UP Engineering Marketing Congress 2006

We had already submitted our marketing proposal for this year's Marketing Congress last monday. About 26 teams are competing and only 8 teams shall be chosen in the qualifying round.

I'm really not that positive that we're going to make it to the finals. We had written our proposal only during the day of the deadline. We should have started it earlier. Imagine, it was at 12am (monday) when we started to brainstorm about our paper. Our product is a promising one as it (well, something similar) had previously won in last year's MIT PESO for best in IT. Regrets thanks to ningas cogon.

Adding salt to our injuries, we passed our paper 40 minutes after the deadline. This makes our paper a candidate for a whopping 10% deduction. Most teams also submitted late, reportedly, only 8 teams submitted on time. I really think 10% deduction is too much. There would be a high probability that the final 8 would be those who had passed early. Most of those whom I think are top contenders for the top prize were also late in submitting the paper. Perhaps, only a slot or 2 remains for us to compete in with. Luck.

Our product is rooted on Despi's thesis project on thin clients. Thin clients are mini-computers which are less powerful than the standard desktop. However, thin clients are capable of doing common tasks in large workplaces such as that of call centers. Common computing workloads such as internet browsing, data and resource management, etc does not require powerful desktop systems. We propose to replace those general-purpose computers with thin clients and connect the network via a central server. This setup provides low-cost solutions such as outsourcing businesses and the e-service community.

Since our paper was rushed, I'd say it was half-baked. I like the name of our product, iThinC, pronounced as "I think". Like that of the iPods and iMacs, it stands for "Intelligent Thin Clients". Funny thing is, the marketing portion of the paper was not fully developed. I guess we spent more time thinking of how we introduce our product (and giving it a name) than focusing on our marketing plan. The hell, it is a marketing competition after all. Good luck to our team for that.