Sinfinity and HAMSTER
Presenting two of our “babies” who ate up our time for the past month:
Finalist, UP Diliman College of Engineering Marketing Competition
Sinfinity is a commercial mobile phone service being developed in UP Diliman. Specifics are under wraps…for now. Behind the concept of Sinfinity is Team Rijndael (pronounced “Rhine-doll”, after a Belgian-born cryptographic algorithm).
Team Rijndael made it to the September 9 Finals Night of the UPD Engineering Marketing Congress, an event dominated by Industrial Engineering majors. I tell you, it is hard to convince a geriatric judge how wonderful an intangible product (i.e. technological service) is when your opponents are marketing soaps, gasoline, and tea. Ia Lucero and I presented Sinfinity, in addition to writing the 18-page marketing plan.
But still, Team Rijndael disproved the theory that Computer Science majors are tongue-tied geeks who know how to program their software but not to market them. (We were the only Computer Science team in a field of seven finalists.) As consolation, we bagged the Best Exhibit award.
As mentioned, Sinfinity is a commercial service; “brand name” would be an appropriate description. It runs on top of HAMSTER, which is the Team’s thesis itself.
FYI, Ia designed both the Sinfinity and HAMSTER logos. Presently, Team Rijndael is in the thick of things at the PESO Challenge, a technology and innovation business plan competition modeled after the MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition. It is being held by the Philippine Center for Entrepreneurship and the Ayala Foundation. Sinfinity is one of the 37 ‘companies’ (pruned from 72) that made it through the first round. Again, I was Team’s business plan writer. Talk about having a stereotype job, haha.
I’ll be posting on our experiences regarding the first PESO Participant Enhancement Workshops in a few days. Wish us luck!
November 24th, 2006 at 6:07 pm
[...] Stellify is an obscure verb. I think we picked it up when we were brainstorming for this marketing congress we joined last year. The product/service we were marketing was called Sinfinity and we came up with a campaign featuring the infinite number of s-verbs we could do with it. Sinfinity is a glorified version of our thesis, HAMSTER. [...]
December 11th, 2006 at 9:37 pm
[...] I can now let out a brief, very brief sigh of relief. Sigh. (There you go.) Yesterday, we successfully presented and defended our thesis, HAMSTER (the other half of the project MOVISS). I mentioned HAMSTER a few months past, branded as Sinfinity. [...]
January 3rd, 2007 at 1:12 am
[...] Three “S” words are of chief concern to you, dear sirs and ma’ams. The first word for today is “Shoot”. Shoot your videos using your cameraphones, while I’m shooting down my writing career. What the hell am I doing entering this and that marketing contest? And actually surviving them? [...]