Blockbuster was one of the nations premiere video rental retail stores until recently. With the advent of the internet and online shopping, customers are more willing to use their credit card online to consume “all you can eat” entertainment rentals. Blockbuster’s CEO James Keyes has said that Netflix is taking “demand out of the market” [...]
Previous Market Segments
Previous to 2004, RIM’s devices were slanted towards corporate and business users starting with it’s Inter@ctive Pager 900 (Ziegler, 5). It’s mobile phone product lines didn’t become popularized until email became a mission critical application. RIM saw the potential in email and grew it’s business along with the popularization of the then nascent technology.
New Market [...]
CSMi has a wide portfolio of healthcare products. One product is an electronic health records system (EHR) that tracks injuries, treatments, and all related information called SportsWare. They sell to a variety of market segments of which are listed below.
Primary Segments
Schools – The SportsWare product is sold primarily to high schools and colleges/universities although any [...]
Syntex is a discount high definition LCD maker that generates revenues by undercutting their name brand competitors. Their low prices and feature sets that are comparable to their competition are their unique selling points (USP). Every company has a marketing plan whether it’s formal or not. Let’s analyze Olevia’s use of the four P’s: Price, [...]
Environmental concerns may be on everyone’s mind, but until the cold hard facts of a cost/benefit analysis weight high on American’s minds, going green is the way to go. General Motors has put a lot of capital behind building cleaner E85 (also known as Flex Fuel) cars. They promote the cars as being cleaner for [...]
Financial ratio analysis aimed at determining a business’s financial strength and condition. The Current and Quick Ratios are commonly used to evaluate a company’s ability to pay it’s short term obligations.
While RIM’s current and quick ratios seem low on first glance, it’s important to consider the business as a going concern. RIM had a higher than the current year’s industry average in 2007 because it’s current liabilities grew from almost half the current industry average to 3.35 times the industry average current liabilities. This increase can be explained by the release of the BlackBerry Storm, which was released November 4th, 2008.
Let’s take a look at how to value an organization. We’ll take the following company as an example:
Wide-Comm Wireless provides wireless broadband service using Wi-Max, a largely unproven technology, on a wide scale. As expected the company lost money it’s first few years as it built it’s infrastructure. It does not expect to reach profitability [...]
So you’ve thought of a great idea for a product or service and are ready to start actually implementing your strategy, but you soon realize you need funding to fully realize your goals. This is a point every business owner finds themselves in at one point or another. When someone is looking to fund there business, they [...]
In Lesson two on revenue forecasting, I introduced the notion of Type 1 and Type 2 errors. What would you expect would be the implications for Fred’s business if he expected the volume of repair work to be $400,000 the first year and it was only half that? On the other hand, what are [...]
Forecasting revenues is a tricky business. Two common errors (called Type 1 and Type 2 errors) made are forecasting too many sales and operating at a negative cash flow until your fume date, or underestimating sales and not having enough capacity to meet demand.
The best way to negate these errors is to come up with [...]
Work breakdown structures are extremely useful way to simplify complex tasks that need to be accomplished in a project by their individual components. They can also be combined with scheduling data to generate a Gantt chart (the end result is something similar to the Microsoft Project interface). The United States Department of Energy’s official definition [...]
A scope statement is a document that details a project’s deliverables and describes it’s major objectives (Wikipedia). This document is essentially a high-level overview of what the entire project will encompass (including what it will not cover).
In order to develop a project scope document, certain key pieces of information need to be discovered. These include [...]
The biotech industry is notoriously hard to fund a startup when you have little to no proven successes. Capital is hard to come by when it may take $1B over 15 years before the investors start to see any returns if the product is approved for the intended use. Here we will examine a hypothetic [...]
I recently read a case study for a small and growing business called UndergroundHipHop.com I obtained from Ivey Publishing.
UndergroundHipHop.com is a company started by a college undergrad student in his dorm room. The company started out as a project of passion that lead to a large online community that all had interests in underground hip hop music. [...]
Many things go into knowing your target market which can be summed up if you know the four P’s: product, price, place, and promotion. Every company needs to at least have a very general idea about these categories before going to market or they’ll be sorely unprepared should any unexpected situations occur. This goes for [...]
Ramon Ecung II, BS, ACHDS, MCP - Boston, MA
Welcome to my blog! This is where I share my musings on topics ranging from law to personal motivation to technology.
My passions in life are learning and creative expression. My talent is working with technology. This website is the intersection of those forces.
