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.

Story of My Life

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.