Last group project/ personal project

I really feel like I learned a lot from our last group project. We did a lot of work and I focused on the financial part, which I might have gone a little overboard on, but one thing that I learned from both Matt and Mr. Boyer is that financials are what people care about. After presenting our idea about creating a website like e-harmony I realized that it actually had legitimate possibilities to be the next big thing, it is kind of innovative and it is just so simple I don't understand why it hasn't been done yet. Merging the highly successful internet dating technology with the profitable job placement searches would be kind of difficult, but no where near impossible, as a matter of fact I would consider it one of the more plausible ideas I heard this semester. Anyways, this project taught me a lot about the storming stage. Prior to this I don't think I ever actually experienced it, but it was constructive in this case. I know it isn't supposed to be, but it honestly was. Picking apart each idea and showing why it doesn't work only strengthens your teams ideas.
Now about the personal projects, I am still not sure exactly what I am supposed to do. All I know is that it needs to be creative. I think what I am going to do is make a video and show some of the things that I have learned this year in ENGR, for instance how to effectively communicate to team members, how to crash and burn, how failure isn't bad, and how to try to create my own guidelines. The lack of structure of this course really killed me. I never knew what was expected, what was allowed, what counted, or anything. The ambiguity kind of bothered me, but I guess in a way it is preparation for being an entrepreneur since they don't have too many guidelines.

New Ideas

So working on this project has really inspired me I would say more so than the other two projects. Building a profitable business is what I strive for being that I am a business major. The restraint of making it a profitable business within three years and the cloudiness of whether or not R&D is incorporated into those three years make it a little harder, but it is still a great project. My group is thinking about a way to make international business easier and less costly to conduct since there would be such a high demand for a product that would assist with this. Right now we are trying to find a way that would make communication for technical people who don't speak the same language easy and fast. Efficiency is everything in big business and I think that if we can make something that will advance this aspect of business we could defiantly make some real money.

Ideas

It is crazy how easy it is to improve something, the problem is coming up with something revolutionary. Anyone can think of making a phone with more memory, or a bigger T.V., but the person who first thought of a cell phone, or a t.v. really pulled it out of thin air. For our new project I am trying to think of something completely revolutionary. One topic that I am very interested in is providing food, water, shelter, and security to third world countries. For the security aspect, I think that policy is more important that procedure, but for the rest, invention is exactly what is needed. Projects in the U.S. would be considered great for living in other countries, so what is the cheapest way to build a secure home? Could we cost effectively send materials over and would it be profitable? What could we build the houses out of? What about water? These people don't have enough money to create a profitable business off their funds, but American's would donate enough money if you could provide a house or water for a family for $100. The thought process I am going through right now is scattered, but on track.

Invention to Venture

I went to a conference earlier this year about how to turn an invention to an actual business but I still find this to be the hardest part of entrepreneurship for me. Finding a fault and a solution may not be very difficult, but for a young person to get financial backing, marketing, and a contract for their creation are all hard. So, I decided now is the best time to learn how to do it. It is time for me to take my concepts to the next level and try to make them come to life.

This project has taught me a lot about starting a business. Different people are good at different things and like to do what they are good at. I had no idea how capable our engineering students are. I can just go into the engineering college and find someone that can make me a pair of self timed glasses, or any other type of product that I want. Knowing this I realized that Penn State is the best place to be an entrepreneur. There are so many ambitious, smart people and I have full access to the best students while they arn't making any money before Google scoops them up.

Saving space

Living in tiny apartments really makes you think about ways to save space. My roommate and I were talking about ways to convert the bed to make it more practical and save space. One idea we thought of was to have a bed that folds up and when it folds up the support would turn into a table, but that would be kind of gross being that the table would have been on the floor. You could instead make it so the table pops out. We should design a room like in where's Arnold where the couches just pop out of the walls. I think by looking into ways to conserve space it makes your living area much nicer and it would seem roomier.

Book

I was just talking to my friend trying to come up with some type of scheme to make money. Being a college student really is a hustle. More money more problems might be true, but I'll deal with that when I get there. Being broke does evoke the entrepreneurial endeavor. So like I was saying I was talking to my friend about how were going to make money in the next month. We talked about doing a 50 50 raffle on state patties and giving the winner something cool. Selling t-shirts, starting a club. All types of stuff. While I was trying to go to sleep, unsuccessfully obviously, I began to think about writing a book. Not that I am a good writer, because I am not at all, I am sure there are at least 10 grammar mistakes just in this paragraph, but because my story is a story that should be told and just isn't. I am a college student, I grew up in the Poconos, I did lots of dumb stuff, I broke laws, lived life and partied, I still do. It is a common story, but not one that's written about. My failures, successes, emotions and just my story in general, poured out, unedited, misspelled; a true representation of life, with errors and all.
Authors make money from nothing, they tell stories that they make up and people pay to read them. I honestly think I should just write a book without ever rereading what I typed and publish it. Now is the time to do it when the stories and emotions are fresh and true. Yeah people would get mad, but who really cares the book would be the truth and how I feel so it would be even more liberating than profitable. Get that paper: My story. Nothing more.

Marketing

So the latest ENGR 407 assignment has begun and it really has me thinking what it takes to become successful in the world of entrepreneurship. Is it a good idea, or how well you market an idea? The truth is it usually takes both, unless of course your idea is incredible or the marketing is amazing. For instance, the marketing behind the pet rock must have been done extremely well.
So, all this being the case, what can a broke college student do to market a new idea? This is the question that I have been working on to try and become successful in terms of this project. Being that people have become so used to seeing commercials they tune them out, viral videos seem to be the simple solution. How many products are actually sold and promoted through viral videos though? I want to think of something new that will attract people's attention. Maybe I can have Colbert say something about my product being that he endorses everything. On a serious note some of the ideas I have come up with so far are giveaways. If I hand out of cup of hot chocolate for free as long as someone signs up on my mailing list I think that would be a huge success locally. The networking principle also works although it is semi a popularity contest in the real world who you know matters. Stickers work and presentations also work. People have been so bombarded by advertisements through electronics and technology that I feel the best way to advertise and the cheapest (per e-mail) would be face to face communication. Talking to people is the new form of advertising. People trust people telling them something who are standing in front of them much more so than the people who make a commercial.

Innovation in News

I feel like news has been the same for so long. The same biased reporting classified as unbiased news when the truth is that there is no such thing. There will always be a bias when you report a story; as they say, there are two sides to every story. So my idea comes with accentuating the biases and giving the option of which side of the story you want to hear. It would be a website with three videos on it. On the top would be a quick description of the stories facts. Then, under that would be two videos, each one reporting the two different sides of the story. This way you could choose what you want to hear. Once these two videos were recorded you the two reporters would debate the points and that video would be located on the bottom. Showing the biases will complement peoples' intelligence rather than insult it and the fact that it would be on the internet would make it easy to start in terms of capital and I truly believe it would begin to get enough traffic to start to charge for the service and eventually turn into a tv show.

Iphone App

I know the Iphone application market is flooded, but the opportunity Apple created for entrepreneurship is one that I don't think has ever been so easy to access (this is of course coming from someone who hasn't gone through the process yet.) Anyways, I was at a invention to venture conference when I met someone who had created an Iphone application that had been very profitable for him. He said it takes a while to get paid, but there are no start-up fees or anything, Apple just takes 30% of your revenues. This being so I saw an opportunity for me, a broke college student, to make some real money. My business partner and I teamed up and went onto freelance sites like guru.com and put up profit sharing Iphone application programmer needed. We advertised that the programmers would receive 25% of our companies profits and the amount of responses we got back were insane. I am very excited to see how the application turns out and how the long distance communication between my programmer and I works.

Crash and Burn

For this project I believe every group has experienced a big crash and burn. I thought it would be a lot easier than it is. The main problem I came across was that without any money to prepurchase items it was very hard to make sales. People don't trust college students unless they know them. I have found the sale of food to be fairly successful, but the truth of the matter is thats not something I would ever want to do. I do realize that it may be profitable, but I wonder how profitable it would be once I expanded and had to hire cooks and get kitchen equipment since right now the most orders I can make in a day in my apartment is 5. When I was at home I was able to make 10 orders, but it is a little harder in a tiny apartment kitchen. On that note I kind of wish I was able to use more startup money to fund an order of creative t-shirts. Realizing that the clothing market is oversaturate I know how hard creating an innovative idea would be, but just making cool shirts and selling them for $10 is profitable being that you can get 100 custom shirts for $3 thats $700 for one shipment.

I was studying the other day using flash cards or index cards and I thought it would be so nice to have an organizer for all of the cards for the different classes I have and I thought of a little plastic container with five slots the outside would be two horizontal slots and the middle would have a verticle slot. From there I thought of other ways that organization would help with this product and I realized another problem I had with studying with index cards. At the end of a midterm I would just throw them out, but when it became time for the final I always wished I held onto them. To fix this problem you could just have 3 plastic cards in each slot so you can put a card in between each midterm so you know what you have to study. Every slot would have a fingerwide cut in it so you could put your finger in it easily.

One red paperclip

I don't know whether or not we are supposed to be blogging about other blogs or not, but I just love the concept behing the one red paper clip idea. Anyways a guy started out with a red paper clip and made trades for it all the way up until he got a house. I'm not sure what the guy does for a living but I think he should be a used car salesman or something because he must have some real talent. The links on the bottom check it out.