Today I'm pleased to report that we have finally finished the specification documents and posted the project on Rent-a-coder.com last night. All in all, the spec consisted of around 160 pages of detailed interface design (where each page, including pop-ups and view variations) is drawn exactly as it should appear (using Powerpoint). It also includes an 80 page data dictionary and a 60 page functionality specification. To protect the intellectual property associated with this, we've decided to post a brief description of the work involved and then send the detailed documents to the interested developers.

Fingers-crossed that we get some good developers interested at a reasonable price.

On another note, we’ve decided to enter into a business plan competition. Melbourne Business School runs MUEC – the Melbourne Universities Entrepreneurship Challenge. It’s a competition open to all students in universities across Victoria (with a minimum requirement of 33% of the team must be current students). We actually entered this in December with the brief description of the business idea and recently found out that we’re through to the second round. From here on there is a Semi-Final round and then a Finals round. For both of these we need to do a pitch to a panel of judges (mainly Venture Capitalists) and submit a written plan. As part of this process we’ve been assigned a mentor to give us some guidance with the pitch and business plan. We met with David for the first time the other day and were quite enthused to find that he asked very intelligent questions about the concept – a few of which got us thinking. We’ve decided to meet with David every fortnight to review progress on the plan.

During the Invizage days we entered a number of awards programs because we found they force you to prepare thorough business plans that you would otherwise not be motivated to do. Plus if you win there is usually some free publicity that comes along with it.