Write a ChinesePod app, get a free trip to Taiwan

[NinjaTurtle]

Hi everyone,

 

I just received this email from ChinesePod:

 

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 ChinesePod is opening its brand new Tech Campus in Taipei, Taiwan and we’re looking for fresh ideas to update the ChinesePod App. We’re awarding 4 lucky winners a MONTH LONG ALL-EXPENSES PAID TRIP to Taipei! Winners will receive 3 weeks of IMMERSION SCHOOL, ONE WEEK of HANDS ON DEVELOPMENT BRAINSTORMING with the ChinesePod Executives, a roundtrip business class flight, a premium hotel stay for the duration of the trip and a VIP experience unlike anything you’ve seen before!

 

We are awarding prizes for submissions in four categories. Feel free to submit your ideas for one or all four categories.

 

Chinese Characters
Design an app that helps ChinesePod users learn Chinese characters. We’re looking for your best ideas on how a learner should go about learning how to write in simplified Chinese.

 

Integrated Dictionary
Submit your ideas for a better integration of the ChinesePod dictionary with other features of our website, including a flashcard feature.

 

Gamification of Learning Chinese
Learning Chinese doesn’t have to be a chore. We’re looking for your ideas to help make the journey more fun! Submit your idea for an exciting Chinese learning game.

 

UX App Improvements
Got suggestions on how our current app can be better? Or, is there a feature you think could be improved? Share your ideas for improving our current app and how it should work.

We’re excited to have the best minds come out to our new facility in Taipei to show off their ideas. Follow the link below to be among the first to be notified when we officially launch the contest next week!

 

https://chinesepod.app/?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=app_challenge

 

 

 

 

 

 

[mungouk]

I got the email as well. Do I detect a note of desperation...?

 

[Tomsima]

Got the email too. I kind of felt like, if I could write an app that good, why wouldn't I just pitch it directly to any of the big online Chinese learning companies? I mean the outcome has got to be better than a flight and a few weeks of study in Taiwan. Felt pretty unprofessional to me…

[NinjaTurtle]

For people who watch ChinesePod on YouTube; Fiona, Constance, and Gwilym all quit at the same time about six months ago. I can only wonder if things are not going well at ChinesePod right now.

[zander1]

Last time I was on (I cancelled my subscription a while ago but went on semi-recently to check it out) they hadn’t released any new content for a long time and many users were already complaining. To be honest, I feel it’s been going downhill since they moved to Taiwan.

[mungouk]

8 hours ago, NinjaTurtle said:

Fiona, Constance, and Gwilym all quit at the same time

 

F & G are now with Skritter.

 

 

[amytheorangutan]

I was looking at the writing characters part and thought that they should forget about it. They should just concentrate on what they are doing as there are already apps to help people writing Chinese and highly doubt they will be able to create a better one and still do all the other stuff they’re trying to do. They will create a mediocre writing app and the rest of the content will suffer as well if they stretch themselves too thin. 

[歐博思]

If I could write an app like that, heck, I'd non only pitch it but start the whole company!

[wibr]

They are clearly asking for ideas, not for fully developed apps, so I think the reward they offer is actually not bad.

[Tomsima]

"Design an app" doesn't mean actually  design an app?

[imron]

On 8/19/2018 at 2:37 AM, Tomsima said:

why wouldn't I just pitch it directly to any of the big online Chinese learning companies?

You mean like ChinesePod?

 

7 hours ago, Tomsima said:

Design an app" doesn't mean actually  design an app?

It means design an app, not develop an app.

[mungouk]

6 hours ago, imron said:

On 8/19/2018 at 2:37 AM, Tomsima said:

why wouldn't I just pitch it directly to any of the big online Chinese learning companies?

You mean like ChinesePod?

 

Maybe to someone who would be willing to give you a better deal for signing over your intellectual property than a free holiday and some Mandarin lessons?

 

 

[DavyJonesLocker]

Sod their free holiday to Taiwan. 

If you have a good idea for an app get a few Indian developers and local Chinese to help you and own it yourself.

 

That's how you make money in life, not doing it for someone else. 

[Flickserve]

Each one to his own. 

[mikelove]

Not trying to come in and pile on ChinesePod here, but I do feel compelled to point out that mobile app ideas really aren't worth that much.

 

We get a *ton* of unsolicited ideas for new features - some good, some bad, some downright hilarious - but we end up implementing very few of them because ideas are cheap and programmer time is not. (even with outsourcing, which I can assure you does not magically allow people with good ideas and little-to-no programming ability to cheaply spin up commercial-quality apps)

 

From ~2004 or so (when built-in cameras on PDAs became a regular thing) until 2010, we'd get a couple of emails every year with somebody suggesting the idea of live OCR. Sometimes they'd mention it casually / treat it as fairly obvious and wonder if we were thinking about it, other times they'd treat it as a big exciting idea but they liked us so much they were sharing it anyway, other times they'd act like it was a super secret amazing thing they'd come up with and which they'd only share with us for a cut of the profits (we only found out they were referring to OCR because they'd drop enough hints that we'd shoot back a guess and be right). But ultimately live OCR is a fairly obvious idea, all that it was really waiting on was for the technology to catch up; the reason our OCR and Word Lens launched within a couple of months of each other was that the iPhone 3GS (first iPhone with an autofocus camera) hit a commercially viable level of adoption around then and Apple added an API in iOS 4 to let apps directly access and manipulate camera output. (this did not stop a few of the 'amazing secret idea' folks from later coming back and accusing us of stealing their idea once we launched live OCR)

 

We also get a great many suggestions for character lookup systems, most of which are either a) not scalable (e.g. somebody just got through their first hundred Chineasy cards and thinks all characters have cute little fake stories to explain them and wants to use that as a character input method), b) so arcane that they would never make sense to anyone except the person who thought them up, or c) date back to the Han Dynasty. And pretty much all of them would require a great deal of both programming time and grunt labor time keying in whatever data this new method would require for each character. (so that even the good ideas are generally not likely to turn a profit)

 

ChinesePod themselves are a good example of how executing well on a fairly obvious idea can pay dividends; audio language lessons are hardly new, I remember listening to Greek lessons on cassette tapes in the car with my dad in the early '90s, but they took that concept to a podcast, brought on some amazingly talented people to execute it, produced a ton of generally excellent content and built a successful business. Pleco is likewise not particularly original - all we were really doing the first few years was putting a Canon Wordtank or whatever into a well-executed Palm app; the closest thing to an idea or vision there was to correctly predict that general-purpose mobile devices would eventually replace single-use ones.

 

To the extent that ideas do drive anything, it tends to be little ideas - the flashes of insight that only come up when you're deep in the middle of developing something and living with it every day - rather than big ones that count for the most. Apple didn't invent pinch-zoom and then build an iPhone around it, they came up with pinch-zoom while they were already in the middle of developing a mobile phone with a capacitive touchscreen. Most of the good suggestions we get - and there are quite a lot of pieces of Pleco that came from user suggestions - are more in this vein, complaining about some little thing that doesn't work as well as they'd like or is too awkward to reach or whatever; users who are living with your product every day are a fantastic source of ideas to make it better. (and so I'm also compelled to point out that 2 of the 4 items in ChinesePod's list are in that category, i.e. soliciting feedback on how to make their app better)

 

Anyway, to sum up: a) ideas for brand new products in isolation aren't worth very much, b) ideas about how to improve something based on your actual experience of using it are incredibly valuable + much appreciated ?

[imron]

6 hours ago, mungouk said:

Maybe to someone who would be willing to give you a better deal for signing over your intellectual property than a free holiday and some Mandarin lessons?

App ideas are a dime-a-dozen.  What matters is execution on those ideas.  ChinesePod is offering to do the execution (i.e. the hard part).

 

5 hours ago, DavyJonesLocker said:

If you have a good idea for an app get a few Indian developers and local Chinese to help you and own it yourself. 

I agree that doing things for yourself is the way to make money, but there are also non-trivial setup costs involved that keep people from trying.  The absolute *minimum* you'd be looking to spend on a decent (but trivial) app is maybe $10,000 (double that if you want both iOS and Android), with no guarantee of seeing any of that back.  Add in all the marketing and promotion efforts, and maybe what you are left with is people who have an idea or two (because ideas are a dime-a-dozen) but aren't so invested in it (or have the money lying around) that they want to execute on that idea themselves.  In those cases, throwing out an idea or two for a one-month all expenses paid study-vacation doesn't seem like a bad deal.

[mungouk]

34 minutes ago, imron said:

App ideas are a dime-a-dozen.  What matters is execution on those ideas.  ChinesePod is offering to do the execution (i.e. the hard part).

 

Point taken on the dev side, but they're asking for semi-functional prototypes, not just "ideas".  Quite a bit of work involved there, and not likely to be accessible to the average language learner either. 

 

After working in design and computing education for many years, I've seen/heard of way too many "competitions", or more recently hackathons, that offer nice prizes — usually to students — in return for taking the IP of all of the entries (not just winners) with the hope of making serious money out of them.  Maybe the T&Cs in this case do actually offer royalties, equity or whatever, but as I've not registered I haven't been able to read them because they're not public.

 

No disrespect to Chinesepod per se. I'm just very skeptical of these kind of IP-harvesting "competitions", instead of the user research and product development that a proper company should be doing anyway, if they intend to survive.

 

 

[NinjaTurtle]

10 hours ago, mikelove said:

We get a *ton* of unsolicited ideas for new features 

 

Mike,

 

Thanks for posting your post. That was interesting.

[imron]

11 hours ago, mungouk said:

but they're asking for semi-functional prototypes, not just "ideas"

Where are they asking this?  I clicked through to the page, but it doesn't give any details unless you register (which I'm not going to do), and the post listed above seemed to mostly ask for ideas, with the exception of the first category which asks people to 'design an app', which in my mind would include a description of the basic idea as well as mockups for the main screens.  I don't see anything about semi-functional prototypes.

 

Now, I agree there's a case to be made that if you are capable of developing a semi-functional prototype you might be better off just bringing the full thing to market yourself.

 

There is also a case to be made that the categories of apps they are talking about are competing in a very crowded market and the amount you'd likely earn might not come anywhere near the value of what ChinesePod is offering as a prize.

 

11 hours ago, mungouk said:

After working in design and computing education for many years, I've seen/heard of way too many "competitions", or more recently hackathons, that offer nice prizes — usually to students — in return for taking the IP of all of the entries (not just winners) with the hope of making serious money out of them. 

I also don't like this sort of thing, but I think what ChinesePod is asking and offering appears to be different.

[DavyJonesLocker]

16 hours ago, imron said:

I agree that doing things for yourself is the way to make money, but there are also non-trivial setup costs involved that keep people from trying.  The absolute *minimum* you'd be looking to spend on a decent (but trivial) app is maybe $10,000 (double that if you want both iOS and Android), with no guarantee of seeing any of that back.  Add in all the marketing and promotion efforts, and maybe what you are left with is people who have an idea or two (because ideas are a dime-a-dozen) but aren't so invested in it (or have the money lying around) that they want to execute on that idea themselves.  In those cases, throwing out an idea or two for a one-month all expenses paid study-vacation doesn't seem like a bad deal.

 

 

Does depend on your risk appetite naturally but if I was on the Chinese Pod management team, this is what I'd be doing, getting some one else to do the work and rep the reward off their hard work.

Worked too long in international Finance and business to see that being smart (in a traditional sense ) is very low correlated to being successful . In any investment bank I worked in the PhD guys never really got that far career wise.