Week 12: NEW IDEAS MUCH

This week was one of the more interesting topics we did! It was about how people(ORDINARY PEOPLE, mind you) are able to create absolutely amazing applications and new ideas that change the way we use and apply social media to our daily lives. Lets take a look at one innovations that have personally helped me improve on my daily dealings

Carousell(surprise surprise)

Something to start off with, lets go local! Carousell started out as Snapsell with founders Lucas Ngoo, Quek Siu Rui and Marcus Tan. Snapsell began in March 2012 at Startup Weekend. Snapsell's team took 54 grueling hours to produce a demo for the final pitch. It impressed the judges and they won.

additional info: They're from NUS. Shocker

The idea began with a problem the founders faced just days before Startup Weekend. One of them had a white MacBook that was still working great and with reasonably good specifications, but it had been abandoned for months since he had gotten himself a newer, more portable MacBook. Having always wanted to sell it on a marketplace like Hardwarezone or Craigslist but just never got around to doing so, it became clear that one of the key reasons for this perpetual procrastination was the hassle in listing stuff for sale.
Listing something for sale is truly non-trivial, especially when it involves photos (and photos are key to getting good offers). The process goes something like this: You take photos with your camera, upload them to your computer, use a photo editing software to enhance/resize the photos, then upload it to an image hosting service and then embed it into the post where you are listing your item. It’s a painful process that easily takes 30 minutes or more. With that, it occurred to them that with smartphones, this process could be streamlined to a process that would take just seconds. Hence, at Startup Weekend Singapore, Snapsell was submitted for the voting round as “a dead easy way to sell your stuff”. Since Startup Weekend concluded, the creators have been encouraged by requests for the app to launch sooner, and have spent a lot of time listening to feedback and understanding the problems associated with selling stuff. Internally, they have distilled all the information gathered to the essence of the problems of selling today. And that has given the makers new insights into the possibilities of what Snapsell can become.
Today,  Snapsell has been successfully been transformed into Carousell! For more information about this new venture, here is a newspaper cutout.


I personally use both Facebook and Carousell, although I subscribed to the latter only recently because I needed a quick way to get a headmount for my action camera. Furthermore, allowing me to chat instantly with any buyers/sellers is a great way to get to know more information about the product I'm buying or whether the buyer is legit or not. So far currently I'm in the dealing with this guy for the purchase of three fire-bellied toads. lets hope it all goes well and I'm not going to get caught.