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/

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.

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.

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.