Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Monday, March 28, 2011
Final Summary
In summation, I was pleased that I was able to connect so many relevant applications to my idea to expand my original thoughts and see how realistically I could plan and approach running a business with my idea. For this reason, I'm glad someone forced me to think about my idea from many different professional angles I would not have otherwise, using IT infrastructure that would apply in the real world. To recap, my entrepreneurial idea was to have an enhanced smartphone that was capable of projecting the image on your screen onto a large display on any clear, flat (ideally white) surface, in effect acting as a mini-projector.
The idea would be as you take your phone around with you, you could use it to show several pictures, documents, presentations, videos, etc. at one time in one big, clear display so you're not all huddled around a small screen of a phone and no one has to crane their necks, especially if it's something you want a big group to see. Your always ready to present something in an audience-friendly display wherever there's a surface RGB light can clearly be projected on to, which isn't too hard to find these days in homes and offices. It's so small you wouldn't even need to carry around an iPad, which my display would still be dwarfed by and which is not pocket-friendly.
The essentials of my idea remained the same, but it was good to think through how I would incorporate social media into my business for marketing purposes, Excel for bookkeeping and financial recording purposes, thinking about the data capacity of my device with bits & bytes, securing personal financial information electronically, like with https and TSL/SSL protocol, tracking product supply and inventory, and managing the brand's online image.
I think this project was a good idea because I stuck with one idea and developed it from different angles in ways I would not have thought of before, but I was really forced to flesh it out in ways that people in the working world routinely have to deal with. I was forced to think more thoroughly and comprehensively about my idea about how it would work from a wide variety of perspectives. So it's a good mindset to stay in to think about how these realistic applications of technologies could be applied to a new start-up idea like mine and then develop your idea into a successful business.
3 (out of the 5 total I believe) blogs I commented on were:
everythingbutorange.blogspot.com
rolandsbrightidea.blogspot.com
http://thektriplerist195.blogspot.com/
The idea would be as you take your phone around with you, you could use it to show several pictures, documents, presentations, videos, etc. at one time in one big, clear display so you're not all huddled around a small screen of a phone and no one has to crane their necks, especially if it's something you want a big group to see. Your always ready to present something in an audience-friendly display wherever there's a surface RGB light can clearly be projected on to, which isn't too hard to find these days in homes and offices. It's so small you wouldn't even need to carry around an iPad, which my display would still be dwarfed by and which is not pocket-friendly.
The essentials of my idea remained the same, but it was good to think through how I would incorporate social media into my business for marketing purposes, Excel for bookkeeping and financial recording purposes, thinking about the data capacity of my device with bits & bytes, securing personal financial information electronically, like with https and TSL/SSL protocol, tracking product supply and inventory, and managing the brand's online image.
I think this project was a good idea because I stuck with one idea and developed it from different angles in ways I would not have thought of before, but I was really forced to flesh it out in ways that people in the working world routinely have to deal with. I was forced to think more thoroughly and comprehensively about my idea about how it would work from a wide variety of perspectives. So it's a good mindset to stay in to think about how these realistic applications of technologies could be applied to a new start-up idea like mine and then develop your idea into a successful business.
3 (out of the 5 total I believe) blogs I commented on were:
everythingbutorange.blogspot.com
rolandsbrightidea.blogspot.com
http://thektriplerist195.blogspot.com/
Monday, March 21, 2011
Break Catch-up 2: Brand-Yourself.com's RJ Sherman, Operating System
Using a service like brand-yourself.com would be a great tool to personalize and centralize my company's online presence by building and managing the firm's reputation through one integrated portal, and then efficiently promoting my brand through positive content relating to my business. Brand-Yourself could help my business reach new customers by targeting high rankings in Google searches, engagement through social media, and track the firm's online image and brand visibility through analytics.
Using Brand-Yourself as a guide, I would make search my company has Twitter and FaceBook pages, as well as a LinkedIn company profile page, that all have links back to my company's website. I would have a social media team that is constantly updating Twitter and FaceBook with special deals and interesting or relevant news about the mobile technology industry, specifically related to Smartphones (such as new operating systems being released, new apps, updates to existing features on Android, iOS, or Blackberry OS).
My smartphone projection device's site would have the Twitter, FaceBook, and LinkedIn logos prominently displayed on the sidebar or header so people can link to those pages to "follow" and "like" us, and start conversations about my company and connecting with other people who buy the products or are potential customers.
We would want to make sure our PR team and social media team are often responding to customers by answering relevant questions about our product offerings and participating in group discussions through the company's page, in addition to posting links providing support to answering questions as well as any information relevant to our company and industry. There might be a live feed of a conversation from each of the sites posted in a small window on our website. Questions about device features, compatibility, and technical support for our projection devices would likely surface often once we build up a wide customer base.
My company's website would also have a blog that employees contribute to occasionally as a small requirement to their employment. There would be a button on the navigation bar of the website that links to the company's blog (and vice-versa) also, a separate site.
It would help to have my PR team work with a SEO team to look at things like how we size up with Google's PageRank and keyword density and what relevant terms people search for and how that can be incorporated into our content online. Brand-Yourself's service provides information from Google Analytics about your business.
Using Brand-Yourself as a guide, I would make search my company has Twitter and FaceBook pages, as well as a LinkedIn company profile page, that all have links back to my company's website. I would have a social media team that is constantly updating Twitter and FaceBook with special deals and interesting or relevant news about the mobile technology industry, specifically related to Smartphones (such as new operating systems being released, new apps, updates to existing features on Android, iOS, or Blackberry OS).
My smartphone projection device's site would have the Twitter, FaceBook, and LinkedIn logos prominently displayed on the sidebar or header so people can link to those pages to "follow" and "like" us, and start conversations about my company and connecting with other people who buy the products or are potential customers.
We would want to make sure our PR team and social media team are often responding to customers by answering relevant questions about our product offerings and participating in group discussions through the company's page, in addition to posting links providing support to answering questions as well as any information relevant to our company and industry. There might be a live feed of a conversation from each of the sites posted in a small window on our website. Questions about device features, compatibility, and technical support for our projection devices would likely surface often once we build up a wide customer base.
My company's website would also have a blog that employees contribute to occasionally as a small requirement to their employment. There would be a button on the navigation bar of the website that links to the company's blog (and vice-versa) also, a separate site.
It would help to have my PR team work with a SEO team to look at things like how we size up with Google's PageRank and keyword density and what relevant terms people search for and how that can be incorporated into our content online. Brand-Yourself's service provides information from Google Analytics about your business.
Monday, March 14, 2011
Spring Break catch-up Post--Input/Output (RFID)
I think Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) would be a wise technological asset to utilize in various parts of my mobile phone business operations, whether in the manufacturing or retail sector.
RFID chips are small and lightweight, inexpensive, and extremely accurate, therefore it would be viable to stick the chips in packages or different component parts that were stored in the manufacturing plant to track where certain parts were and have an instantly-available, accurate account of the parts in stock (such as LCD screens, cases, batteries, wireless chips, microprocessor, image sensor for the camera, OS, hard drive with software, flash memory, microphone, speaker etc.).
RFID chips could easily track the location of shipments to make sure they're reaching their designated destination on time. You can get a real-time inventory account in retail stores for finished phones packaged and shipped and ready for sale. At any time, you can know where your inventory and device parts are, and you can easily have access to a lot of specific data stored in microchips.
We might want to invest in Active Tags for use in large manufacturing plants and shipping purposes because they have wider operating ranges. We could use the cheaper Passive Tags within stores for inventory purposes (which don't have a battery) and could be located by the small readers installed every couple of feet in the facility so they're never out of range.
RFID chips are small and lightweight, inexpensive, and extremely accurate, therefore it would be viable to stick the chips in packages or different component parts that were stored in the manufacturing plant to track where certain parts were and have an instantly-available, accurate account of the parts in stock (such as LCD screens, cases, batteries, wireless chips, microprocessor, image sensor for the camera, OS, hard drive with software, flash memory, microphone, speaker etc.).
RFID chips could easily track the location of shipments to make sure they're reaching their designated destination on time. You can get a real-time inventory account in retail stores for finished phones packaged and shipped and ready for sale. At any time, you can know where your inventory and device parts are, and you can easily have access to a lot of specific data stored in microchips.
We might want to invest in Active Tags for use in large manufacturing plants and shipping purposes because they have wider operating ranges. We could use the cheaper Passive Tags within stores for inventory purposes (which don't have a battery) and could be located by the small readers installed every couple of feet in the facility so they're never out of range.
Monday, March 7, 2011
Week 6 - Computer Forensics
In this post I will talk about some pretty straightforward and direct applications I would make in the running of my business, lifted from and building on the lecture. First, for my company's financial transactions, I would encourage my customers to use a credit card when buying products online from my website or in the store. Credit cards have far more security and fraud protection legally, and it is much easier to get your money back if a purchase is signed for (and a charge made) in the account under your name but it is not you.
I would always shred important financial documents and to the greatest extent possible, I would try to physically destroy any important financial information electronically stored on a drive [ex: credit card and bank account numbers, PINs, social security numbers, addresses, mother's maiden names]. If we needed to keep the drive or it was in our best interest to save the storage medium, a drive with any sensitive information we didn't want to keep would be completely degaussed and overwritten [after deletion]. The drive would be wiped so that single random byte (character) would stand in its place, including memory.
Lastly, to keep our computers running quickly and to access information stored on the hard drive quickly, I would make sure to defragment out hard drives once a week. On Windows, I have used a utility system software called Diskeeper Lite for this purpose. Doing this reorganizes the hard disk drive so that the files are stored in contiguous sectors [all related files are grouped adjacent next to one another, not scattered about different physical locations on the disk tracks]. This would speed up the entire computer's performance.
I would always shred important financial documents and to the greatest extent possible, I would try to physically destroy any important financial information electronically stored on a drive [ex: credit card and bank account numbers, PINs, social security numbers, addresses, mother's maiden names]. If we needed to keep the drive or it was in our best interest to save the storage medium, a drive with any sensitive information we didn't want to keep would be completely degaussed and overwritten [after deletion]. The drive would be wiped so that single random byte (character) would stand in its place, including memory.
Lastly, to keep our computers running quickly and to access information stored on the hard drive quickly, I would make sure to defragment out hard drives once a week. On Windows, I have used a utility system software called Diskeeper Lite for this purpose. Doing this reorganizes the hard disk drive so that the files are stored in contiguous sectors [all related files are grouped adjacent next to one another, not scattered about different physical locations on the disk tracks]. This would speed up the entire computer's performance.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Week 5 - "Bits & Bytes"
I would definitely only allow .mp3 files to play on my mobile projection device. MP3 files take up much less space in terms of bytes. MP3 is more efficient because it compresses the files for audio frequencies our ears cannot interpret (any sound below 20 Hz or above 20,000 Hz).
We can assume that 1TB can hold about 250,000 songs with an average length of four minutes. This means each song takes up about 4398047 bytes, which is equal to about 4MB in the binary system. 20 GB is about 21.4 billion bytes in the binary system. Dividing that by the previous number of bytes given per song, that means my device could store up to almost 5000 songs.
Rounding we could just say that 20GB is 20,000MB. Likewise 20,000MB / 4MB [all digits in the binary system of counting] is about 5000 songs if each song takes up about 4MB. This is the amount of songs Apple has traditionally advertised for the 20GB iPod in the past before iPhones and iPod Touch and I believe it has remained the same.
My iPod I got in 2003 was the one just before the click-wheel and has these statistics. They no longer make an iPod Touch or even have iPod Classics with a 20 GB storage drive according to Apple's store. Though now you can get an older iPod with 160GB of storage for less than a 32-gig iPod Touch!(No, it doesn't still work and I stopped using it years ago, though it held on for many years...I think I have it buried away somewhere, the old relic.)
We can assume that 1TB can hold about 250,000 songs with an average length of four minutes. This means each song takes up about 4398047 bytes, which is equal to about 4MB in the binary system. 20 GB is about 21.4 billion bytes in the binary system. Dividing that by the previous number of bytes given per song, that means my device could store up to almost 5000 songs.
Rounding we could just say that 20GB is 20,000MB. Likewise 20,000MB / 4MB [all digits in the binary system of counting] is about 5000 songs if each song takes up about 4MB. This is the amount of songs Apple has traditionally advertised for the 20GB iPod in the past before iPhones and iPod Touch and I believe it has remained the same.
My iPod I got in 2003 was the one just before the click-wheel and has these statistics. They no longer make an iPod Touch or even have iPod Classics with a 20 GB storage drive according to Apple's store. Though now you can get an older iPod with 160GB of storage for less than a 32-gig iPod Touch!(No, it doesn't still work and I stopped using it years ago, though it held on for many years...I think I have it buried away somewhere, the old relic.)
Monday, February 14, 2011
Blog Review Post
TechCrunch is one of the web's most authoritative technology blogs according to technorati.com. According to its mission statement, techcrunch.com is "dedicated to obsessively profiling startups, reviewing new Internet products, and breaking tech news." In addition to news an analysis, Internet products and websites, computer hardware, and the technology/computer industry are commonly profiled. The property was founded in 2005 and gets over 33 million page views per month.
The site has a global network of websites specializing in different sectors of the tech market from mobile to environmentally friendly technology and more. The blog was launched in 2005 by Michael Arrington as a way to share and receive info about companies on the rise in the "burgeoning web 2.0." In less than a year and a half, the site started getting millions of page views per month and Mr. Arrington launched supplemental startups to cover gadgets and technology startups.
After TechCrunch (TC) was the first to break the news of Google's acquisition of YouTube in 2006, TC became respected online as a authoritative source of digital and web technology news. The Wall Street Journal recognized as it more than one man's opinion, but an authoritative source on technology news. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the sites content has shifted to covering social media sites like FaceBook and Twitter. AOL announced late last year that it would acquire TechCrunch.
http://www.techcrunch.com/
The site has a global network of websites specializing in different sectors of the tech market from mobile to environmentally friendly technology and more. The blog was launched in 2005 by Michael Arrington as a way to share and receive info about companies on the rise in the "burgeoning web 2.0." In less than a year and a half, the site started getting millions of page views per month and Mr. Arrington launched supplemental startups to cover gadgets and technology startups.
After TechCrunch (TC) was the first to break the news of Google's acquisition of YouTube in 2006, TC became respected online as a authoritative source of digital and web technology news. The Wall Street Journal recognized as it more than one man's opinion, but an authoritative source on technology news. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the sites content has shifted to covering social media sites like FaceBook and Twitter. AOL announced late last year that it would acquire TechCrunch.
http://www.techcrunch.com/
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Week 3 - Spreadsheet Essentials (& Digital Images)
Excel would undoubtedly be an extremely useful tool to keep track of my hypothetical venture's essential business and financial figures as well as qualitative data such as customer profiles. I could group info for each week together in a collapsible menu, which could include inventory on-site or products ordered. For net profit, I would list my mobile device's selling price [retail to the customer] in one column and how much my business bought them for in the other column--and then I'd have Excel calculate the difference between each of those figures using a formula, in order to display our net sales profit.
Because I am a startup, after entering essential company financials into my data spreadsheet, I could set up an Excel formula to alert me when I break-even (it would use the number in the cells to perform the arithmetic or geometric operations). I could also use the pattern recognition tool to make future projections by extending a current recognized pattern with sales profit, or volume or costs, several periods [e.g. months] into the future to get a reasonable estimate based on logical and statistical inference for when my company would break-even and I'd be in the black with a surplus of a cash!
And I would use the conditional formatting feature like we did in the lab to compare how the cost of my operating budget compared to revenue and money I have in the company bank account. If operating expenses (cash out) became greater than or equal to net revenue or assets/holdings [cash-in] in the business' bank account, I would set up an alert on Excel so that the cell would turn red and say something along the lines of "liability ALERT! NEGATIVE profit and DEBT likely to accumulate!". Likewise if my firm's liquidity was ca greater than operating costs, I would have the Excel cell for each figure turn green to symbolize a positive bottom line...the message could be: "the company is COMFORTABLE."
With all of this data, for appropriate time periods, I could make graphs from my tables of data that would be visually appealing and easy for a wide audience to understand a trend quickly. For example, showing how our volume of sales has increased over the last couple months (or by week). Excel could also calculate for me the PERCENT increase each week in sales of my mobile projection device, or from month to month. Visual representations of this [ex: in bar graph form] would be instrumental to insert into presentations for quarterly financial reports. As a summary, I would also want to make figures and charts/graphs for AVERAGE [a function] profit margin growth over a long period of time, operating leverage and to keep thorough records.
Once I have a loyal customer base, I would also create a spreadsheet to store all their name, address, and contact information and to log who is buying what and when. I could sort the names alphabetically. Then I could decide to offer rewards [in the form of coupons or rebates] for my top customers who spend the most on my product and its accessories. For this function, I would want to sort the columns of info based on how much they've purchased from me, so descending order, with the biggest spenders at the top of the list.
Because I am a startup, after entering essential company financials into my data spreadsheet, I could set up an Excel formula to alert me when I break-even (it would use the number in the cells to perform the arithmetic or geometric operations). I could also use the pattern recognition tool to make future projections by extending a current recognized pattern with sales profit, or volume or costs, several periods [e.g. months] into the future to get a reasonable estimate based on logical and statistical inference for when my company would break-even and I'd be in the black with a surplus of a cash!
And I would use the conditional formatting feature like we did in the lab to compare how the cost of my operating budget compared to revenue and money I have in the company bank account. If operating expenses (cash out) became greater than or equal to net revenue or assets/holdings [cash-in] in the business' bank account, I would set up an alert on Excel so that the cell would turn red and say something along the lines of "liability ALERT! NEGATIVE profit and DEBT likely to accumulate!". Likewise if my firm's liquidity was ca greater than operating costs, I would have the Excel cell for each figure turn green to symbolize a positive bottom line...the message could be: "the company is COMFORTABLE."
With all of this data, for appropriate time periods, I could make graphs from my tables of data that would be visually appealing and easy for a wide audience to understand a trend quickly. For example, showing how our volume of sales has increased over the last couple months (or by week). Excel could also calculate for me the PERCENT increase each week in sales of my mobile projection device, or from month to month. Visual representations of this [ex: in bar graph form] would be instrumental to insert into presentations for quarterly financial reports. As a summary, I would also want to make figures and charts/graphs for AVERAGE [a function] profit margin growth over a long period of time, operating leverage and to keep thorough records.
Once I have a loyal customer base, I would also create a spreadsheet to store all their name, address, and contact information and to log who is buying what and when. I could sort the names alphabetically. Then I could decide to offer rewards [in the form of coupons or rebates] for my top customers who spend the most on my product and its accessories. For this function, I would want to sort the columns of info based on how much they've purchased from me, so descending order, with the biggest spenders at the top of the list.
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Monday, January 31, 2011
Week 2 - WWW/Ecommerce
My entrepreneurial device would be an enhanced smartphone or iPod Touch that would have the technical capabilities to act as a portable, compact projector. Instead of having to always watch streaming or downloaded video on a small-screen (meaning squinting your eyes or holding the screen up close), anywhere you are, you would be able to digitally project the image onto any reasonably smooth, light-colored surface (e.g. a wall).
You could adjust the size of the amplified image based on how far away you are [for correct focal length] to reach an average picture size approximately equivalent to a 36-inch widescreen HDTV at about 10 feet away. You can share whatever entertainment you have downloaded, or any video on the Internet, with groups of various sizes using whatever you already access constantly on-the-go [from your phone’s Wi-Fi or 3G network.] Further, the step of using the computer as a mediator would be bypassed.
Twitter would definitely play a role in marketing and promoting my device. Twitter is used primarily by organizations' PR teams to promote their brand, and with my device it would be no different. Throughout the day we could Tweet about movies or shows you could be watching in a large display format through your phone. We could link to content on YouTube, iTunes, Hulu, Vimeo, Fancast, and others.
After developing some manufacturing partnerships, we could even cross-promote because our technology would be used by other companies in making their smartphones. So we would promote their phone with a link to that phone's section of a website, with a special mention of the digital projector technology in the Tweet for emphasis.
In addition to the main company Twitter account, I'd want to set up a separate one devoted solely to customer service issues. I'd want to have at least two or three employees checking this throughout the day on shifts to monitor customers' concerns, complaints, questions, etc. and reply to those Tweets with appropriate links with directions for solving the problem after researching the issue.
You could adjust the size of the amplified image based on how far away you are [for correct focal length] to reach an average picture size approximately equivalent to a 36-inch widescreen HDTV at about 10 feet away. You can share whatever entertainment you have downloaded, or any video on the Internet, with groups of various sizes using whatever you already access constantly on-the-go [from your phone’s Wi-Fi or 3G network.] Further, the step of using the computer as a mediator would be bypassed.
Twitter would definitely play a role in marketing and promoting my device. Twitter is used primarily by organizations' PR teams to promote their brand, and with my device it would be no different. Throughout the day we could Tweet about movies or shows you could be watching in a large display format through your phone. We could link to content on YouTube, iTunes, Hulu, Vimeo, Fancast, and others.
After developing some manufacturing partnerships, we could even cross-promote because our technology would be used by other companies in making their smartphones. So we would promote their phone with a link to that phone's section of a website, with a special mention of the digital projector technology in the Tweet for emphasis.
In addition to the main company Twitter account, I'd want to set up a separate one devoted solely to customer service issues. I'd want to have at least two or three employees checking this throughout the day on shifts to monitor customers' concerns, complaints, questions, etc. and reply to those Tweets with appropriate links with directions for solving the problem after researching the issue.
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