Mohamed's Blog

In writing this post, there were a lot of things I had to take into consideration. First and foremost, I had to decide if I wanted to go with my parking app idea, or if I wanted to pick one of the other two business ideas, or something else entirely. I couldn't really find anything else I was really interested in so I decided to go with my parking app idea. To review my idea, I wanted to create an application that would help students at universities/colleges find parking spots on and around campus. Now, thinking about how to price my product also required a lot of consideration. I looked into it and there are a lot of parking apps already available (various levels of quality) that are free. The way these applications generate revenue is by advertisements. The other option I considered was the option where the app would be free to use with limited features and would cost money to upgrade. Given that my target market would be students, I figure they wouldn't be so willing to pa...

Our third guest speaker was Brian Forth, CEO of SiteCrafting. As the name suggests, SiteCrafting is a web design company that creates and designs websites for its clients. Mr. Forth's story is similar to the story about 'My Uncle's Alders' in that Mr. Forth kind of stumbled across his idea. He had someone ask him to create a website for him, and word got around. Eventually, Mr. Forth realized that he had a good thing going, and the result was SiteCrafting. There were a couple of things that stood out to me about Brian Forth and his company. First of all, his company does not have a sales department and has relied mostly on word-of-mouth. Second, the culture of Brian's company is unique. The office is just one big open area where all employees can easily access each other. Even Brian doesn't have his own office (in the conventional sense). I thought it was interesting when Brian talked about how some clients were let go. I wonder if sometimes a CEO or a company...

I wasn't there for our second guest speaker's presentation unfortunately, so I had to read my fellow students' blog post to find out what he talked about. I learned a bunch of things. First off, the speaker's name was Robert Coons and his company was called Scout Military. Most of the students mentioned that Mr. Coons talked about the pros and cons of being an entrepreneur, just like our first guest speaker. I ended up looking up Mr. Coons' company on google, and I saw a link to the website. The website had a link to the Android and Apple stores and just described some of the app's features. What struck me was how simple the idea was, and how he was able to turn it into a company. In one of my earlier blog posts I  talked about how I found it difficult to distinguish an app idea from a business idea, but I guess this made me realize that they could be one and the same. One of the points made in a blog post I read was that as computer science students, we could r...