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South Sound Technology Conference

I was presenting at the colloquium for my Internship in CSS class, so I decided to get there early to listen in on some of the panels attending the conference. The first panel that I listen to was  Protecting the enterprise roundtable. This panel included Eric Eid, Matt Knox, Terry Gifford, and Chris Kradjan. They talked about how different sectors of the market get targeted for cyber security attacks everyday, going up to 4000 attacks per day. One of the panel members talked about thousands of attacks everyday to try and steal the patient records. These records are then sold to other clients that use this stolen information for insurance fraud. One of the other panel members, who I believe was from Puget Sound Energy talked about how there multiple attacks everyday at their online service as well. After leaving the panel open to question one of the attendees asked a very interesting question: Why do you put the things on the cloud that aren't meant to be on the cloud? I think he
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Guest Speaker #6: Shadrach White

Shadrach White was one of my favorite guest speaker so far in this class! Besides just the CEO's perspective on different aspects of his business and the journey so far, I really liked his personality and his willingness to thoroughly answer all the questions. I noticed that he is a very glass half full type of person, which sounds like one of the core pre requisites for becoming a CEO. One of the most important thing that I learned from Shadrach was that "People generally like people", it really resonated with me because I tend to give everybody benefit of the doubt and assume that they are a decent human being and treat other human beings with same respect and dignity. He value this trait very much because that is how he got two of his angel investors for his company. Shadrach talked about how important being patient is for an entrepreneur, although he did admit that he was not very patient in his early years. Being patient is very important especially for CEO and Man

The Rise and Fall of .com

I have been hearing mentions of "the .com bubble" and "the .com burst" ever since the first day of this class, and we finally got to dive deep into the history of this incident. The .com boom was a moment in history where a lot of companies went public, solely based on the fact that they have a website, in which the succeeded and got a lot of funding as well. This caused a huge negative impact on the market once everybody realized that having a website isn't everything which lead to the eventual burst of said bubble. The .com bust happened over 5 stages: The innocent beginning Boom Insanity  Bust The crawl back to sanity It all started in early 90's when browsers were introduced. Internet had already been around at this point but it was mostly used by very large and very few companies for their internal server. Some of the first companies that were target for early investors were AOL, Prodigy, Delphi, and Genie. Next came the boom where even bigg

Protecting my IP

Initially I was really confused about the difference between Patents, Copyright, Trademarks, and Trade secrets, but after earlier lecture I feel very comfortable with it. Having an IP is very crucial to a company because company name, logo, or a slogan because it is what identifies a product and is also a big factor in driving sales for the company. It is crazy how Nike programmed our brain to recognize the brand by a very simple curved check mark. Being one of the most recognized logo, it has become more than just that and almost a status symbol or proof of good quality in sports industry. I plan on protecting my brand name, slogan, and logo using copyrights. It is very important to protect the brand name so that no spiteful individual can register a company with a similar name and use it to tarnish my brand name. It could cause a huge PR disaster, and is best if all the similar domain names to my company name are also registered. I also plan on using copyrights for our slogan "

Guest Speaker 4: John Dimmer

I wasn't able to attend the class on the day we had John Dimmer as a guest speaker, however I had my friend record the lecture and send it to me after the class so I caught up on it later that day. From the recording, I learned that John Dimmer is an entrepreneur who also worked at Free Range Media with Andrew Fry and helped create multiple businesses around the country. John Dimmer wasn't there initially when Free Range Media was founded but he joined later after FRR was a going concern. It was nice hearing the about John's journey from high school till here because we have already heard Mr. Fry's side of the story on the first day of class, and now hearing it from John's perspective helped put it all together. He want to high school with Mr. Fry back in the day and his dad helped pave the Entrepreneurship way for both of them. He graduated with a degree in finance and worked in the industry for a few years. During the John's talk it was obvious that these

How to price your product

Pricing your product is one tough decision, and it's something that I have had to put a lot of thought into. Initially, I was just throwing numbers out but after Tuesdays lecture on "My Uncle's Alders" it really helped me put a set ruleset together so I can come up with a price for my product. Below are the guidelines I followed to come up with the price: Time and effort spent When you are selling the product Shipping and handling Consider the value of the product from clients perspective Following these guidelines I decided to the price for my Video Game Cafe would be $9.99 per person for each hour and offer discounts for groups. I decided to go with this pricing scheme for many reasons, one of them being the age group that my business is targeted towards is early teenager to young adults, which means I cannot have a high price entry point. $9.99 is low enough for someone who just wants to go play some games with their friends in a LAN environment and have fu

Guest Speaker 3: Brian Forth

Our third guest speaker was Brian Forth, who is the CEO of SiteCrafting.com which is a Tacoma based website development company. Brian has been in the web designing business for almost 20 years with his company. I enjoyed this guest lecture very much because he seemed really comfortable in the class and he gave a lot of time for questions in the end. There are 36 employees in Brian's company and it was interesting to know how he handles various management level issues such as having bad team managers or bad employees in general. Brian seems to be very stern in terms of his company policy and I find that very amendable because he didn't write company goals just for the heck of it, he decided to follow those goals and incorporate them into the company's roots. This is very essential so the employees don't lose track and promote company goals at all time. Brian also talked about how it is working with different clients, since he has experience working with different compa