Cybersecurity Risk Assessment & Mitigation Strategy

Many organizations face difficulty in identifying and prioritizing their cybersecurity risks. Learners will conduct a risk assessment, document vulnerabilities, and deliver actionable remediation recommendations in a professional format. Evaluate the cybersecurity posture of a small-to-medium business (SMB) or simulated environment. Identify vulnerabilities, assess risks, and develop a prioritized mitigation plan aligned to industry standards (e.g., NIST, ISO).

Event Essentials Website Development

Our company advertises thousands of products online. We hope to update and revamp our existing website to attract more customers. We would like to work with students to develop a new website that is easy to maintain while providing an appealing interface for users. This can be achieved through common site building tools such as Wix, Webflow, and WordPress. This will involve several different steps for the students, including: Researching different site-building tools and their associated advantages / disadvantages. Conducting a needs analysis to determine which platform is most suitable. Building a website, with our assistance in providing the content. Providing training on updating and maintaining the website. Bonus steps in the process would also include: Testing prototypes with customers and refining ideas with feedback.

Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning Application

Our company has many variations of our festival management SaaS, and we want to leverage the latest technology to gain market advantage. Applications of this technology include recommendation algorithms, predictive analytics for both system client (users) and also attendees, We would like to collaborate with students to apply the latest artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques to our existing dataset. Students will develop an AI / ML model related to any of the aforementioned applications. This will involve several different steps for the students, including: Conducting background research on our existing products and the dataset. Analyzing our current dataset. Researching the latest AI / ML techniques and how they could be applied to our data. Developing an AI / ML model that provides unique outcomes or insights into our data. Providing multiple solutions that can be applied to solve the same problem.

Event Essentials Website Development

Our company advertises thousands of products online. We hope to update and revamp our existing website to attract more customers. We would like to work with students to develop a new website that is easy to maintain while providing an appealing interface for users. This can be achieved through common site building tools such as Wix, Webflow, and WordPress. This will involve several different steps for the students, including: Researching different site-building tools and their associated advantages / disadvantages. Conducting a needs analysis to determine which platform is most suitable. Building a website, with our assistance in providing the content. Providing training on updating and maintaining the website. Bonus steps in the process would also include: Testing prototypes with customers and refining ideas with feedback.

Competitive Analysis

Our company has been serving thousands of customers for decades. We want to better understand how our target audience perceives our brand and competitors. This will help us develop clarity on our competitive advantages and optimize our marketing strategy. We would like to collaborate with students to conduct a competitive analysis of our business. This will involve several different steps for the students, including: Familiarizing themselves with our company, products, and target market. Identifying current and potential future competitors. Creating a matrix identifying features that are similar and different between companies. Summarizing our competitive advantages and disadvantages relative to the competition identified. Bonus steps in the process would also include: Recommending how our company can differentiate itself through products / services and messaging.

Competitive Analysis for Marketing and Website Revamp

Event Essentials is seeking to enhance its marketing strategies and revamp its website to better compete in the Festival and Marketplace industry. The project involves conducting a comprehensive analysis of the competitive landscape to identify key competitors, their strengths, weaknesses, and market positioning. The goal is to gather insights that will inform the development of a more effective marketing strategy and a user-friendly website design. Learners will apply their knowledge of market research and digital marketing to evaluate competitors' online presence, marketing tactics, and customer engagement strategies. This project will enable learners to understand the dynamics of the event planning industry and the importance of competitive analysis in strategic planning. Key tasks include: - Identifying and profiling major competitors. - Analyzing competitors' marketing strategies and website features. - Evaluating customer feedback and engagement on competitors' platforms. - Summarizing findings and providing actionable recommendations for Event Essentials.

Virtual Internship Opportunity: Marketing

Our organization is able to offer a virtual internship opportunity for several marketing students or teams. The primary focus for the student will be: (please include a few examples of marketing projects you would like the student(s) to execute during the placement, as exemplified below.) Branding - Conduct a full competitive landscape assessment; define our organization's brand and core value proposition; identify opportunities and threats facing our brand; assess where and how to improve our brand's presence and differentiate from our competitors. Marketing Communications - Recommend changes to advertising and PR materials; create an integrated marketing campaign; create a rebranding campaign. Market Research - Investigate our competitive landscape; perform market segmentation to identify the ideal target market for (new or existing product or service); conduct customer surveys or focus groups to gain insights into the perceptions and behaviours of our target customers; develop a pricing strategy; identify expansion opportunities; identify key messaging for (new product or service). Public Relations - Develop and implement a PR strategy; create collateral, including press releases, user testimonials, case studies, and customer stories. Prospecting Strategy - Evaluate our current customer base and make recommendations for further market penetration; assess our current outreach process and develop and implement targeted prospecting; review our prospect messaging, make improvement recommendations, and create new outreach content. SEO Strategy & Recommendations - Develop and implement an SEO strategy; provide content suggestions and recommendations to increase search visibility; increase our inbound traffic and optimize the customer journey; increase inbound leads. Strategic Social Media Marketing - Conduct an audit of our current social media presence and/or other current communication channel(s); develop and implement strategies for improving our online presence and increasing engagement; create a content calendar; creating useable social media and blog posts. Reviewing our current website - content and design. Conducting user studies - how our customers are using the current site and to gain feedback. Designing a new website - based on your insights and UX best practices. Our goal at the end of this experience is: (please indicate the goal for this placement, or deliverable you expect the student(s) to complete, as exemplified below) Branding and Marketing Communications - For the student(s) to help us improve our brand's presence and capture greater market share. Market Research - For the student(s) to help us gain a better understanding of our target market and ensure we are optimally positioned and our product and pricing aligns with our target sector/customer. Public Relations - For the student(s) to help us effectively communicate our brand's story and mission to a broad audience. Prospecting Strategy - For the student(s) to help us implement better prospecting that increases conversion rates and boost our sales team's performance. SEO Strategy & Recommendations - For the student(s) to help us generate more traffic and revenue through search engines. Strategic Social Media Marketing - For the student(s) to help us improve our online presence, reach more customers, and effectively promote our brand through compelling content. Website - We hope to have a workable prototype that is ideal for our target customer, which we can present to our web developer for platform recommendations and pricing. Other duties the student may complete could include : (indicate other duties as exemplified below) Content development, including social posts, blog posts, LinkedIn articles, and website copy. We will plan to communicate with our virtual intern(s) using these communication tools: Riipen messaging, company slack, email, virtual daily/weekly as needed production calls, JIRA.

Develop Event Essentials 2.0

Overview The Event Essentials SaaS offers online ticket sales, donations, vendor/sponsor/volunteer registrations for festivals and event organizers. In its current state, each festival/event organization (will be referred to as client ) that uses our system runs their own self-contained, highly customized web app that is driven by a shared database. Each new client generally uses a common codebase as its starting point, but the copy of that codebase often changes drastically, with little standardization, to be tailored to that client’s specific needs. Goals We have begun development on a new system that will offer more customization and automation, as well as better deployment. Multi-tenancy will still be used on the database level, with one central, shared database being used. But the significant change will be introducing multi-tenancy to the web app. One codebase will run with each client sitting on its own subdomain. Develop a new system Different areas of the system offered to the client can be thought of as “modules.” Some of those modules include ticketing, donations, vendor management, sponsor management, volunteer management. They will be toggled on and off for each client from a global admin controlled only by EE. Ticketing will be the first module to be developed, as it is the one that is currently the most standardized and primed for client customizability. Our goal is to have the entire ticket sale process be managed by the client from start to finish. Some of that process includes: · Creating their event(s). Event information, branding, site content. · Creating the tickets for each event and customizing what gets displayed on the ticket PDF, including product details, colors, rotating sponsor logos. · Configuring and filtering reporting and exporting. Sales data by time period/product/geographic location. Revenue collected, fees, as well as redemption data. Ability to compare data between different years and discount time periods. Standardization and versioning All system features will inherently be available to all clients. This includes new features as well as bug fixes or changes to old features. Improve and automate the onboarding process - Tech stack · JS (Vue) · PHP (Laravel 7 framework) · MySQL · Apache/Nginx The front-end JS framework/library is not set in stone. React, for example, could be used instead if it aligns more with developer experience. Multi-tenancy There will be two different types of tenants; clients and events. A client can have one or more events. An event will always belong to a client. Tenant-owned entities will have both client_id and event_id foreign keys in the database, with some exceptions. Tenant routing exists on the subdomain level for the client and on the path level for the event. If the event slug is omitted, the next upcoming event will automatically be selected. Client : https://{client_slug}.appdomain.com/ Event : https://{client_slug}.appdomain.com/{event_slug} The client slug will be a unique alphanumeric with hyphens string chosen by the client. The event slug will be comprised of two parts; a client-chosen event slug, followed by the unique event id. Take Coachella as a fictious client, for example. Their data and routing information could be as follows: Entry in the `clients` table: id : 2938 name : AEG Presents slug : coachella Entries in the `events` table: id : 10293 name : Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival 2020 slug : 21st-annual-coachella-festival start_date : 2020-10-09 end_date : 2020-10-18 id : 10237 name : Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival 2021 slug : 22nd-annual-coachella-festival start_date : 2021-04-09 end_date : 2021-04-18 Root URL : https://coachella.appdomain.com/ Tickets (2020) : https://coachella.appdomain.com/tickets Tickets (2021) : https://coachella.appdomain.com/21st-annual-coachella-festival-10237/tickets

Internship Opportunity: E-Commerce Bluetooth Application Development

Our organization is able to offer a virtual internship opportunity for (1 | 2 | 3) computer science students or teams. The primary focus for the student will be: Application Development - Selecting the best technologies for creating the application or feature (i.e. a real-time chat function); creating a fully-functioning application. Software Architecture Development - Architecting the software of a new product; improving the architecture of an existing system; porting an architecture of one system into another . Software Evaluation (e.g. new CRM) - Conducting a needs analysis; researching available options; evaluating the options within the context of our organization's budget, immediate needs, and projected needs. Application Programming Interfaces - Redesigning an existing API to simplify it; changing API technologies; designing a new API; creating or updating public-facing documentation. Real-Time Data Visualization - Creating a charting system with basic querying functionality; creating a dashboard to visualize key performance metrics of our organization or tool. Database Analysis - Decreasing query execution time; Changing ORM code in hotspots to more efficient SQL. Our goal at the end of this experience is: Overview The Event Essentials SaaS offers online ticket sales, donations, vendor/sponsor/volunteer registrations for festivals and event organizers. Goals Develop a mobile application to facilitate two primary processes: the point-of-sale (PoS) and ticket redemptions that take place on the day(s) of the event. This mobile app should run on iOS, at a minimum, and will be powered by an EE REST API. Point-of-Sale The PoS card processing will be powered by Stripe Terminal’s iOS SDK using the BBPOS Chipper 2X BT mobile card reader. Users should be able to select products from a list (possibly in a grid similar to Square), select quantities, add to cart, get taken to a checkout page to enter their basic information, then finally swipe their card through the reader and process payment. They should be able to easily adjust their cart at any point in the process prior to payment, including removing from the cart and adding new products to cart. Ticket redemption Currently, when event attendees purchase tickets online they are given printable (as well as mobile) tickets. Each ticket displays a QR code containing the unique 10-digit numeric code for that ticket. The QR code is scanned with a third-party mobile app, and if the code is valid and not already redeemed then the attendee is permitted entrance. Our goal in creating our own mobile app is also to gain direct access to the device’s camera for QR scanning, avoiding the need for a third-party scanning app. Stripe API Docs https://stripe.com/docs/terminal Event Essentials API Docs Link to be provided Other duties the student may complete could include : (indicate other duties as exemplified below) Software vendor research and evaluation Assisting with other process improvement projects Unit and integration testing We will plan to communicate with our virtual intern using these communication tools: Riipen messaging, company slack, email, Zoom Student's primary contact : Zach Bundy, Lead Programmer. Secondary contact: Kiffen Taylor, Director.