IST 195 Week8---Final Summary for my very first entrepreneurship project

        I still remember the first day that our whole class was announced by Professor Rubin that there is a project of entrepreneurship coming. I was never a technology person, and before I took this class, I already concerned whether I can catch all those technologies during lectures and apply them in labs. At that time, I thought there would be no way that I could actually create a new brand which would relate to materials of each class. At the beginning, I have no idea since I have only a limited understanding of technology and business. But then, I got the idea about this doll-making website from one of my other classes-- childhood psychology. It seems like there are always some issues about communications between parents and their infants since newborns cannot speak for themselves and new parents are inexperienced. Also, the US needs extra help, such as technology support, to improve its health care system for kids during early childhood as proven by some psychology researches.  

 Just a quick summary about what are my blogs all about. My plan is to build a new website called, Build your own toys. The main goal of my product is not only let the kids pick their favorites or create their unique ones, but also keep them being healthy both mentally and physically by putting medical test devices into the body of some dolls. In those ways, parents can easily and briefly check the condition of the kid before they go to a doctor, and they don’t need to panic when the baby is crying loudly. By using techniques like excel, I can easily manage the statue of my inventory. Also, by using apps like digital videos and images, the company can publicize our produces widely and effectively. Since almost every product from Build your own toys are unique ones, I figured it will be easier to have my own doll factory. Therefore, the productivity of our doll factory can be increased by using RFID technology. There are also other techniques that help me to make the website or the factory to be more organized and attractive to our customers. However, they are just not being as much obvious as those that I detailed mentioned above. 

 In conclusion, I think I choose a really interesting topic. By blogging each week, I have a better understanding of the first one third of the course materials. Quite an experience! For this Build your own toys project, I thought I start it out too broad and it was more complex than I thought it could be since I was trying to put different processes in this one project. There are still a lot of details need to be done for build your own toys as a new brand. However, I definitely believe it will be something that people need all the time in real life, and if it does come true, it will fulfill the gap of infants’ medical supply in the United States. 

 3 blogs I commented on were: 
http://everythingbutorange.blogspot.com/  by Nicole Alexis 
http://mobileprojectiondevice.blogspot.com/  by Gabriel Shore
http://travisespeut.blogspot.com/  by someone without personal information

IST 195 Week7----Blog Review Post: A blog summary of Ty Tribble

The blogger that I researched is a blog of Ty Tribble. He is a famous blogger for social media and entrepreneur. Ty grew up in Seattle and later spent most of his time to live on the western side of Washington State. After Ty started his own full-time business, he had a really a successful career in corporate America. However, he preferred to work for himself. So now, he has his own business and he is able to work at home without going any place for his job.  

   His blog is called MLM Blog, and the article that I am interested about is “Amway Settles Gift Card Lawsuit For $20 Million”. In the article, the Amway Corporation was sued because the company redeem gift card before a certain expire date which was viewed as a violation of several state laws by the customers. According to the blogger, all expired gift cards or gift cards nearly to be expired worth more than $20 million. He believed that Amway provided Ribbon Gift Card which violates the right of Amway’s customs.

    The lawsuit continued for two years. Finally, on February 16, 2011, the Superior Court of Los Angeles proclaimed that Amway’s consumers will have mostly two months from April to June in 2011 to change a new Amway gift card. Not only that, the Amway company has to give extra service and benefit to their consumers and they can never use “redeem before” gift card or anything similar for their products.
http://mlmblog.net/site/2011/03/amway-settles-gift-card-lawsuit-for-20-million.html 

IST195 Week6--- Operating Systems

     Last week’s lecture, we talked about the important of operating systems, especially the use and effect of UNIX operating system. I found out a good operating system can be really effective for my doll company.

     Since an operating system such as UNIX can be a coordinator that helps application software and hardware to work together, it will organize my doll website and all of the order. The status of orders will be clean, and they can be easily updated or moved in different situation. 

    Moreover, the multitasking technology can also be helpful for my doll company. I understand there are three different strategies for multitasking, and each single one of them may not fit for all the tasks. Right now, I don’t know which type of multitasking is more appropriate for our company, but I think I will consider the scale of orders from our doll website and give it a try.

IST 195 Week5---Bits and Bytes

   Last week during the lecture, our class learned what’s bits and bytes, the difference between MP3 and WAV storage type, and how to get the MP3 from the storage type of WAV.

   In fact, I didn’t find it is a lecture that quite related to my doll project since my doll project is hardly related to sound effect or bits. The only thing that I find will be helpful for my project is the color depth part. So now I know the different image effects of various bit depths, and as the bit depth becomes bigger, the image will actually be more colorful and vivid. It reminds me to pay attention to the bit depth of the doll website when I am making it.

   Moreover, I learn names of different size amount, and by knowing that the amount of free storage space that I get with blog is around 3GB, it actually helps me to recognize the available free space that our doll website should provide to our customers. 

IST195 Week 4---Input &Output

   Last Monday our class had a lecture about input and Output. Materials are really interesting and they are various input or output devices. The one that I am really interested about is an input innovation---RFID. 

   I think the RFID technology can really help to increase the productivity. Instead of putting old Barcodes on our products (dolls), we can replace them to the new technology—RFID tags. In this case, there’s no need orientate scanned items, products for different customs can leave our factory at the same time without being scanned by a scanned machine one at a time. Moreover, the new RFID technology is more accurate than the old barcode technology, and it usually makes no mistakes.  

   RFID tags are not expensive, and the best thing about it is that we can mount any RFID tags on our dolls since they can be mounted various types of materials. Therefore, it doesn’t affect the cute outward appearance of our dolls. Also, because of the type of our product, passive tags will be more necessary and better. Varied microchips may also be included in our products for different kinds of doll collections.

IST 195 Week 3---Digital Video

       Last week we learned two chapters which contains basic information about Hardware Components and Digital Video. Since my project concentrates on making children’s own dolls online, Digital Video will be an important tool that I will use throughout my project.  
       In order to stand out from thousands of web companies and to keep our business going and being successful, I will definitely take good use from various digital Video. By using tool, like flash, I can design several short videos to publicize our doll products. For example, one can be a brief introduction about our company, our cooperative partners, the uniqueness of our doll products and commercial standings of our products and factories, so more people will know and be interested in dolls that our company manufactures after videos are posted on medias, such as YouTube. 

The other video will be designed and showed as a short cartoon. The audiences of our cartoon video are our main customers---kids. The main characters of the cartoon will be dolls from our company. Our goal is to bring happiness to kids by cartoon, and at the same time, they will easily accept our products. In addition, as the technology develops, we will change the digital tools that we use some advanced streaming formats, such as HTML.

IST195 Week 2-Excel Application and Digital Images

    Last week we studied Excel Application and Digital Images. I think both materials can improve my project. For Digital Images, we can use them to change the color of my website in order to make it more attractive to kids. Therefore, there are two main goals about the color of my website. 

First, since the key point of my doll website is that the kid can pick their favorites, the doll website will use colors that will not hurt kids’ eyes. Second, under the first condition, we will choose several different background colors for our website. The background color will change automatically and randomly each time when our custom click on our website, so the freshness will stay. Each time the kid clicks on our website, it will feel like a new start.

   The Excel application will be an important part for my doll website. To have a better idea about how well my business runs after a period of time, I need to look at the record of the cost of materials, transportations and revenue through excel application. After I get the exact date of those information, I will know how well the doll website works in the market. Then, I might adjust the price of different collections or reduce some cost to make it more profitable.

IST195--Project Introduction

 

  I want to create a website for kids. On my website, there will be all different kinds of dolls for both girls and boys. Not only that, children can actually create their own dolls or in some cases, their “new friend” by using different materials or tools that my website provides. For example, a child can choose the doll’s hair color, spoken language or even gender. Therefore, there’re hundreds of choices on my website, which guarantees the uniqueness of each doll. As kids are creating their own dolls, they actually get a chance to try different combinations, pick their favorite elements and have fun at the same time.

  After the combination of dolls are decided, my company will manufacture those dolls and delivery them to clients’ houses in different states. However, the most important part is there are small machines inside those dolls which can actually induce the fluctuation of the baby in order to help adults to find out why the baby keeps crying or doesn’t sleep at night. In some cases, dolls can also attract baby’s attention to help them to relax and to stop crying by inducing the fluctuation. My purpose of creating such a unique idea about dolls is that it helps kids to develop a better physical and mental health since they are little.

As kids grow up and more investors join, I might also consider making dolls that are in different ages, so those dolls will actually have the process of growing up as our kids and become their  long-term “friends at home” as they grow up.