Final Summary Post

My original idea has significantly developed within the last eight weeks or so. Way back on September 12th, I posted my base idea of creating a Laundry View application for both iPhones and android phones. This post covered what it exactly was that my product offered, it covered what problems it solves, and it also went into details about how I will market the product. For initial purposes I said that I think that it would be greatly beneficial to promote the product through social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter because this product is aimed at college students who for the most part are all very active on these sites.

Each week for six weeks after my original post, I made a  new post about how I can apply things that I have newly learned to the advancement of my product. My first idea involved applying excel to my business. The core idea of apply excel was that I could use it to organize my data, and then use formulas and its functions to make necessary accounting calculations. The next week I talked about how I could apply computer forensics to my business. The core idea about applying this was to make sure that all my employees are well informed to what information they should release over the internet, and be knowledgeable about data that will still remain after disposing of a computer. I then went on to apply input and output to my business. A couple ideas that came out of this was taking advantage of technologies such as voice recognition and QR codes. The following week I posted about how I could apply bits and bytes to my business. The main way I would apply this information would be to know how much memory I needed in my computers, and how much memory certain documents and such would require. The last idea that I applied to my business was networks. Core ideas from this information were understanding the uses of IP addresses, domain names, and the differences between different email protocols.

All of this new information that I acquired over the course of eight weeks seems to hold a great deal of value and opportunity for the success of my new business. All of these ideas will be incorporated and hopefully produce great results. The experience of creating the blog, learning new information, thinking about how to apply the information and eventually sharing these ideas withe the world was a great experience. It got me more experienced to blogging which I had never done before, and also got my to run my mind through ideas about apply new knowledge to a business environment which I would have never done before.


A few other things that further improved the experience were a meeting a had with the GA, a review I made for a professional blog, and viewing and commenting on other students' blogs. The names of the students and the links to their blogs that I commented on are listed below:

Benita Mach http://benitamach.blogspot.com/ 
James Jarrett http://jamesjarrett.blogspot.com/ 
Kristofer Curtis http://ist195classwork.blogspot.com/ 

Applying Networks To My Business

There are many aspects to networks that would be beneficial to running  a technology based business. Aside from just understanding the mere facts of networks such as what packets are and how they are sent, or what a protocol does, there are other aspects that can really be applied. One basic aspect would be in understanding how IP addresses and domain names work. This would be important when considerign whether I want to create my own site to advertise or promote my service aside from the actual existing Laundry View website.

If deciding to do this I need to understand that I will be given an IP address but will need to choose and pay for domain name that will be more easily recognized or coherent to customers. I will have to decide what domain name I would like and I will have to decide what top level domain I will want (.com or .net). If someone owns the domain name that I want, I will either need to choose a different one or pay the current owner of that domain. One exception is if someone is using the domain name in bad faith and just trying to capitalize off of the name or hinder the company. Then I can have a panelist look at the case and have the name revoked from them.

Another thing that would be beneficial to understand is the difference between different email protocols. Two email protocols that I may consider are POP and IMAP; POP is the Post Office Protocol, while IMAP is Internet Message Access Protocol. The major difference when looking at these two protocols is that with POP, emails can only be download to one machine. For example, if I download an email on my laptop it will not show up on my desktop. However, with IMAP the emails will show up on all machines. After understanding this difference, I believe I would like to use the IMAP protocol because it would be more convenient when trying to access business emails on different computers.

Blog Review Post

Blog being reviewed can be found at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/17
Source: Huffington Post
Subject: iPhone 4S

The Huffington Post is a professional online blogging site that provides news and information on an array of different topics. To the best of my knowledge, they produce some of the most known blogs and are credible in what they post. They are widely viewed and their posts can receive hundreds of comments within a single day. They have several different sects, the one I looked at was their technology section. The post that I chose to review was called "Apple: IPhone 4S Sales Topped 4 Million In First Weekend" and written by Catherine Smith.

In this blog post, what is primarily discussed is the success that the iPhone 4S had its first weekend. The phone was launched Friday the 14th and this blog was posted the 17th after weekend sales had closed. It was discussed that it sold more phones its first weekend than any previous phone in its first weekend. The post provides more information about new Apple products including its new iOS5 and iCloud.

What makes Huffington Post blogs so powerful is that they are so well known and so many people view them. They have been around and produce information on all different topics attracting people with all different interests. Bloggers feel they can get there ideas out there by commenting on popular blogs, which is why their posts relieve so many comments so quickly. A blog such as mine would take a vast amount of time to get anywhere near the power this has, and that will never happen. Huffington Post remains successful in producing the latest information and allowing anyone to blog/comment and speak their minds about what is posted.

Applying Bits and Bytes To My Business

When dealing with computers, bits and bites along with being able to count in binary are information that must be understood before any technological aspects of a business will succeed. Where this really comes in play with my business is when it comes to matters of how much memory I will need in terms of Bytes.  This is important to know because I need to know how much storage I will need on my computers. Basic knowledge about prefixes is a beginning to understanding this, but it goes further. I will need to know first off if business on my computers will require either Terabytes of storage or Gigabytes.

Word documents and PowerPoints will not really be a factor as a one page Word document only take up 30KB, which is virtually nothing in terms of a gigabyte or terabyte. Things that will need to be considered is how much video or pictures will be used. Specifically videos will take up much more space than anything else previously stated. Of course there will be other applications and such that will also needed to be looked at in terms of how much storage space they will require. With the material I am dealing with, I don't expect at this time to need as much as a terabyte of storage.

Applying Input/Output To My Business

Ideas involving input and output devices present a lot of opportunity to different aspects of my business. As many of the other things I have discussed in my blog have been about applying information to the management of my business, such as using Excel or disposing of hardware, input and output can be applied directly to my product/service.

I have several ideas for how I can use input or output devices to even further enhance the quality and the ease of use of my product. One idea I have that I believe will increase the ease of use of my product therefor making it more popular, involves voice recognition. Voice recognition will be implemented in two ways:

• First, voice recognition will can be used for the initial setup of the application. The user will simply speak into their phone, first speaking their campus name and then their dorm name. The application will then take them to exactly where they need to be.
• Second, if all machines are taken, the user will be able to speak "first available," and the device will then locate and point out the machine that will first be available to use.

The other idea i had concerning input/output involved QR codes. The QR code would be used to let the user know when his or her laundry was done. Each machine will have a QR code placed on it. After you have put your laundry in a machine, simply scan the code on your phone using the applications QR code scanner, and it will register that you are using that machine. When the time is up on that machine, you will be notified immediately.

These two idea I believe will be easy to implement and at the same time will be very beneficial to producing more business. 

Applying Computer Forensics To My Business

Obtaining personal and credit information is very appealing to people in today's society who are interested in taking someone's money or other assets. The ease of doing this has risen due to the integration between personal information and computers. Being someone who runs their own business, I am sure that my information would be all the more valuable to someone looking to steal money or hack the business's system. Therefore I will need to take strict precautions when it comes to digital security of information on all computers.

My first priority will  be to make sure every employee is educated on what information he or she should release over the internet, as well as be warned about risky internet activity. Every employee should know to read each and every email with the utmost scrutiny. No employee should ever disclose any credit card numbers, customer information, social security numbers, etc without having one-hundred percent certainty of who will be seeing it.

Aside from that, I will make sure my employees are educated in computer forensics. It is important that employees know that even when information is deleted from a computer it can still be recovered. This is important when it comes time to discard of computers or just simply a hard drive. If someone one looking for company information for malicious use, they could simply take a computer if thrown into the trash, and use a program to recover the information. The information is still there, it is just marked as that it can be reused. When it comes time for a computer to be discarded, it must be sent somewhere reliable where it can be destroyed.

Employees must be educated to the fullest extent in these issues. A slip up in withholding information could blow up very quickly and be devastating to the company. 

Applying Excel to My Business

Using a spreadsheet application on a computer is a useful task in most businesses, as it will be in this business. Because I am most familiar with Microsoft Excel, this program will be the spreadsheet application I use. Spreadsheets serve multiple purposes that will make organizing any and all information easier and more orderly.

The most basic task I will take on with Excel is recording customers names, contact information, and necessary financial information (payment method, payment amount, etc.) Because the application will be the same price for each and every customer, once I have one customer's payment amount down, I will be able to use Excel's "drag" function to automatically fill in other customers' payment amounts. 

The same is with any business at first in that there will be a low initial membership so information is easy to take on manually. But once the application becomes more popular, I will need to take advantage of Excel's various services and functions.

Something I believe to be useful will be organizing information or new purchases monthly. By doing this I will be able to compare revenues or losses between months. By using the "AutoSum" function, I can easily add up the totals that I receive monthly. To make the information even more viewer friendly, I will use conditional formatting to indicate whether I have a positive or negative month based on a constant goal.

One service that Excel offers which I believe I will find to be most helpful is creating charts and graphs to really provide a brilliant visual aid. I will be able to also use charts to organize my monthly financial information, and one time gets going I will also be able to make yearly charts. Excel makes chart making easy by just selecting desired information then entering the chart wizard. This is the easiest way to organize and compare records.