Continuing on with the SmileFile business plan as part of my MBA Entrepreneurship subject, it has recently become clear that I need some more evidence of people's willingness to submit ratings. While I know that people in other countries (mainly in the US and India) are willing to freely contribute ratings on some similar websites, and also that a good proportion of the people I speak to about the idea seem willing to contribute, for an MBA business plan, this is not sufficient.

I discussed this with Brad and we decided to conduct a real-live test of people's willingness to contribute ratings. He knocked up a very basic website interface where people can contribute ratings, as well as a telephone interface using his EasySpeak speech technology. We also had a small number of "rating cards" printed giving instructions on how to rate a business. We decided to target restaurants and hairdressers in our local area and so for a week, we door-knocked each of these businesses, telling them that we are conducting a competition to find this suburb's best restaurant / hairdresser and at the end of next month we will be giving out awards (which we will do). The competition is based entirely on customer feedback though, so we gave each of the willing business a pile of rating cards to give to their customers.

We now have around 30 businesses involved and are eagerly waiting to gauge the participation levels of their customers (so that we can determine the likely participation rates of Australian consumers in general). Fingers crossed...