Seminar 10 Review

This seminar mainly covered the topic of Business plans and also a bit on storytelling. Another important thing which happened this seminar was the professor distributing, to those who paid, the printed copies of the original version of the wiki. He said the exam was open book and so we could take this into the exam hall.

Prof Lee Gilbert first told us about small businesses and how they are defined. We also learnt about something called a limited liability partnership(LLP). Wikipedia defines it as follows...

A limited liability partnership (LLP) has elements of partnerships and corporations. In an LLP, all partners have a form of limited liability, similar to that of the shareholders of a corporation. However, the partners have the right to manage the business directly, and (in many areas) a different level of tax liability than in a corporation.

We then started to learn about small industries. Some interesting things we learnt were that 50% of them fail in the first yr, and in 5 yrs 50 - 80% fail..... nice encouragement for budding entrepreneurs among us huh?? Then we started to look at the reason y the industries might fail, and these were anything from too less money to bad management and even too much money. Here and at other points during the seminar, Prof Lee Gilbert told us about many examples from his past experiences with these matters and kept the seminar interesting. Next we discussed what companies do to avoid failure and the first step was to write a good business plan. This way we moved on to the next topic... Business plans

So what is a business plan? Wikipedia defines it in this way...

A business plan is a formal statement of a set of business goals, the reasons why they are believed attainable, and the plan for reaching those goals.

In other words it is a documents used by people with business ideas to convince people with lots of money to lend them some. It has various clearly defined parts. First comes the executive summary, the most important part of the plan, by far. Prof Lee Gilbert says(and i have heard this from many other people as well) that more often than not this is the only part read by venture capitalists(the people with lots of money) for them to decide which venture to fund. Only if they are impressed by this section will they even look at the rest of it.

The other parts basically list out who you are, what you propose to do, what your strategy to get this done, what you need to get this done and who are the people going to get this done. Lastly come the Financial statement and the appendices.

At this point he distributed the copies of the wiki, and began the mini lecture on story telling. At first i was wondering what on earth might story telling have to do with business. Then i realised that what he was talking about was the need to grab the attention of your audience. This is a common need between both the fields, of story tellers and business men. Here is harvard business review's say on the matter....

"Persuasion is at the centrepiece of business activity. Forget about PowerPoint and statistics. To involve people at the deepest level, you need stories."

A site, Dutopia, uses this statement to illustrate how important story telling is to succeed in todays business world....

"Google 'storytelling', and you get 18 million hits. By comparison, 'shareholder value' gets you 6 million. Storytelling is hot. Understandably so, since a good story can differentiate you from your competitors."

This part was all about how to make a good story. The lecture started off with the basic structure of any story and then we started to talk about the various steps one might take(consciously or unconsciously) when one is writing a story, i.e. Pre-Writing (thinking about the subject, basic plot, etc) then Drafting(writing the story out once roughly and letting others read it and give you their thoughts) and finally Revising(using the input of the readers to improve upon the story and finalizing it.).

Then we toughed upon the subject of grammar, and how important it is to make no mistakes of grammar or other wise which may add to the noise of the story and ruin the readers experience. The professor also said that it is usually advised to use active voice and avoid passive.

This marked an end to todays seminar.

Seminar 9 Review

The Main topic covered this seminar was something called scenario planning. Though i know or could guess mostly what it is i decided to check the "expert(s)" Wikipedia.

Scenario planning or Scenario thinking is a strategic planning method that some organizations use to make flexible long-term plans. The basic method is that a group of analysts generate simulation games for policy makers. The games combine known facts about the future, such as demographics, geography, military, political, industrial information, and mineral reserves, with plausible alternative social, technical, economic and political (STEP) trends which are key driving forces.

What i understood it to be was a method used to prepare for every(or most) likely events by expecting it and prepare your plan of action if it were to happen.

To teach professor Lee Gilbert was using a presentation which he said he had made atleast 10 yrs ago about the telecommunications industry. He talked about terms like norms laws and standards and the differences between them. We learnt how many other external factors influence our decisions and actions starting from task related factors to the unknown future forces. Then he showed us a plan he had made about the telecom industry with 4 scenarios ranging from the ideal to the nightmare cases and studying the changes and reactions of the environment, market etc in each case.

In this plan 3 of the four scenarios were easy to understand but one of them was called zero sun, and though you could say it was the practical bad case(i.e. between good and nightmare) i could not figure out the rationale between the naming... so back to Wikipedia. It defines Zero-sum as:

A situation in which a participant's gain or loss is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the other participant(s). It is so named because when the total gains of the participants are added up, and the total losses are subtracted, they will sum to zero.

At this point the professor set us a small assignment. We were to determine a set of 3 variables which will be strongly affected in the case of a company entering the singapore WI-FI market and setting up hot spots.(He stressed here on the number 3 here since he felt, from experience, any less than 3 was too less and any more than 4 was too much) In the end thats what happened, even though he got the answers from everyone in the class, most of them could be combined with each other to for just 3-5 variables. The seminar ended at this point after the professor collected the technology plans and remining us about our upcoming project and to make edits to the wiki, which he said he was locking next week.

Seminar 8 Review

Extremely sorry for the long break, i will try to stay up to date now and catch up the old ones as i can. So here goes...

This seminar was the submission deadline of the project's proof-of-concept, so the seminar started off with each group presenting their proof of concepts. Should anyone be interested to know, Wikipedia defines proof oc concelp as follows:

Proof of concept is a short and/or incomplete realization (or synopsis) of a certain method or idea(s) to demonstrate its feasibility, or a demonstration in principle, whose purpose is to verify that some concept or theory is probably capable of exploitation in a useful manner.

The proof of concept is usually considered a milestone on the way of a fully functioning prototype.

For us it can be just restricted to a demonstration of a partly working model of the user interface of our projects. As with the previous submissions and classworks, even here there were vast differences in the methods used to achieve the end result. Some, including my own group used good ole' power point, nice and simple. In the other end of the spectrum, we had a group with a super hifi flash presesntation, with a real fancy interface, though it too had a few quirks. Somewhere in the middle (sort of) was a group which used a motorola emulator to simulate exactly how their project would function on a phone.

After all the groups were done we began the seminar which was about almost the same topic, design. The professor started out by giving us a seemingly complicated game, where of 2 people each picks a number between 1 to 9 and the first to have 3 numbers adding to 15 wins. we tried this for a while after which Prof Lee Gilbert shows us a magic square with the same numbers in and thats when i realised that what we have been breaking our heads to figure out is nothing but the immortal game of tic-tac-toe. With this innovative start, Prof Lee Gilbert began the seminar of the day on the importance of design in the making of the product. He started off by talking about iterative development, In which he talked about a new concept/tool to me, called use case. From what i understood. It was a method by which u choose a scenario and then devlop the product to be able to handle that scenario and be able to help the user reach his goal. Wikipedia had this to say..

According to Bittner and Spence, "Use cases, stated simply, allow description of sequences of events that, taken together, lead to a system doing something useful" . Each use case provides one or more scenarios that convey how the system should interact with the users called actors to achieve a specific business goal or function.

He called a student, who had a presentation about this topic, up front and he tried to explain to us what was the use case method, but i didnt really get what the big deal was. Then the professor gave use a few examples and then it started to make a bit more sense... After this he talked about some thing called UML(unified modelling language) which was i guess used in design, for use cases, etc. Again i drew a blank so back to Wikipedia ....

In the field of software engineering, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a standardized specification language for object modeling.

Another site of the Kennesaw State University gave a bit more consise explanation so i desided to add that also here..

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a standard language for specifying, visualizing, constructing, and documenting the artifacts of software systems, as well as for business modeling and other non-software systems. The UML represents a collection of best engineering practices that have proven successful in the modeling of large and complex systems.

The seminar ended on this note with the professor reminding all of us that the technology plan, the next assignment of the project was due next week and that it just need to be submitted in the digital dropbox.

Seminar 2 Review

Im sorry for the delay of this post but here goes..

This seminar we talked about technology infrastructure or in other words the infrastructure of the cyber world. We learnt about how the internet came to be what it is from its humble beginings. What are the various protocols that hold it together, a bit about WiFi protocols, and finished it of with a little about various markup languages and a little bit of practice of basic html. But first....

We started off with various groups giving a presentation about Starhub and a technology called Fixed mobile convergence. From what i understood from the presentations and also the professor, the case was about Starhub entering the mobile market and the problems it faced upon entering, and Fixed mobile convergence(FMC) was a technology by which your mobile phone and your cordless landline converge into the same device, i.e. when outdoors it behaves as a mobile phone and when inside the house it acts as a cordless phone. The professor also went on to say that it was true that Starhub was miles ahead of starhub on the technology front, they seem to have goofed up on the business aspect. Apparently when they started up, they choose a billing mechanism which had little or no upgradability or expandability, and so when Starhub expanded from the mobile market and started other services, they were unable to integrate its billing into the old system, and so they have to bill it separately. Hence users, like Professor Lee Gilbert himself, who subscribe to multiple services from Starhub are sent multiple bills and hence have to pay with separate checks for each service. I can understand that this will get irritating after a while. After this the professor invited three of the students to show their blogs in front of the class, as an example of what was expected from the rest of us, as this was an important part of the in-class assessment. He also commented that these blogs could help ourselves and the other students to either review the previous class or while preparing for the exam.

Now the actual class began and we started learning about the history of the internet. How it started off as the arpanet, meant only for use by researchers and then the military. But it kept growing slowly. Then came 1972 when the email was born. Soon came along mailing groups and the Usenet(Then started by a bunch of unversity students but now better known as the google groups.) By now internet started to spread faster and more and more civilians were adopting it. Then we learnt about the emergence of the world wide web and the contribution of Tim berners-Lee and many others.

This concluded the history and we began on the actual infrastructure section.

The first topic discussed was packet switching. This is kind of a major topic encompassing most of what we learnt later. Basically when files or web pages are sent over the internet network, they are split into many tiny pieces called packets. they are then sent from the sender through the network, to the reciever where they are assembled again. The sending of the packets through the network from server to server, until it reaches the reciever is basically what packet switching is. The routing of these packets is, as you can imagine, very important, and so there are routing computers which handle routing. There are also several algorithms controlling the routing process. We were then shown a diagram which clearly shows how each lan is connected through a router into the internet network. This brought us to the topic of the protocols which control the net.

A Protocol can be defined as a set of rules by which something(here, the web) functions or works, to enable different systems to work together. The major protocols governing the net are TCP(Transfer control protocol) and IP(Internet protocol). TCP controls how big files are split into small packets for transmission over the web and viceversa, while IP controls how these packets are sent from the source to their destination. We can see clearly that thesetwo protocols are so important for the nets functioning that they inevitably create a bottle neck in that the effeciency of the net depends on the effeciency of the protocols. Hence several improvements were made over time to them. The current IP is IP v4 but this is soon going to run into its limits as the number of domains available are decreasing fast. There was an attempt to improve this in IP v5 but since it was too much work for vey less gain it was rejected. IP v6, when it comes is not only supposed to increase the number of domains but also improve various other aspects like security, etc.

Then we went on to web page delivary protocols and learnt about http, url. THen we moved to Email protocols like pop, smtp, etc. We then talked a bit about different kinds of networks, internet, extranet, private network, and so on. We then moved on to wireless connections, first a little about bluetooth connections and then about wireless ethernet or WI FI and its various standards (802.11 a/b/g/n). Prof Lee Gilbert told us that where he stays , out of the families staying near, he could detect six WI FI netowrks. This maybe normal here in singapore, but it is about 6 more than i would expect back where im from.

We then moved on to markup languages, and learnt about the main ones like SGML, HTML, XML and XHTML, and brief details about each. After this we had a small lab session in which Prof Lee Gilbert showed us the basics of html coding done in notepad. We all tried using a few tags and opened the files in IE to view the results. This concluded the class for today.

My first impressions..

I must confess the first thing i saw when i entered the seminar room, were all the laptops oon the tables, i had never expected that. Each student had one for himself. I was kind of encouraged by this. However .....
The course stared off on a bad foot( ;-) ). The professor started talking about how the class looked so empty and that he must have scared most of them off, i cant say i was too thrilled about the word 'scared'. However the class picked up after that and it looked fun, seems like i get to learn a lot about stuff which i have upto now just given a passing glance or even ignored. This includes things like Wikis, blogging, podcasts, etc. Then i learnt we had to pay $30 to stay in the course but then i figured it seems a quite interesting course and the professor seems a great speaker and ofcourse we all get laptops, so it seemed kinda fair! Anyway thats all for this post, the next will all be mostly summaries of the weeks seminars.

my first blog post

here goes my first blog post ever!! (hope it is not too surprising !) This one isnt going to be long though, as i didnt attend the first class, having added the course only this week, so i really dont know what to write here. I expect the next few one to be much longer though.. so i think i will be closing here for now, will be posting again real soon so watch out!