Week 3: Hardware

This week in class we discussed the physical aspects of a computer. We learned about all of the hardware that is necessary to make a computer system run and what each of these parts functions were. The most important parts of the computer are the motherboard, the CPU, RAM, and the hard drive. The motherboard is the main circuit board of the computer and is what all of the pieces of hardware plugs into. The processor is the brain of the computer and it is what understands and executes data from software programs. To help speed up these software programs and also allow multiple programs to be running simultaneously without any jitter is the memory which is also known as the ram. Lastly, the hard disc drive is where all of the files on a computer are stored and accessed from. We also talked about expansion cards such as graphics cards and audio cards which are used to enhance the computers graphic or sound quality.

Learning about all of this hardware gave me a better understanding of how to build a computer and I can see this being useful if my business had an office. I would now be able to build computers for my workers and know how to save money. Depending on the needs of my employees i would be able to build machines that would support their needs and not end up spending money on useless parts. For example my website design team would probably need fast computers to use their graphic design software. I would make sure that they're computers had fast processors and plenty of RAM to run these applications as smoothly and effectively as possible. For my team that is dealing with accounting and other business things involving applications like word and excel I would be sure not to waste money on having the "best" processor on the line or an insane amount of RAM. I would buy the hardware that is adequate enough to run these simple applications.

Week 2 Excel

This week in class we learned about how excel is a very valuable tool to learn how to use in today's businesses. It extremely simplifies figuring out things like budgeting money for your company instead of doing it all by hand. You can plug in any type of formula that so you can quickly and accurately figure out certain values. After playing around with the program I realize for me there is a lot more to learn about Excel but what I have already taken away from the lecture I can already apply Excel to my own idea. 

Having an online website like mine means that there must be tons of data to analyze. I have learned that the easiest way to effectively manage all of this data is to open it up in excel into what is called a pivot table. Once inside a pivot table i would then be able to easily analyze all of the different subscribers to my website so then i could efficiently budget my money. When budgeting my money I could once again use excel to easily setup formulas to tell me if I am over budgeting or if I have money to spend on growing my website. These are just some of the many ways that I think i could use Excel for my business. I would like to start using Excel more often now because I now see the true power it holds for managing businesses.

The Idea:

This is an idea that I thought about back in high school when me and my friends would trade video games back and forth. We all decided to start doing this because almost every single video game we ever bought would eventually become boring and would turn into a complete waste of money (and video games are expensive to buy a lot of).  So what happened is that we eventually got to a point where we all had bought enough video games that we could constantly trade them back and forth between each other and end up not wasting any money video games. My idea is to take this trading idea to a larger scale. I would create a website that connects everyone in local towns and communities that want to trade video games with each other. I would setup a subscription to this site so I had a source of income to sort out things like the mailing and shipping costs and the maintenance of this website.

This week in class we discussed the power that social media has and I saw the opportunities that it can open up for entrepreneurs like myself. After about a week now of using twitter for the first time I see that it can really get you connected to a lot of people that can help push your ideas and get them on the map over the internet. For my idea i could see my self using twitter to advertise it to my followers, have my followers that like the idea advertise it to their followers, and so on.... Also i saw the usefulness of websites like facebook and now google+ for businesses. You can create pages for your business (not yet on google+ but soon) and send all of your followers to it to get information about your business. Also these social media websites can be used when receiving job applicants to basically run background checks on them. Facebook now a days enables you to see what kind of people your job applicants really are and can help employers make better decisions with the people they hire.

That's all for this week. I hope to and am looking forward to learn more next week so I can further develop my ideas for a potentially great website.