Dot Com and Dot Bomb

Well... Without attending the class lecture, I know some of the information, very briefly, about dot com and dot bomb. The reason why I couldn't attend the class was due to my back injury that I am suffering for quite a while. I, sometimes, go to class late if my back muscle gets highly stressed during the sleeping period. If that happens I have to use cold pack to release the pain..

Michele Armstrong

Very interesting information was given from Michele. Since she has great experience there were many good tips and information about how to be successful in the interview. Amongst all the advises given out, I recall that interviewer must know the company that they are going to work for and know strength and weakness of yourself helps out. Well... it's common sense to know the company that your applying, but guessing that is not the case for someone... I remember Prof. Andrew talking about selling yourself to the company. Knowing what you are good at and bad at must figured out.

Michele also talked about the circulation of employees. The turn over, replacing workers, is a healthy element to have within a company since not everyone performs as employer expected. In order to save money and operate the company efficiently, people who is lacking off must be removed from the position. Usually the turn over rate is around 10 to 15%.

Number of questions that I've asked..

hm.... very a few. one or two I recall.

Derek!! The creator of Exit 133!

Derek introduced the class a very interesting ways to invest or establish a company. Small businesses! Derek states that he likes the small companies that does ONE thing very well. As a start up company focusing on one thing will be the best option that can be taken if you want to be successful. Since I am writing a business plan for my company, hearing this information about why investors look good on the companies that does one thing very well is very encouraging.

On the other side of the presentation Derek made, he explained how he created Exit 133 and Suite 133. The Exit133 was first created as experiment and later on it got searched by Google, thanks to them. By having the gateway for people to enter this blog website the traffic increased and many people had interest about the blogs that were posted. By having professional writers working with Derek Exit133 had valuable posts that helped out many entrepreneurs in the local areas. Exit133 is very well known, it also had interview with New York Time!! WOW.

Bruce Kendall

Bruce delivered very interesting points about how the money flows within the local society. One of the great point he made was that growth of the market comes from the local existing company. This reminds me the issue of WalMark taking over local businesses with their low prices. I had great conversation with one of my friend who is majoring in international business, and he states that one of the factor for worldwide market crisis is having Walmart. Bruce introduced a system called incubator during his presentation. I personally thought this is very interesting and effective system that new born company can have. Incubator helps out starting company to have some place and resources to get things going. When a company is small and their revenue is low it is very difficult decision to rent a office, but having an option of using incubator will help those needed companies. Of course, the company will get kicked out after awhile.

Bruce made two main distinction between job categories: primary job and secondary job. Primary job is one of the most important job that a local society need. Primary job creates and sells to out side of the local market, which will result in bring 'fresh' money from other local areas to fuel up local growth. Where as secondary job circulates existing money inside the local market. Important idea to keep in mind is that a local market needs both primary and secondary jobs in place, but without primary job the local market will soon go down. There is good saying from old days, "still water will get rotten." Make the money flow in and out of the local market is very important.

John Dimmer

great speaker who knows a lot about the money. He's from local, used to work at pugetsound bank and ended up running his own business. John spent great amount of his time explaining what Angel Investment is. It was very informative.

Angel Investors are most likely a retired business man/woman who has great interest for new born companies. Angels looking forward to get 10x of their investments after certain amount of time, so being smart money player is very important to keep your company in your hand.

In order to protect and keep the company under your control, there must be your own money invested into the company. If you believe the company will be successful, then keep most of the company to yours.

There were couple great quotes from John that challenged and inspired me. One was "Don't underestimate the others." Everyone can be better than you, allowing yourselves to be opened to suggestions and ideas always benefit you in the long run. Don't be like "oh, I am better than you at this and that," rather be "oh your better at this, would you teach me?" This attitude opens up various doors for you to succeed.

John Goodman!

I enjoyed her lecture very much. Thank you to Prof. Andrew Fry for bring her in.

There were many good points and ideas made by her through out the speech that opened my mind up a bit on what a business is.

My favorite quote was, "Your word, your bond" This just said everything in my opinion that a business man need. There is a traditional Korean saying as follows, "A word of man worth thousands of gold" what a great quote!

Another great idea was that we should not, never ever, set our goal to be rich. As I heard this I was like "huh?" but it made all sense when she went on and talked about her point. The passion is the key to the success. If we don't trust of enjoy what we are doing, we are losing our game! Imagine doing something that you hate and there are many people who are very good at it... Man I would just drop whatever I am doing to get rid of the stresses.

Setting a goal of a business is very important. Define the business in terms of what I want to accomplish is the key of success.

Also, seek help from who have done it. Be shameless to ask something! "There is no stupid questions" is the quote that most people ignore, not forget, very often because of the shame.

Setting a agreement within core member is also important issue. Everyone can be a good partner until they hit the wall of money issues. Also set up a exit strategy. Do I want this business to be my family owned business? or sell it when the value goes up? or keep it just for whatever? Think about that!

Strength and Weakness

As to start a business it is very important to consider what is my pros and cons. Knowing my capability will guide me to either hire a professional to do a job or achieve it by myself. Well, here is the list of my strengths and weaknesses.

Strength:

1) Majoring in Computer Science: This skill allows me to code up applications or programs that I might need for my business. This will save tons of money since hiring programmer costs a lot of money.

2) Inherited Korean culture: This is more of a social connection strength of mine. Depending on what my business is focusing, I can bring funds or professionals that is well suited for Koreans. For example, if I am interested in A.I. builder, I might hire some Korean pro-gamers to test my A.I.

3) Leadership experiences: I've served as president and core member of various organizations. Experiencing various leadership position taught me not to be scared in public speaking. I, most of the time, try to carry the conversation within the group. I have great sense of leading people to focus on the tasks while having meeting in order to prevent wasting time.

4) Very optimistic: My integrated characteristic works great with business since I am very optimistic about what I am doing. This means I am passionate on my tasks. Optimistic means I am not realistic. I know where to put my energy and focuses.

Weakness:

1) ESL (English As Second Language): I've been in the states since I was 8th grader. That's about ten years now. Even though it has been awhile, my accent and fluency in English is not as perfect as native speakers. This is trouble for me if I get a position of business man where I have to meet people and make a contraction.

2) Fast, Fast, and Faster!: I live in 21st century and most of my generation suffers from this as well. I like tasks that gives me the feedbacks or reactions right away. As programmer, I can see the result right away as I am building a program. This is trouble for me since a business takes time to build up.

3) I am not a risk taker: I like things that are safe and well-known. Investing on something that is vague or takes too much risk to be successful... well I hate them. Of course, as a business owner, it is important to reduce as much risk as possible, but sometimes there must be a risk taking in order to make some good amount of money. I cannot do that...

4) Lack of interest in particular subjects: better phrase will be.. "I have no interest in something that I don't care" Sometimes there are times where we need to show some interests on new things, but I don't show that interest very often. This characteristic of mine goes well with not taking risks...

Guest Speaker: Ron

First of I really like his presentation over Business Plan (BP)! Very good points were made and I was very interested to know more about certain points. Here are some points that I noted down as I was listening to the presentation.

1) Selling stuff (idea) that has no/low value:

At first I was like, "why do we want to sell something that has no value?" but Ron goes on and explained, the 'real' money comes from where no one has explored before. Great point~! Convincing or even making thing better to sell is very important skills to acquire.

2) BP is a way of communication, and having BP convinces other people that you are taking this business very seriously:

He emphasized the importance of having BP. From my understanding, BP is like a resume for a applicant to present their history. You can tell them everything about your business idea, and maybe they will get interested to buy into your business. The next thing they will ask is do you have a business plan that they can read. Well, here is you shot. Investors will want your BP and your business's growth rate, even a prediction if you are just starting.

3)Elements of BP:

Here is the five steps to write BP.

1. identify audience

2. outline BP

3. write plan

4. review plan

5. update plan

consider step 4 and 5, this two steps are repeatable, well you have to repeat them, because BP is always a draft. There is no 'final' BP, because local/global market and information get updated/changed every day and every night.

5 Business Ideas

From my perspective, a business ideas can be very creative and innovative since it is an 'idea' of what might be possible. I had and have many business ideas as I grow up, and I would like to introduce some of them here.

1) Online game Enviroment A.I. development Company
Before I move on to details, it is important to understant what 'enviroment' is in online game world. The enviroment in online game world is considered as non-user objects that interact with users with behaviors that is predefine by program. Good example can be drawn from RTS(real time simulation) game called StarCraft. Once a user decide to play a single player mission, the A.I. interacts, e.i. fighting againts, with user to somewhat make them think there is a real person playing with them. But, the crucial problem of A.I. computer kicks in soon or later. The limitation of A.I. ability to handle various exception is considerable low.

There are a lot of facts that cuases A.I. lack of ability to perfom like or better than human. One of them is the cost. Since game development company is spending a lot of momeny and time to get the game going, I would like to propose the other option to them. The business plan that i made was to make a company fully devoted on development of A.I. computer for gamings.

2) UE development and improvement company
What is UE? We surely, as CSS major, know what UI, user interface, is right? UE stands for user experience. Driven from recent reading for TCSS 452 class, I've thought, "how about making a company or team fully devoted to create better user experience while using various interfaces?"

3) Waitless Order
With a hightech that has been developed recently, I believe it is possible to install a clear screen on the tables of restaurants that displays menus. In recent conference in CES2010, there was a technology introduced that allows a computer screen to be transparent and still display images.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeNJrim3SU4 (reference to the information)
By adopting this model, there will be no waiters to take your order, meaning no frustration on telling them bring my water, spoon, or etc.
The order of the food will go into the kitchen straight in order the customer submits their order. Waiters, they are still there to deliver the food to the table, will be waiting to deliver what is needed. Thus, the number of waiter will be reduced significantly.

4) Trashcan that has hole?
This idea hit me when I was young. As most teens do, I hated to clean my room. Whenever my mom yelled at me to empty the trash can, I yelled back I can hold for few more days. Then I thought what if there is a trashcan that has a hole under it that is connected to trashyard somewhere, or even connected to a local collector that gets emptied frequently just like what Trash Car does to the trash cans in town.

5) Cellphone payer
This model has been adopted throughout many Asian developed countries, such as Korea and Japan. This is not a 'new' idea, but it is very efficient and useful. I don't know why we are not using them right now...
The concept is to turn a cellphone into a protocol that ables users to purchase something by just touching the cellphone to a pad. When we, as UWT student and faculties, we have a key card that we have to touch the pad with to open up the doors. Very similarily cell phone will work just like that to purchase services.
I.E. in transit, when we are getting on board, we can just touch the cellphone to the pad located on the enterance to pay the money. The amount will be added into next month's cellphone payment.

Ah... the feeling of cutting the tape wrong way..

I just noticed that the first blog entry was due past wednesday... sigh.
I just hope I will be on track with due dates from now on.