its students.

▪ UNIL, UNIGE, EPFL, etc.

The university sub boards will give access to further boards related to the different aspects of the university life.

• Admission

Questions relating admission procedures, experiences, etc. can be discussed here.

• Campus life

This board can be used to discuss restaurants, shops, upcoming events, etc.

• Architecture, Civil engineering, etc.

These are the sub boards for all the faculties

o Job / Internship

Here students can share their experience and talk about things such as how to write a cover letter, get good recommendations, etc.

o Night life

This board will host talks on the night life scene in the country, upcoming events, concerts, etc.

▪ Geneva, Lausanne, Bern, etc.

Discussion on city specific events will be held here. There will also be 4 sub boards to treat specific areas:

• Ins and Outs

• Restaurants

• Bars

• Clubs

• 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.

• 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. Information that a person registered as a “tutor student” can provide to students looking for one are:

o Basic profile (name, age, home town, etc.)

o Current and if applicable previous field of study

o Current year of study

o Experience in tutoring

o Personal availability

To complement the personal information we plan on adding a “tutor” rating system 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

These reports concerning internships and exchange will be submitted by students and will be a source of reference for others. They will be organized and presented in a structured and easily browsable manner just like the past exams.

• Dating

Here we will have various dating related information such as recommendations, do’s and don’t do’s, etc.

• 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

All4Students is a young and dynamic privately held company that offers interesting services

to students. The members are all students from EPFL with a large experience in Computer

-Science, Engineering and Communication Technologies.

Thanks to the good location near the EPFL and UNIL they have ideal access to the target

group and can easily recruit skilled personnel for their future growth.

Technical support can be acquired from EPFL Students and marketing, economic and

management knowledge can be provided by competent UNIL students.

Chief Executive Officer (CEO) 

Person XYZ is founder and CEO. He is responsible for the entire operations of the

corporation and reports directly to the chairman and board of directors. His responsibility is

to implement board decisions and initiatives and to maintain the smooth operation of the

firm, with the assistance of senior management. He is also designated as the company's

president and is one of the inside directors on the board.

Chief Operations Officer (COO) 

Person UVW is founder and COO. He is responsible for the corporation's operations. He

looks after issues related to marketing, sales, production and personnel. He is more involved

into daily activities while providing feedback to the CEO. The COO is also referred to as a

senior president.

Chief Financial Officer (CFO) 

Person UVW founder and CFO. He is reporting directly to the CEO. He is responsible for

analyzing and reviewing financial data, reporting financial performance, preparing budgets

and monitoring expenditures and costs. He presents such information to the board of

directors at regular intervals and also provides this information to shareholders and

regulatory bodies such as the tax authorities. He is also referred to as a senior vice

president. The CFO routinely checks the corporation's financial health and integrity.

Partners of All4Students

Achraf Tangui

|[pic] | |

| |Achraf Tangui was born in Casablanca, Morocco. |

| |In 2008he received his Bsc. Sc. from EPF and since September |

| |2009 he is completing is Master degree at EPFL in Computer |

| |Engineering. |

| | He joined All4Students in September 2008 as a project manager |

| |and expert in web 2.0 technologies, later performing various |

| |functions within the company in the French speaking part of |

| |Switzerland. |

Hamidreza Khadem:

|[pic] | |

Peyman Safarzadeh-Samarghandian:

|[pic] | |

Kazim Rehman:

|[pic] |Born in Lahore, Pakistan Kazim has passed most of his life |

| |hopping from country to country. He has experienced the life of |

| |Islamabad, Tokyo, New York and Geneva. |

| |Currently he is a student in the Swiss Federal University of |

| |Technology, Lausanne studying Electrical Engineering as a major |

| |and Management in Technology and Entrepreneurship as a minor. |

| |Kazim joined All4Students.ch in September 2009 as a market |

| |analyst. |

Ulugbek Kamilov:

|[pic] | |

Felix A. Huguenin

|[pic] | |

| | |

| | |

| |Felix A. Huguenin was born in |

| |Winterthur, Switzerland. |

| |In 2004 he received his Bsc. Sc. from ETH |

| |and since September 2009 he is |

| |completing is Master degree at EPFL in |

| |Electrical Engineering. He joined |

| |All4Students in September 2008 as an |

| |Electrical Engineer, later performing |

| |various functions within the company in |

| |the French speaking part of Switzerland. |

Marketing

Overview

Market identification

All of the members of All4Student team are currently enrolled in various sections of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) and the project has started out from our own frustrations with respect to the lack of easy information regarding student opportunities. We felt like much of the practical information aimed at us was scattered across numerous websites on the internet, offices on campus, and student oriented organizations, which makes it difficult to find. Hence the need to create a coherent set of services which would be easily accessible and could provide students with means to succeed with their academic life. The most obvious solution then was to propose an internet portal designed for students, by students.

However, as for any business that aspires to be successful, there comes the need for revenue, and hence the issue of sponsorship. A student website is the perfect place for many companies to advertise their services and appeal to the upcoming work force. Thus, we can divide the consumers of All4Students into two distinct groups: students and partners. From the students perspective All4Students will be a free online tool, where they can find in one place the information which is normally scattered all over the web. From the perspective of the partners we will provide a paid service through which they can reach out to the student population through targeted ads or communications.

It is clear that to be able to attract partners to support our activities financially we will need a solid base of active student users. The main consumers of our services are students residing in Switzerland. As a target group the latter is rather self explanatory. Generally, the age range is between 18-34, there is an almost equal division of sexes, and the student body is distributed evenly among larger cities of Switzerland. However they may be less homogenous when it comes to the type of study, the region in which they study, and whether they are students in a public or private institution.

According to the statistics provided by the University of Lausanne there were a total of 121‘000 students studying in one of the 12 public higher education institutions in Switzerland (Figure 1: Number of Students registered in public universities in Switzerland). Considering the fact that the number is provided only for publicly funded universities, we expect the actual number of students to be much higher.

[pic]

Figure 1: Number of Students registered in public universities in Switzerland

In order to get a better understanding of this target group, we conducted a survey among students in EPFL. The results of our survey turned out to be insightful. Students.ch the largest student oriented website within Swiss borders claims to have over 110’000 users, both from public and private institutions, but we have found that only 20% of survey respondents use student oriented websites regularly (See Annex). At the same time our findings indicate that approximately 80% of students would like to use such website[2]. This demand combined with the lack of suitable offer indicates that there exists a gap, which our website has the opportunity of filling. Moreover the graph of students in Swiss universities above furthermore clearly shows that our pool of potential consumers is steadily increasing.

To wrap up this section we would like to briefly discuss our partners. As discussed above as our user base grows, All4Students will become an attractive place for the marketing campaigns aimed at students. Compared to students, partners form a much more heterogeneous group, which includes all the organizations offering products and services for students or others that are interested in reaching out towards the student population. To use our services, partners will have to get in touch with us through our website. On the website, we will provide contact information for the partners and automatic forms for those interested in standard tasks like placing advertisement banners.

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

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 year[3]. 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 hosting service of our website, is very low. There are numerous hosts to choose from and the competition among them is fairly intensive. In Switzerland itself reports 420 hosts and this number goes to 23’823 for the US[4].

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. However according to our survey the current offerings in the Swiss market do not seem to satisfy the student needs.

• 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. DomainTools[5] 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.

• 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 survey[6] 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

| |

|Subject of SWOT analysis |

|Internal factors | | |

| |Strengths |Weakness |

| | | |

| |Starting with low costs |No trade mark on unknown domain name |

| |No possibility of suppliers bargaining |Network effect |

| |To be informed about student’s needs |Personal information sharing |

| |Strategical location | |

|External factors | | |

| |Opportunities |Threats |

| | | |

| |Differences in the offered services |No entrance barrier |

| | | |

| |Low level of rivalry and the possibility of rapid | |

| |development | |

Description of Internal factors

• Strengths

The strengths of our project can be broken down into the following factors:

o Starting with low costs

A website can initially be started for less than CHF 200 a year[7]. The main cost is the server cost depending on the expected traffic. We have to add some more costs like a high bandwidth connections and an office. Our starting costs are very low comparing to the traditional known e-market project.

o No possibility of suppliers bargaining (changing the host of our website with low transaction’s costs)

The bargaining power of our website’s host is very low. Web hosting is a competitive international market; just in Switzerland, we have more than 400 host possibilities[8].

o To be informed about student’s needs

Founders are all students and therefore well aware about market’s needs. We know the currents student oriented websites lack and what is attractive for their comrades. The team has few members and the organization is dynamic and can easily adapt to currents needs.

o Strategical location

To stay in touch with student’s needs, the team will be located right at the heart of one of the Switzerland’s educational hub. With EPFL, UNIL, IMD, IDHEAP and HES, Lausanne has the big players in the vicinities.

• Weakness

The weakness of our project can be broken down into the following factors:

o No trade mark on unknown domain name

To begin our website will be an unknown entity and it will take time to have a following. To install a network effect, our project will probably need a serious marketing investment.

o Network effect

There are very strong network effects operating in the market for websites. Because of this effect the value of the sevice will increase as more user use it (subscribe to it). As long as we don’t have a portofolio of users atracting others it’s going to be a weakness confronting to our concurents.

The main impact of a weak nomber of users when starting this project will be the difficulty to find addvertisers.

o Personal information sharing

Users (students) will probably hesitate to share personal data until the entity is unknown.

Description of External factors

• Opportunities

The opportunities of our project could be the following factors:

o Difference in the offered services

After the market analysis and student’s survey[9], we offer the services that students need and which is not yet offered by other sites in the same field (discussion forum, alumni platform; contact between the graduate students whom are already in the labor market)

o Low level of rivalry and the possibility of quick development

In the Switzerland’s market, there are only two well known competitors, Students.ch, Etudiants.ch. Considering this oligopoly, the intensity of rivalry is quit low offering the possibility for a new entrant to take place in the market.

• Threats

The threats of our project could be the following factors:

o No entrance barrier (high possibility of new entrants)

New entrance can come easily to the market for several reasons. Firstly, websites are not economies of scale nor do they require heavy capital investement. Secondly, the service provided by All4students.ch can easily be copied by other competitors or a new entrant. Finally, there is almost no switching costs for customers wishing to use another website. This market is not protected by barrier.

Avoiding the threat:

Porter’s theory of sustainable competitive advantage[10] suggests two different ways to attract customers: 1) lowering the price

2) Differentiating the product

This market is not a price competitive market because using website like All4 students.ch is free. The only existing strategy to avoid the new entrant’s threat is to offer a new product responding to customer’s needs to attract users and develop a network. This network is going to make the difference between All4students.ch and other competitors or new entrants.

Marketing strategy

Keeping in mind the two distinct users of our website as discussed in the section on market identification we would like to come up with a coherent strategy to place our service on the market. We will discuss separate strategies for both groups: students and partners.

Students

Product

Our major innovation with respect to other student sites will be the introduction of the traditional social networking tools, which make online applications like facebook or digg™ attractive to the masses. All of the sections of our website will be under the control of the students, who will upload the content, rate the relevance of it, or discuss it with each other. The All4Students team will intervene in the process only when absolutely necessary.

For our portal to function properly we need our users to be active, hence we introduce the concept of user status very similar to the way ebay® ranks its sellers. For each activity on the portal a student will receive points, which will cumulate and will be reflected with a little star next to his or her name. The most active users will have a shiny red star, while passive users will have less or no visible stars. Moreover we will reward active users with higher visibility throughout website, meaning their messages will be disseminated with higher priority on the main sections of the site. This will give active students certain reputation, on which they can rely later on when they decide to tutor or to create an event.

As a student community portal All4Students has to create the image of community and for achieving this we introduce another innovative concept of profit sharing. All4Students will be sharing certain portion of the profit with its active users through offers on our website. This will be the way for us to thank our active users, who are actually the ones helping the portal generate the profit by creating the content. This is in line with our way of creating a community based on mutual profit and solidarity. The actual portion of the profit to be shared will be determined after the launch of the portal and will depend on the amount of actual profit we manage to generate in the first year.

We would like to underline two innovative services our portal will be offering: Calendar and Instant Tandem. For major universities in Switzerland we will develop a database of the courses they are offering. This will help us create an automated scheduler that will let students quickly create his or her calendar by logging in and selecting classes for the current semester. Instant Tandem on other hand will aim at bringing the popular Tandem to the internet world. From our own experiences with languages we found that one of the reasons why students do not participate in this useful program is the effort required to find a suitable partner. Hence, we will provide a section which will be matchmaking students willing to improve their language skills. Moreover we will give a possibility of making online tandem sessions through the use of the skype™ network.

Table 1: Overview of All4Students services

|Service |Description |

|Internships and Jobs |Here students will be able to share available offers with each |

| |other. Moreover our partners will be able to post their offers |

| |through this section. |

|Study Material |We will create a comprehensive and self-organized directory of |

| |the study materials, including directory of past exams, class |

| |notes, cheat sheets, reports, and other students’ tips. The trick|

| |for organization will be a voting system commonly found on most |

| |of the current social networking sites like digg™ or facebook, |

| |where a user shows if something is useful by clicking ‘Like’ or |

| |inverse by clicking ‘Dislike’. |

|Night Life and Events |Similarly this will be a self-organized directory of events. |

| |Students will be able to say if they are planning to attend an |

| |event, as well as invite their friends to go with them. Partners |

| |will be able to create events and invite students through this |

| |section. |

|Instant Tandem |We will offer a section dedicated to learning languages. On this |

| |page students will be able to find a partner with whom he or she |

| |can make regular Skype conversations to improve his or her |

| |language skills. |

|General Discussion Boards (Forums) |Self-explaining section where students can post messages and seek|

| |advice. |

|Calendar |This was the original idea for our website. We wanted to create a|

| |tool called “Scheduleman” for students in major Swiss |

| |universities that would act as an automatic scheduler. The |

| |calendar will be able to automatically retrieve the schedule of |

| |classes, public holidays or events. |

|Tutoring |Here students can offer their services as tutors to other |

| |students. In the long term we are planning to develop this |

| |section to the form where we can actually match student and |

| |tutor, control the whole process, thus charge a little overhead. |

Price

As discussed previously in the report the site will be completely free for students. This means that any student with a valid university email address will be able to join our website for free and use the services offered. Potentially in the future, we are planning to develop sections like Tutoring and Internships where we will charge a certain overhead to the transactions made through our portal, much like ebay® does. The overhead will be added to the price posted by the student proposing his service. Before posting the student will have to accept our terms of use, which will explain the process to the student. However at least initially we are planning to launch our web portal keeping these services open and observe the potential of transforming them into online marketplaces.

Place

The way our customers, in this particular case student, will reach us is through the internet. Each student will have his unique user id to log in. Afterwards he or she can use the services offered.

Promotion

Awareness of students in Switzerland will be raised through promotional activities organized across the major campuses and cities. The main tool we will rely on will be student parties sponsored by our website.

Moreover we will organize an advertising campaign which will include ads placed on internet and potentially in the free newspaper “20 Minutes”. These campaigns will raise the awareness for our brand name among the students and the general public. Depending on the success of the campaign, there is a possibility to design a more extensive advertising campaign within student newspapers and journals.

Partners

Product

For our partners we will be offering a possibility to get in touch with students through our portal. This can be done through online advertisements, job offers, and event creation. We summarize these services in the table below.

Table 2: List of partner services

|Service |Description |

|Online Advertisement |Our partners will be able to place ads throughout dedicated zones|

| |on the portal. We are planning to innovate and propose an option |

| |of narrowly targeted advertisements, where partners specify |

| |exactly the characteristics of the student they want to reach |

| |(age, university, language, and etc). |

|Internships and Jobs |Positions posted by our partners will receive special privileges.|

| |They will be designed to be more distinctive, as well as placed |

| |in more visible areas of the page. Dedicated page can be designed|

| |by the company on our portal for students to apply for the |

| |position. On top of that like with advertisements the partners |

| |will be able to target their offers to a narrow group of student |

| |users. |

|Night Life and Events |Similarly to job and internship offers, events created by |

| |partners will be more visible overall. Moreover partners will be |

| |able to design a dedicated page for the events to create certain |

| |aesthetic image of the enterprise. |

Price

Sync with Achraf.

Place

All the services for our portal will be accessible online, through online forms, very similar to the way facebook takes orders for advertisements. For very specific deals we will provide our contact details online, to let our potential customers get in touch.

Promotion

Currently we are not planning any partner oriented advertisement campaign in popular media or on the internet, as our main initial task is to attract students to have a solid user base. However, we expect our advertisement campaigns for students to make our brand known as well to our potential partners.

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.

Integration and collaboration

In fact supply chain integration and collaborative partnerships have a positive effect on supply chain performance.

In today’s world of international trade and global competition, where increasingly supply chains compete more so than individual firms and products, integration and collaboration have become key differentiators of high performing supply chains.

Supply chain integration is an enabler of collaboration. While integration is product and process oriented, collaboration is focused on relationship. Formation sharing can be achieved by implementing integrated processes and applications, but may not be benefit to all supply chain partners, possibly exposing suppliers to their competitors.

For example supermarket retail is intensely competitive, as are automotive sales. This drives down consumer prices at the supermarket shelves and car dealers forecourts, which in turn causes them to ‘ squeeze ‘their suppliers to operate with lower profit margins and tighter delivery schedules while maintaining service quality. Consequently, suppliers are forced by these market conditions to behave competitively rather than collaboratively. Collaboration is dependent on the provision of mutual benefit. Clearly in such supply, mutual benefit between suppliers is difficult to achieve. Hence trust becomes an issue.

The dynamics of trust and collaboration can be explained via the prisoner’s dilemma, an example of Nash equilibrium game theory. Here is the analogy:

You and a partner are suspected of committing a crime and arrested. The police interview each of you separately. The police detective offers you deal: your sentence will be reduced if you confess! Here are your options:

➢ If you confess but your partner doesn’t: your partner gets the full 10-year sentence for committing the crime, while you get a 2-year sentence for collaborating.

➢ If you don’t confess but your partner does: the tables are turned! You get the full 10-year sentence, while your partner gets the 2-year sentence.

➢ If both of you confess: you each get a reduced sentence of 5years.

➢ If neither of you confess: you are both free people.

The dilemma you face is ‘do you trust your partner to make the same decision as you? ’

The best strategy is based on trust, and results in a ‘win-win ‘situation.

Traditionally, business relationship has been built on open market negotiations (i.e. Gaining the lowest priced products and /or service). From this common ‘competitive ‘starting point, a trust-based win-win situation in a supply chain partnership takes time. Trust needs to be built up step by step. The journey towards a collaborative supply chain can be long and arduous.

Collaboration has two dimensions: vertical collaboration between suppliers and customers, and horizontal collaboration between competitors and other supply chain actors. Vertical collaboration is more common and easier to implement than horizontal collaboration. However, supply networks that achieve both will gain significant business benefit. In the context, for all4student , the combination of vertical and horizontal collaboration can achieve reduced inventory costs, reduce unproductive waiting time to download or upload something, improve integration of network, improve lead time performance by adopting collaborative methods joint planning and technology sharing.

Here are some proposals for all4student :

1. we could sell the members information to phone marketing companies

2. Find job for students and take a percentage of their salary due to finding the job. it can be master or bachelor project, visual arts, music, internship and more.

3. Bonus for the active student on the web site such as priority in using the job offers.

4. Advertise sponsors in student night lives.

5. Dating web sites more secure due to registering with the Switzerland university address.

Implementation Plan

To ensure that the idea of our business doesn’t rest on the drawing board, we describe in the following section a short overview of the implementation plan, in which we set the most important goals and state the responsibilities of each individual that is involved on the founding process of All4Students. The main goal (founding and operating a successful start up) is divided into subtasks for each founder and co-founder

Tasks for each individual:

• Person Z is the CEO and responsible for strategic decisions. He has the big picture and has an open eye for possible future market segments that might be interesting to enter. He looks out for possible mergers, acquisitions and joint ventures.

• Person Y is the human resource manager: and is responsible for providing a good internal working climate. He eases possible disputes and can act as a mediator. If the COO or other members of the board decide to hire new people he searches for young, motivated new people. He ensure that the workforce is well organised and has an open discussion culture.

• Person XY is the CFO and responsible to raise enough capital to ensure a positive cash flow. He deals with banks and carefully looks at the expenses to prevent costs going out of control. Financial commitments over a certain threshold need to be allowed by the CFO to prevent risky treaties that might break our neck. He also explains the quarterly and annually results to the sponsors and investors and deals with the tax authorities.

• Persons U and V are Programmer. They are responsible for the implementation of our services and tools and guarantee, that our webpage is always available and running smooth. They have acquired the necessary knowledge to prevent Distributed Denial of Service Attacks and are always looking where new threads might emerge.

• Information and Security officer: warns from weaknesses regarding the IT Infrastructure and defends our business environment from harmful attacks. His main responsibility is to keep our web portal smoothly running 24/7.

• Person X is the house manager and deals with infrastructure issues. He organizes sufficiently large offices and rents IT infrastructure such as computers, secure entrance keys to the building for every employee, etc. He verifies if the offers for the office space and webspace are market conform and in our interest.

The time table isn’t formulated in each detail because we have to stay flexible and must be able to react accordingly to new circumstance. That’s why we just formulate some important steps we have to take care when we start and we add new points when problems arise.

• We plan to start as a small start up with the least necessary external financing. This keeps us more independent from investors and allows us to react to difficult situations in our best interest without having to fear to loose investors.

• If our business volume crosses a certain threshold we definitely decide for a legal framework of our company. This can be a limited liability company, a privately held company or a public company and is not yet decided.

• After the launch of the website we will immediately begin to measure the activities on the web page and try to acquire as many new users as possible.

• We post interesting news, make easy contests and surveys and reward valuable users and clients to attract new users and get a high user satisfaction.

• In the days after the launch we monitor the activities regarding the number of users and their time spent on the webpage. We plan to track the development very carefully which allows us to immediately detect if we get on the wrong track.

Financing

Capital needs :

All4Students as any startup needs funds. In the section we will discuss the capital needs of such a society. We will also discuss which of the debt capital or equity capital is more suitable for our case.

The Start-up capital or working capital, is defined as the funding that will help a company pay for equipment, rent, supplies, etc., for the first year or so of operation.[11]

Let’s see how the capital need is divided in our case for the launch of the company:

1. IT infrastructure

As an internet portal it is obvious that a considerable part of the expense will be on the information technology and it’s management:

• Dedicated server rental : a quick comparison of the market offers sets the cost to : 200CHF *12 = 2400 CHF/year

• Brand and Interface design: Creating the company’s logo and graphic style is definitely one of the most important tasks for our Startup, as users will have to recognize the logo anywhere.

Such a service would cost around 5'000 CHF (advised by Aziz bousseta designer in CH, ).

• Software manufacturing: Many of our services do rely on databases that are elsewhere, this requires that our portal has a back-end compatibility with other services (CFF, Is-academia, Unil .etc)

The cost of manufacturing can be avoided since 2 of the team members are computer engineers and can develop the soft.

[pic]

2. Marketing :

IT is a basic investment, but without a perfect marketing complain our product will fail to reach its target customers.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of the means we plan to reach our potential customers and their respective cost:

• Online advertisement: If we choose to use the advertisement through Google’s search results the prices are the following:

▪ Adwords : For keywords like “Bourse d’études, étudiants, appartements étudiants,jobs étudiants, bon plan étudiants” average price per key word : 0.10 CHF/cpc

▪ AdSense : Depends highly on the hosting website.

Considering the number of clicks : we can expect something like 10’000CHF for 1 year (equivalent to 100’000) clicks which is very conceivable

• 20Minutes.ch : As the reader may now this newspaper is the dominant in the free newspapers industry. This is definitely an investment that is going to have an effect on the number of visitors to our website.

[pic]

The tables above show the rearders number and the rate of youth among all:

▪ Footer 1st page : 2960 CHF daily -> around 50 prints first year

3. Payrolls:

During the first years of activity the team members have agreed to share equally the rights of the company but no wages are going to be

4. Rent:

The rent is not going to be an expense as the company doesn’t need a physical location. To begin we will work from our rooms or garages or anywhere where we have a fast internet connection.

5. Other expenses

• Insurance(520/year), obligations to partners etc…

Total Needs for 1st year are : …….

Principal sources of funds:

As discussed above the expenses for the first year are over 50’000 CHF, which is beyond what usual students can gather during their academic path.

Here is a set of solutions that can be presented as Equity capital:

• Parc Scientifique of EPFL : a site integrated to the EPFL campus that helps innovative high-tech startups to take off.[12]

(the PSE can provide the location for our company as well as the help needed to find investors:

• A non exhaustive list of venture capitalists (from Venturelab.ch):

SECA

CTI Invest

Business Angel Suisse

Fondation pour l'Innovation technologique - FIT

Fongit Seed Invest

BrainsToVentures (b-to-v)

RedAlpine

StartAngels Network

Sources of income of all4students:

Finally, let’s discuss how much money All4students is planning, hopefully going, to make:

• Advertisements: Hosting banners in our portal can bring advertisement incomes, namely through Google’s Ad-Sense mechanism: receiving a fee for each click or each impression on our portal.

“A common banner ad package consists of 100,000 impressions and costs from $20 to $100 per thousand impressions. Rates from $25 to $70 cost per thousand (CPM) are average for popular sites” [13]

“Affichez votre publicité sur Students en fonction du coût par mille contacts (CPM) de Fr. 70.-. (CPM= coût pour 1000 contacts / bannières / ad impressions).”[14]

• Transactions fees: This will be our main source of income. For every service where some money is involved All4Students.ch will get a transaction fee.

Basically no money is transferred through the website, but for each transaction a fee is received from one and/or both of the contract parts.

The fees vary depending on the service type:

• ScheduleMan: free service

• Tutoring: no fee received, tutors on the other handwill see their account type evolve making them beneficiary of the revenues.

• Job offers: Checking the offers or uploading them is free of charge(bonus for the uploader). Once a deal is made we receive a onetime fee from the enterprise and a % of the salary*

• Night Life: Free service, users benefit of reductions.

• Dating: ?

•

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.

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 blog[15]. 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

|Weeks |Dates |Weekly program |Deadlines |Meeting with supervisor |

|1 |04.01 - |Exams | | |

| |10.01 | | | |

|2 |11.01 - |Exams | | |

| |17.01 | | | |

|3 |18.01 - |Exams | | |

| |24.01 | | | |

|4 |25.01 - |Exams | | |

| |31.01 | | | |

|5 |01.02 - |Holiday | | |

| |07.02 | | | |

|6 |08.02 - |Holiday | | |

| |14.02 | | | |

|7 |15.02 - |Holiday | | |

| |21.02 | | | |

|8 |22.02 - |Subgroup work + Weekly meeting | |During these weeks arrange a meeting with the supervisor|

| |28.02 | | |(week 8 to week 11). |

|9 |01.03 - |Subgroup work + Weekly meeting | | |

| |7.03 | | | |

|10 |08.03 - |Subgroup work + Weekly meeting | | |

| |14.03 | | | |

|11 |15.03 - |Subgroup work + Weekly meeting | | |

| |21.03 | | | |

|12 |22.03 - |Subgroup work + Weekly meeting |Subgroup's | |

| |28.03 | |deadline | |

|13 |29.03 - |Implementation of subgroup's work | | |

| |04.04 |+Weekly meeting | | |

|14 |05.04 - |Send the report to the supervisor |First deadline |During these weeks arrange a meeting with the supervisor|

| |11.04 | | |(week 14 to week 16). |

|15 |12.04 - |Corrections + Weekly meeting | | |

| |18.04 | | | |

|16 |19.04 - |Corrections + Weekly meeting | | |

| |25.04 | | | |

|17 |26.04 - |Send the final report |Final deadline | |

| |02.05 | | | |

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

Annex

Survey

We took the survey before starting our work on our business plan to have an idea of student’s needs and habits. For this purpose we designed the following 6 questions:

• To get a rough idea of how much time students spend on web 2.0 websites we asked them:

How much time do you spend on a social website (facebook, orkut, linkedin, etc.)?

[pic]

• We wanted to know how they look for internships/jobs so our second question was:

How do you look for internships?

[pic]

• To understand which will be the most crucial services we asked:

If there is a social website oriented completely towards students which services would you like to see?

[pic]

• We then wanted to know how many students would actually use such a website, we therefore asked them:

If there is a social website that offers all of the services above would you use it?

[pic]

• We were also curios to know if the students would participate in such a website which is our basic idea behind All4students.ch. Naturally the question was:

If there is a social website that offers all of the services mentioned above would you participate (upload exams, job offers, etc.) in it?

[pic]

• The last question we asked students was to measure the satisfaction of current solutions:

Do you use students.ch or other student oriented websites?

[pic]

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[1]

[2]

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hyw³hÆBQ

hyw³hERSjh[7]ZŒU[pic]nHtHh…a? Respondents of our survey were mainly EPFL students, thus results indicated represent the opinions of the French speaking area of Switzerland.

[8] 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:

[9]

[10]

[11] See survey questions, results and graphs in annex

[12] 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:

[13]

[14] Annexe ?

[15] Michael Porter, On competiton, Library of congress, Washington, 1996 (Chap. 5)

[16] HowStuffworks :

[17]

[18]

[19]

[20] Our blog is public and can be accessed via the following link: .

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