Extra Credit - South Sound Technology Conference

    I attended the South Side Technology Conference as apart of my internship presentation. I was able to show off what I learned/did during my internship this quarter. For the research/poster session portion, I got to see what my fellow students worked on. One other thing poster I was interested was my friend Arshdeep Singh's. Arshdeep had an interesting story to his internship. He started off testing software updates on virtual machines but wanted to do something else. He talked with his manager and he got moved on to a networking team. On the networking team, Arsh got to write Ruby scripts to automate switches.

    Another presentation that I found interesting, not mine or a friends was Caleb's presentation on his TMobile TechX internship. During his internship, Caleb got to work on an operations security support team and development integration test team. I liked that his internship was a rotation one where you could see what it's like on different engineering teams. This is the a kind of internship that I prefer to have so I can see what technologies/teams fit my interests.

    I did catch a peak at what topics were actually being discussed during the conference. The two that I caught during my breaks were drones and women in technology. I don't actually personally own any drones but they do interest me it lets end users see the view from above whenever/whenever they want(of course there's regulations) and am hearing about how Amazon is trying to deliver packages via drones.

     Women in technology is something I hear about all the time on LinkedIn. My view on this  is that it's good to bring in/interest people who aren't represented as well in technology - women and minorities but at the same time I don't believe they should be given unfair advantages like if a man presents himself as more technically adept than a woman applying for the same position, the woman shouldn't be hired simply because shes a woman.

Dot.com to Dot bomb

     Andrew gave a lecture on the Dot Com bubble. In the mid to late 1990s, there was an unprecedented amount of an excitement in the Internet companies that rose. People thought it was a boom without end.

    Andrew used dinosaurs as an analogy to describe the dominant Internet companies in the era - Compserv,  Pets.com, Yahoo. He used dinosaurs because they were these strong creatures that roamed the Earth and no one dared to challenge them. Unfortunately, like dinosaurs, these companies failed to adapt to the significant changes(for Dinosaurs, asteroid ahead of them and perished.

The asteroid in this case was an incoming bubble. Because of all the excitement, so much money than what these Internet companies were actually worth(if you do DCF  of future revenues) was being put in and later when the bubble burst, people were in a panic to sell. This actually reminded of my purchase of the new Star Wars battlefront game. Due to all the hype around the Force Awakens, many people(including me) bought the entire game($60) without playing it first. We put so much hype into the game. The game itself lacked a single player campaign mode, droids, and had few maps compared to the previous Battlefront games.

     There were some dinosaurs that adapted to survive. Andrew talked about Yahoo as the exception. Yahoo would be the crocodile in the dinosaurs analogy. One of the things I took away was that to survive in the economy, you need to willing to adapt. As software engineers, were taught that you need to constantly learn new frameworks and technologies or your skills will be obsolete.  er

Guest Speaker - John Dimmer

    John Dimmer came to our class to speak last Thursday. Andrew mentioned that John's talk was his favorite. I think this is because John and Andrew started up Free Range Media together :)

    John played golf at the University of Oregon. He graduated from University of Oregon with a degree in finance and started his career at Puget Sound Bank. After working at Puget Sound Bank, John went on to work at Alliance Surety Bonds which he learned a great deal about accounting. John  then became an entrepreneur. He is a managing member at Firs Management, an investment firm that invests in startups, owns a Honda Dealership, and Airstream, trailer dealerships in different states.

    John also talked about the differences between legal structures your company can form. The three types of legal structures he mentioned were LLC, C corporation, and S corporation. LLC reminded me of Quizlet LLC. C corporation is the most common legal structure. C corporations pay federal income taxes from its income. S corporations are not subject to a federal income tax as the shareholders will bear the burden of paying the federal income tax.

Mission, Vision, and Values Statement

Mission/Vision Statement
Our mission, at Vitalize Technologies, is to provide simple to use community based application to notify what is going around on around them.  We alert our users of work opportunities, retail promotions, sports activities, and other social gatherings. Our platform will let users, at anytime, anywhere pinpoint areas of interest and and join in conversation with other users who are interested/join in the common event.

Value Statement

Our core values are

Customer Obsession - Like Amazon.com, we want do what's right for the customer. We want to listen to our customers - see what features they like and suggestions they have for our application. We want to start from the customer and work backwards to earn their trust.

Transparency  - We want our employees to know what our plans for the company and have them contribute ideas and suggestions

Passion - We want developers, program managers, and designers that live and breath our product(in other words, actively use our product in their everyday life and want to improve it). We feel that if our employees use our product, they will have more energy to code and kill bugs!

Safe & Respectful  - We will not tolerate any discriminatory or threatening language on our platform. Users that use discriminatory or threatening language will be banned.  

Amy Sallin Visit

    Amy Sallin, assistant director at Buerke Center for Entrepreneurship came to speak with us last week. She spoke to us about competitions in entrepreneurship and gave us advice about how to get advice in entrepreneurship. One such competition she mentioned was Buerke Center for Entrepreneurship's Business Plan Competition in which $70,000 is awarded in prizes. The money won can set your business and pay off expenses/new employees.

   Andrew added on to what Amy mentioned and said that this would be a great opportunity for us to enter our business plans that we will turn in at the end of the class. Amy also told us that there are more benefits than just the funding involved. By entering the competition, we will be able to build our network of contacts, receive coaching/mentoring, feedback on our idea, and be able to market our idea to other participants/potential investors.  The network of contacts could especially be helpful for us in case we want to start a business later or looking for a new job. Because the process lasts six months, it is experience that demonstrates your commitment to go from start to finish

    The Buerke Center of Entrepreneurship Business Plan Competition does have outright cash prizes for 1st/2nd place and other finalists. However there are other rewards as well. Amy listed two of them, $5000 AARP prize for addressing challenges faced by low income seniors, and $5000 Wells Fargo Clean Tech prize that harnesses renewable materials and energy sources.

Logo, Company Name, and Product

My company's name is Tamaritz.

Our logo is

    

     Our product is a carpooling client that gives flexibility to people to find and schedule their carpool groups on their own. This product will also have an add feature for people to add events/happenings around them as well to make it more interactive. The add on feature will emphasize live time communication and interaction among people in a community. At the same time, that feature will involve a mix of private and public communication. The main focus of the add will be private and localized communication that entices people to use the main carpooling application.

      The mission of the carpooling product is to make communities more connected, save money on gas, reduce traffic on roads, and stay connected with members of their carpool group. Eventually the carpool client will have a discovery feature that allows a user to discover where other users in their same community are going. Of course there will be privacy concerns. Users that belong to a group have full power to either make that group discoverable or not. 

      My carpool app will also leverage Facebook and attempt to match riders/drivers that share mutual friends, schools, and other preferences(music, tv shows). I believe that if we do this sucessfully, people will have something to talk about during the ride and be able to develop new connections.

     Our company culture will consist of small teams that move quickly and rapidly iterator on features they care deeply about. In the future, we may involve data visaulization/graphing that informs the user how much money/ the positive environmental effects of them carpooling.

Guest Speaker - Brian Forth

     Last Thursday, we had a guest speaker named Brian Forth. Brian is the founder of SiteCrafting Inc, which from the company website is "a digital agency in Tacoma that builds and designs websites to amplify your web presence, and support your business goals". SiteCrafting's clients include Tacoma Public Utilities, and Lemay Car Museum. This reminded me of the company I am interning at right now, Pivotal Labs. Pivotal Labs is a consulting software company that works hand in hand with their clients via pair programming and preaches the tenets of extreme programming - test driven development.

     Brian brought up responsive web design in his presentation. He mentioned that because so many people use their phones to access web apps/sites, it's important to make your web app responsive to such phones/tablets. This is something that has often been reinforced to me in courses I've taken and heard in industry as well. In my mind, if you don't support mobile, you're isolating yourself from a significant portion of the market.

     Brian also brought up business insights. When asked how he picks his clients Brian mentioned that he prefers that his clients don't lie in the same industry. Going along with this, SiteCrafting sometimes does a exclusive contract with a client. The nice part about the contract is that it is a guaranteed contract. This reminds me of Netflix. It is a constant membership fee no matter how many shows/movies you watch.

    This is more of personal advice but Brian also mentioned that he doesn't get too high during the good times or too low in the tough times. I hear this a lot in sports.