Analysis of WidSets platform opportunities at Russian market

Project team

Alexey Koren, post -graduate student, SUAI
Alexander Sidorenko, post-graduate student, SUAI
Sergey Semenov, post-graduate student, SUAI
Natalia Voloshina, PhD, SUAI
Daria Glebova, student, SUAI

Project motivation

The WidSets is a new service provided by Nokia. This fast growing service provides quite big collection of small but useful applications (widgets) mostly oriented on easy and fast access to online resource in the Internet, like RSS-feeds, news, e-mail, wikipedia and much more. WidSets can be installed to any mobile phone supported J2ME and compatible with almost all popular mobile phones.
It is known that in Russia huge number of registrations is completed every week, but the number of really active returning users is not developing as well. The main target of project is to evaluate the efficiency and usability of this service according to specific issues of using online services in Russia.

Project flow and targeted goals

We suggest the following flow of the project. Project will be divided into 3 main steps:

• Start-up phase;
• General Research phase;
• Finalization phase.

First step is intended to get initial knowledge about using and developing widgets. Team will be split into few parts and roles will be assigned to any team member. We already provide classification for people who can be interested in WidSets and role assignment will be done according to this. Full information is provided into project report but the common approach is that we have 3 main groups of WidSets users:

1. Actually Users – the main consumers, people who actively download and use widgets
2. Developers – users which made one step further and become creators of new widgets
3. Customers – people from any industry who can be interested in having WidSets coupled with services they provide.

We will easily analyze WidSets from starters’ point of view. It can be done from starter users’ point of view as well as from point of view of starter developers.

Goals of Start-up step are:

• WidSets usability testing
• Testing of developer’s tools and usability of online resources such as wiki and manuals
• Analyzing the user experience started from registration up to active usage
• Building WidSets User Model
• Performing analysis of data domain (competitors, similar technologies etc)

Second step is longest phase; most part of research activity will be performed during it. We will use result got from Start-up phase to dig deeper to WidSets technology, to understand problems and to work out the solutions for solving it.

Goals of General Research step are:

• Investigating problems with WidSets usage in Russia
• Provide solutions for solving these problems
• Analyzing WidSets User Model to understand needs of each user category
• Analyzing existing approaches for satisfaction these needs
• Provide market and technical recommendations for increasing interest of all categories of users to WidsSets platform
• Propose strategic recommendations for WidSets market intervention in Russia

Finalization step is the time where all results are combining together, formatting and preparing
to be presented to project customer.

Deliverables of Finalization steps are:

• Full project report, including all results achieved during all steps
• Presentation describing WidSets platform and its opportunities at Russian market
• Technical presentation summarizing our experience of work with WidSets, containing information about all widgets implemented and planned for implementation, ideas of widgets to encourage students auditory.

Timeline

21.11.2007 – First meeting of the team, official start of the project as well as its Start-up phase
12.12.2007 – End of Start-up phase, beginning of General Research phase
31.12.2007 – WidSets developers contests deadline; team is going to participate in this contest as well as spread message about it in SPb developers community
13.02.2008 – End of General Research phase, start of Finalization phase
End of 02 – start of 03.2008 – WidSets seminar in SUAI; team is planning to present its results.

Required equipment

Three mobile phones supported WidSets technology should be provided to the team with the free Internet traffic from one of the Russian mobile provider (Megafon, MTS, Beeline or Tele2). WiFi-enabled devices are preferable because they help to reduce expensive GPRS traffic.

Competence support

The team is looking for statistics and other data regarding WidSets usage. This data will be discussed separately. Also team is looking for support from WidSets experienced developers and architects to discuss technical issues and ways of handling it.