Friday, October 1, 2010
Proposals
This day was our last chance in presenting our project proposals in Technopreneurship, Randy said to us. So, everyone was eager to have a feasible project proposal because, if we failed to do so means we will have a grade of 5.0. Everyone of us was so tensed. By the time Irwin presented our proposal, I doubted that it won't pass Randy's judgment, but to my surprise it passed and we are very happy that we will not receive a failing grade in techno because our proposal were accepted. hooraay!
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Business Proposal Presentation 2
Randy merged us with the Evening students. This was for the continuation of the unfinished business plan proposal last meeting. This time, we took turns, if the evening class' turn to propose, we the day class' task was to criticize for their proposals and vice versa.
In the end, a lot of us was unable to pass our proposal for Randy turned us down, he gave us a thumb down, meaning he did not liked the proposals. Better luck next time folks!
In the end, a lot of us was unable to pass our proposal for Randy turned us down, he gave us a thumb down, meaning he did not liked the proposals. Better luck next time folks!
Friday, September 24, 2010
Business Proposal Presentation 1
We formed a group of 5 persons, and we need to have a business proposal basing on our interests and irritants. After discussing, we came up with the idea of having a business of t-shirt printing and customizing. Irwin was the one to present our business proposal, but in the end, Randy gave us a thumb down, in other words, our business proposal was not acceptable enough. So, we need to think again of other business proposal, we need also to make it as unique as possible. Good luck to us!
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
IT Elective - Assignment 5
Given the chance to have your own techno business, discuss it's nature and target clients (3000 words).
Last meeting in our technopreneurship subject, we are tasked to present in the class regarding our business plan which is by group. We presented a business plan based upon our love, hate and irritants. Our business plan was all about operating an all-around shirt printing and customizing stuffs, although this kind of business was not new at all. As we discussed our business plan we came up with the idea to make the students, government institutions and the likes as our target clients. For the reason that students will always like the idea of having their shirts customized with their own designs.
We all know that our business plan was not that unique at all, but we tried to be different from the other existing ones.
But now, our facilitator gave us another situation, to have our own techno business and also to discuss our target clients and nature of business.
Given the chance to have my own techno business I would like to focus my techno business on mobile applications. Since almost everyone around the globe has their own mobile phone. My techno business centers on mobile security, due to the fact that this precious gadget is so easy to get stolen by anyone with the intention to steal along with your private data, contacts and your sensitive information e.g. bank pins/accounts. Most of the people with the experienced of having their mobile phones stolen always wanted to retrieve their data and as much as possible their hard earned mobile phones in which had became a part of their lives. Although it is very difficult to retrieve a stolen mobile phone, most of the people resort to the decision to permanently block their stolen mobile phones. But I believe that blocking a stolen mobile phone is not effective because there are many softwares that have the power to unblock a blocked mobile phone. All you have to do is google it or you can turn to some mobile phone technicians. Thus turning the idea to block a stolen mobile phones useless. In today’s technological advancement, virtually, there is nothing a man can’t do. The possibilities are endless. The core of my techno business is security. The following list will be the features of the mobile application that I will develop:
a. encrypts valuable and sensitive data (e.g. bank pins/accounts)
b. retrieves the encrypted data from the mobile phone
c. the mobile application will be hidden from the running task and processes and cannot be uninstalled without providing the security key.
d. capable of pinpointing the culprit using GPS.
I intend to integrate my mobile phone application into different mobile phone platforms. We all know that there is a vast platforms in mobile phones nowadays. The very common is Nokia’s proprietary platform the S40, this platform is the very common among Nokia mobile phones, I refer them as “dumbphones” because S40 does not support true multi-tasking and doesn’t have a native code API for third parties, its user interface may appear to be more responsive and faster than other Nokia platforms. This S40 platform is based on Java, in lieu with this; it can only accept mobile applications written in Java ME, with a file extension of .jar. S40 platform has its direct competitor, another proprietary platform made by Sony Ericsson, it can multitask applications which is a lack in Nokia’s S40 platform. Sony Ericsson’s proprietary platform also utilizes java applications. Nokia’s S60 on the other hand has the ability to multitask many applications. And its operating system is symbian, or much likely known as “smartphones”. The S60 Platform is a software platform for mobile phones that runs on Symbian OS. S60 is currently amongst the most-used smartphone platforms in the world. Nokia made the platform open source and contributed it to the Symbian Foundation. S60 is much complex than the S40 platform, able to handle .jar applications as well as its native applications with the .sis/sisx file extensions. Also, S60 looks like and feels like a mini computer, it needs a lot of processor power and memory or RAM in order of it to function well. This platform had gone through many iterations, from the oldest S60 1st edition, and now the latest iteration the symbian^3. There are a lot of mobile phone platform that is readily available to choose from.
Since there are a lot of platforms for mobile phones, In my business, I will cover all mobile platforms for greater support and integration. Covering all mobile platforms means that I will have a broad selection of clients, from ordinary people to more complex ones. I will also have to advertise my product and services by all means necessary.
It is also important to have a target market for the business. Targeting your market is simply defining who your primary customer will be. The market should be measurable, sufficiently large and reachable. Once your target market is defined through your knowledge of product appeals and market analysis, and can be measured, you should determine whether that target market is large enough to sustain your business on an ongoing basis. In addition, your target market needs to be reachable. There must be ways of talking to your target clients. A market is simply any group of actual or potential buyers of a product. There are three major types of markets. First is the consumer market: Individuals and households who buy goods for their own use or benefit are part of the consumer market. Drug and grocery items are the most common types of consumer products. Second is the industrial market. Individuals, groups or organizations that purchase your product or service for direct use in producing other products or for use in their day-to-day operations. And lastly the reseller market. Middlemen or intermediaries, such as wholesalers and retailers, who buy finished goods and resell them for a profit. Identifying your spot on the limelight is an edge for you. You’ll have the idea to where and whom and what sector you aim to. In this business, it is very important to have a link between the developers and the end users, so it is necessary to put up a dedicated webpage for the product. The webpage will contain essential information about the product as well as technical support and the BUY section. In order to market your product or service, it is imperative that you tailor your marketing and sales efforts to specifically reach the segment of population that will most likely buy your product or service. It is critical that you first determine or clearly identify your primary market. Your energies and funds then can be spent more efficiently.
The first step in identifying your target client is understanding what your products/services have to offer to a group of people or businesses. To do this, identify your product or service's features and benefits. A feature is a characteristic of a product/service that automatically comes with it. For example, if your product has encryption capabilities, that's a feature. The benefit to the customer, however, is security. While features are valuable and can certainly enhance your product, benefits motivate people to buy. Another example is anti-lock brakes; they are features on a car, but the benefit to the consumer is safety. By knowing what your product/service has to offer and what will make customers buy, you can begin to identify common characteristics of your potential market and clients. For example, there are many different clients who desire safety as a benefit when purchasing a car. Rather than targeting everyone in their promotional strategy, a car manufacturer may opt to target a specific group of consumers with similar characteristics, such as families with young children. This is an example of market segmentation. It is a natural instinct to want to target as many people and groups as possible. However, by doing this your promotional strategy will never talk specifically to any one group, and you will most likely turn many potential customers off. Your promotional budget will be much more cost effective if you promote to one type of customer and speak directly to them. This allows you to create a highly focused campaign that will directly meet the needs and desires of a specific group. Again, this is called market segmentation.
Market segmentation is the process of breaking down a larger target market into smaller segments with specific characteristics. Each group requires different promotional strategies and marketing mixes because each group has different wants and needs. Segmentation will help you customize a product/service or other parts of a marketing mix, such as advertising, to reach and meet the specific needs of a narrowly defined customer group.
After identifying and defining the possible segments within your target market, you must face the critical question of whether it would be profitable and feasible for you to pursue each identified segment, or choose one or two. To make this decision, you must answer the following questions:
What is the financial condition of my firm? If you have limited resources at this time, you may want to direct your marketing efforts to only one segment. A concentrated advertising campaign to reach one market segment is likely to be more effective than a diffuse campaign attempting to reach two.
What segments are my competitors covering? Are they ignoring smaller segments that I can possibly exploit? Is the market new to your firm? If so, it may be better for you to concentrate on one segment for now, and expand to others when your initial segment has been successfully penetrated. Developing new markets takes a greater commitment of time, money and energy.
Things to consider: If you pursue one segment of your target market and the demand for your product decreases, so will your financial strength. In essence, you are putting all your eggs in one basket. When your firm becomes well established in a particular market segment, it may be difficult for you to move to another segment. This may occur due to your market reputation or popularity.
After you have mastered one particular segment, you can then begin to develop another. Directing your firm's marketing efforts at more than one market segment by developing a marketing mix for each specific segment is known as multi-segment strategy. An example of a product that was traditionally targeted at women and is now being targeted with variations in strategy at men is hair coloring. The marketing mixes for multi-segment strategy may vary by product feature, price, promotional material and distribution methods. If product variations requires additional work, you may incur higher production costs. Additionally, different promotional plans and distribution efforts will result in higher marketing costs. Plan carefully, to make sure the costs don't outweigh the benefits. Now Think About All The Characteristics You Have Identified And Start Formulating The Promotional Campaign That Will Best Address This Specific Target Market. Start To Formulate A Picture Or Description Of Your Ideal Client. Make Sure Everything You Do, From Design, Price To Marketing, Addresses Your Market.
Having a software business that is centered on writing mobile applications nowadays is profitable, due to the fact that most of us have their own mobile phones disregarding their platform types. It is still important to secure every software from software crackers and you should provide a constant update to your products so that your clients will be satisfied. In a nutshell, my techno business focuses on software on mobile phones, this includes application, utilities and most of all security.
Considering the type of business that I will be handling, it will be of great help if I will try my luck and push it into a partnership business. A partnership is an arrangement where entities and/or individuals agree to cooperate to advance their interests. In the most frequent instance, a partnership is formed between one or more businesses in which partners (owners) co-labor to achieve and share profits or losses. Also Partnerships have widely varying results and can present partners with special challenges. Levels of give-and-take, areas of responsibility, lines of authority, and overarching goals of the partnership must all be negotiated. In addition, being in a partnership will boost my techno business, but keep in mind to work with your partner harmoniously to avoid conflicts and the likes.
As a whole, my techno business’ nature is software developing in mobile phones. And its type of business venture is partnership. Also, my target client ranges from ordinary mobile phone user up to the power user ones.
Last meeting in our technopreneurship subject, we are tasked to present in the class regarding our business plan which is by group. We presented a business plan based upon our love, hate and irritants. Our business plan was all about operating an all-around shirt printing and customizing stuffs, although this kind of business was not new at all. As we discussed our business plan we came up with the idea to make the students, government institutions and the likes as our target clients. For the reason that students will always like the idea of having their shirts customized with their own designs.
We all know that our business plan was not that unique at all, but we tried to be different from the other existing ones.
But now, our facilitator gave us another situation, to have our own techno business and also to discuss our target clients and nature of business.
Given the chance to have my own techno business I would like to focus my techno business on mobile applications. Since almost everyone around the globe has their own mobile phone. My techno business centers on mobile security, due to the fact that this precious gadget is so easy to get stolen by anyone with the intention to steal along with your private data, contacts and your sensitive information e.g. bank pins/accounts. Most of the people with the experienced of having their mobile phones stolen always wanted to retrieve their data and as much as possible their hard earned mobile phones in which had became a part of their lives. Although it is very difficult to retrieve a stolen mobile phone, most of the people resort to the decision to permanently block their stolen mobile phones. But I believe that blocking a stolen mobile phone is not effective because there are many softwares that have the power to unblock a blocked mobile phone. All you have to do is google it or you can turn to some mobile phone technicians. Thus turning the idea to block a stolen mobile phones useless. In today’s technological advancement, virtually, there is nothing a man can’t do. The possibilities are endless. The core of my techno business is security. The following list will be the features of the mobile application that I will develop:
a. encrypts valuable and sensitive data (e.g. bank pins/accounts)
b. retrieves the encrypted data from the mobile phone
c. the mobile application will be hidden from the running task and processes and cannot be uninstalled without providing the security key.
d. capable of pinpointing the culprit using GPS.
I intend to integrate my mobile phone application into different mobile phone platforms. We all know that there is a vast platforms in mobile phones nowadays. The very common is Nokia’s proprietary platform the S40, this platform is the very common among Nokia mobile phones, I refer them as “dumbphones” because S40 does not support true multi-tasking and doesn’t have a native code API for third parties, its user interface may appear to be more responsive and faster than other Nokia platforms. This S40 platform is based on Java, in lieu with this; it can only accept mobile applications written in Java ME, with a file extension of .jar. S40 platform has its direct competitor, another proprietary platform made by Sony Ericsson, it can multitask applications which is a lack in Nokia’s S40 platform. Sony Ericsson’s proprietary platform also utilizes java applications. Nokia’s S60 on the other hand has the ability to multitask many applications. And its operating system is symbian, or much likely known as “smartphones”. The S60 Platform is a software platform for mobile phones that runs on Symbian OS. S60 is currently amongst the most-used smartphone platforms in the world. Nokia made the platform open source and contributed it to the Symbian Foundation. S60 is much complex than the S40 platform, able to handle .jar applications as well as its native applications with the .sis/sisx file extensions. Also, S60 looks like and feels like a mini computer, it needs a lot of processor power and memory or RAM in order of it to function well. This platform had gone through many iterations, from the oldest S60 1st edition, and now the latest iteration the symbian^3. There are a lot of mobile phone platform that is readily available to choose from.
Since there are a lot of platforms for mobile phones, In my business, I will cover all mobile platforms for greater support and integration. Covering all mobile platforms means that I will have a broad selection of clients, from ordinary people to more complex ones. I will also have to advertise my product and services by all means necessary.
It is also important to have a target market for the business. Targeting your market is simply defining who your primary customer will be. The market should be measurable, sufficiently large and reachable. Once your target market is defined through your knowledge of product appeals and market analysis, and can be measured, you should determine whether that target market is large enough to sustain your business on an ongoing basis. In addition, your target market needs to be reachable. There must be ways of talking to your target clients. A market is simply any group of actual or potential buyers of a product. There are three major types of markets. First is the consumer market: Individuals and households who buy goods for their own use or benefit are part of the consumer market. Drug and grocery items are the most common types of consumer products. Second is the industrial market. Individuals, groups or organizations that purchase your product or service for direct use in producing other products or for use in their day-to-day operations. And lastly the reseller market. Middlemen or intermediaries, such as wholesalers and retailers, who buy finished goods and resell them for a profit. Identifying your spot on the limelight is an edge for you. You’ll have the idea to where and whom and what sector you aim to. In this business, it is very important to have a link between the developers and the end users, so it is necessary to put up a dedicated webpage for the product. The webpage will contain essential information about the product as well as technical support and the BUY section. In order to market your product or service, it is imperative that you tailor your marketing and sales efforts to specifically reach the segment of population that will most likely buy your product or service. It is critical that you first determine or clearly identify your primary market. Your energies and funds then can be spent more efficiently.
The first step in identifying your target client is understanding what your products/services have to offer to a group of people or businesses. To do this, identify your product or service's features and benefits. A feature is a characteristic of a product/service that automatically comes with it. For example, if your product has encryption capabilities, that's a feature. The benefit to the customer, however, is security. While features are valuable and can certainly enhance your product, benefits motivate people to buy. Another example is anti-lock brakes; they are features on a car, but the benefit to the consumer is safety. By knowing what your product/service has to offer and what will make customers buy, you can begin to identify common characteristics of your potential market and clients. For example, there are many different clients who desire safety as a benefit when purchasing a car. Rather than targeting everyone in their promotional strategy, a car manufacturer may opt to target a specific group of consumers with similar characteristics, such as families with young children. This is an example of market segmentation. It is a natural instinct to want to target as many people and groups as possible. However, by doing this your promotional strategy will never talk specifically to any one group, and you will most likely turn many potential customers off. Your promotional budget will be much more cost effective if you promote to one type of customer and speak directly to them. This allows you to create a highly focused campaign that will directly meet the needs and desires of a specific group. Again, this is called market segmentation.
Market segmentation is the process of breaking down a larger target market into smaller segments with specific characteristics. Each group requires different promotional strategies and marketing mixes because each group has different wants and needs. Segmentation will help you customize a product/service or other parts of a marketing mix, such as advertising, to reach and meet the specific needs of a narrowly defined customer group.
After identifying and defining the possible segments within your target market, you must face the critical question of whether it would be profitable and feasible for you to pursue each identified segment, or choose one or two. To make this decision, you must answer the following questions:
What is the financial condition of my firm? If you have limited resources at this time, you may want to direct your marketing efforts to only one segment. A concentrated advertising campaign to reach one market segment is likely to be more effective than a diffuse campaign attempting to reach two.
What segments are my competitors covering? Are they ignoring smaller segments that I can possibly exploit? Is the market new to your firm? If so, it may be better for you to concentrate on one segment for now, and expand to others when your initial segment has been successfully penetrated. Developing new markets takes a greater commitment of time, money and energy.
Things to consider: If you pursue one segment of your target market and the demand for your product decreases, so will your financial strength. In essence, you are putting all your eggs in one basket. When your firm becomes well established in a particular market segment, it may be difficult for you to move to another segment. This may occur due to your market reputation or popularity.
After you have mastered one particular segment, you can then begin to develop another. Directing your firm's marketing efforts at more than one market segment by developing a marketing mix for each specific segment is known as multi-segment strategy. An example of a product that was traditionally targeted at women and is now being targeted with variations in strategy at men is hair coloring. The marketing mixes for multi-segment strategy may vary by product feature, price, promotional material and distribution methods. If product variations requires additional work, you may incur higher production costs. Additionally, different promotional plans and distribution efforts will result in higher marketing costs. Plan carefully, to make sure the costs don't outweigh the benefits. Now Think About All The Characteristics You Have Identified And Start Formulating The Promotional Campaign That Will Best Address This Specific Target Market. Start To Formulate A Picture Or Description Of Your Ideal Client. Make Sure Everything You Do, From Design, Price To Marketing, Addresses Your Market.
Having a software business that is centered on writing mobile applications nowadays is profitable, due to the fact that most of us have their own mobile phones disregarding their platform types. It is still important to secure every software from software crackers and you should provide a constant update to your products so that your clients will be satisfied. In a nutshell, my techno business focuses on software on mobile phones, this includes application, utilities and most of all security.
Considering the type of business that I will be handling, it will be of great help if I will try my luck and push it into a partnership business. A partnership is an arrangement where entities and/or individuals agree to cooperate to advance their interests. In the most frequent instance, a partnership is formed between one or more businesses in which partners (owners) co-labor to achieve and share profits or losses. Also Partnerships have widely varying results and can present partners with special challenges. Levels of give-and-take, areas of responsibility, lines of authority, and overarching goals of the partnership must all be negotiated. In addition, being in a partnership will boost my techno business, but keep in mind to work with your partner harmoniously to avoid conflicts and the likes.
As a whole, my techno business’ nature is software developing in mobile phones. And its type of business venture is partnership. Also, my target client ranges from ordinary mobile phone user up to the power user ones.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
IT Elective - Assignment 4
What are the lessons that you learned after reading the commencement address of Steve Jobs? (at least 1000words)
Living a perfect life is impossible for life is unfair. There are things we need to experience inorder for us to grow and develop as wells as lessons to learn no matter how hard it is for us to overcome. As we go on with our lives, we always happen to learn life’s essential lessons the hard way around.
As I carefully read through Steven Jobs’ commencement address at Stanford way back 2005, I managed to learn some essential and relevant lessons that are of great help to us. First lesson I have learned with his speech was in connecting the dots. He was perfectly right that you cannot connect the dots by looking forward; you can only connect it by looking backwards. There are things we tend to overlook as we go over our lives. Things that we thought are of little or no relevance at all. But, as time goes by, we were caught off guard by the things we previously thought that those things was irrelevant to us. For example, Steven Jobs can’t see the value of going to college so he dropped out. But as time progresses, he stumbled on the calligraphed texts and noticed that it was beautiful. Moving on, Steve Jobs decided to enroll at a calligraphy class at Reed College. As time passed, he managed and learned on how to beautifully write texts. He found out that even science can’t capture its art. If he did not dropped out at college, there was a big possibility that he can’t come across at the beautifully typed texts and the likes. And the Mac would not have its beautiful typefaces. This was the way the dots connect at Steve Jobs life. Clearly, we cannot connect the dots in our life just by relying on the present scenario, we just have to trust and hope that somehow, someday our dots will connect.
Next was perseverance pays a lot. We knew that Steve Jobs didn’t finish college, but look at him now, he is earning a lot. Steve Jobs persevere together with Woz and they begin to build there masterpiece way back years ago. I also learned that some people took a long time just to know their interest in life. Good for Steven Jobs because he managed to know his interest at an early stage. Even though some of us had a lot of time wasted in search of our interest, still when that time comes, the fruits of our labor will turn out just fine. We need to have faith and do our part.
I also learned that being on the top requires a lot of painstaking maneuver and respect. And one should be careful whom to trust. Steven Jobs got fired from his own company during his 30’s by the people he entrusted with. Imagine, just by merely trusting someone or somebody could instantly make or break an individual, and Steven Jobs is no exception to the rule. We should be careful enough and meticulously examine every detail of the situation even if it requires us our precious time, in turn, it could be beneficial to us.
As days goes by, Steven Jobs managed to pick himself up from the failures of his life, from being ousted from his very own company, the Apple Computer Inc., Steve Jobs drew attention due to this situation. He returned back to being a beginner. Imagine, from the top he plunged down to the very bottom. This proves that what goes up must come down but the law of gravity didn’t states on how painful it is to fall from the top. But the unfortunate event in Steven Jobs’ life turned out just fine, thus it paved the way for Steven Jobs to be more creative and innovative and then he managed to build another computer company in which he called NEXT. The failure of Steven Jobs just turned out to be a blessing in disguise for him. How I wish life were just as the same as Jobs’. Life seemed just unraveled its beauty onto his side.
You’ve got to love what you are doing, Steven Jobs said. It is very true and it implies to each and every one of us. We have to love what we are doing in order for us to produce top quality outputs in life. Just by loving what we are doing, we can assure ourselves that we give our best to everything we have done. And of course, we can guarantee to them that it is the best of our doing. You can also feel satisfaction just by loving what you are doing with your life. And if by chance you still did not found the things you love to do, use your heart, feel everything that is of importance to you and is related to you. And if you managed to use your heart, I’m sure you will find what you are looking for. Just don’t settle, always keep looking. Just like in every relationship, it gets better and better as time goes by. Keep looking, keep moving.
If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right Steve Jobs said. If you apply that lesson to your everyday life, you can guarantee yourself that you have done something right, something very useful, something that has relevance and something that you love. I also learned to live your life to the fullest without regrets, and without doubts. I also learned that money should not be the priority of every one; it should be our family, our loved ones. Money can’t buy happiness; money can’t buy you an extra life. Yet, money should be set aside, you should take care first of your family, because whatever happens to you, your family will always be by your side, constantly and undyingly supporting you with everything they can. Being with you family gives you energy to continue living and striving.
And lastly, we should not be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of others thinking. Our time is limited, so in turn; we should do our best to leave a mark onto this world, something worth dying for.
Living a perfect life is impossible for life is unfair. There are things we need to experience inorder for us to grow and develop as wells as lessons to learn no matter how hard it is for us to overcome. As we go on with our lives, we always happen to learn life’s essential lessons the hard way around.
As I carefully read through Steven Jobs’ commencement address at Stanford way back 2005, I managed to learn some essential and relevant lessons that are of great help to us. First lesson I have learned with his speech was in connecting the dots. He was perfectly right that you cannot connect the dots by looking forward; you can only connect it by looking backwards. There are things we tend to overlook as we go over our lives. Things that we thought are of little or no relevance at all. But, as time goes by, we were caught off guard by the things we previously thought that those things was irrelevant to us. For example, Steven Jobs can’t see the value of going to college so he dropped out. But as time progresses, he stumbled on the calligraphed texts and noticed that it was beautiful. Moving on, Steve Jobs decided to enroll at a calligraphy class at Reed College. As time passed, he managed and learned on how to beautifully write texts. He found out that even science can’t capture its art. If he did not dropped out at college, there was a big possibility that he can’t come across at the beautifully typed texts and the likes. And the Mac would not have its beautiful typefaces. This was the way the dots connect at Steve Jobs life. Clearly, we cannot connect the dots in our life just by relying on the present scenario, we just have to trust and hope that somehow, someday our dots will connect.
Next was perseverance pays a lot. We knew that Steve Jobs didn’t finish college, but look at him now, he is earning a lot. Steve Jobs persevere together with Woz and they begin to build there masterpiece way back years ago. I also learned that some people took a long time just to know their interest in life. Good for Steven Jobs because he managed to know his interest at an early stage. Even though some of us had a lot of time wasted in search of our interest, still when that time comes, the fruits of our labor will turn out just fine. We need to have faith and do our part.
I also learned that being on the top requires a lot of painstaking maneuver and respect. And one should be careful whom to trust. Steven Jobs got fired from his own company during his 30’s by the people he entrusted with. Imagine, just by merely trusting someone or somebody could instantly make or break an individual, and Steven Jobs is no exception to the rule. We should be careful enough and meticulously examine every detail of the situation even if it requires us our precious time, in turn, it could be beneficial to us.
As days goes by, Steven Jobs managed to pick himself up from the failures of his life, from being ousted from his very own company, the Apple Computer Inc., Steve Jobs drew attention due to this situation. He returned back to being a beginner. Imagine, from the top he plunged down to the very bottom. This proves that what goes up must come down but the law of gravity didn’t states on how painful it is to fall from the top. But the unfortunate event in Steven Jobs’ life turned out just fine, thus it paved the way for Steven Jobs to be more creative and innovative and then he managed to build another computer company in which he called NEXT. The failure of Steven Jobs just turned out to be a blessing in disguise for him. How I wish life were just as the same as Jobs’. Life seemed just unraveled its beauty onto his side.
You’ve got to love what you are doing, Steven Jobs said. It is very true and it implies to each and every one of us. We have to love what we are doing in order for us to produce top quality outputs in life. Just by loving what we are doing, we can assure ourselves that we give our best to everything we have done. And of course, we can guarantee to them that it is the best of our doing. You can also feel satisfaction just by loving what you are doing with your life. And if by chance you still did not found the things you love to do, use your heart, feel everything that is of importance to you and is related to you. And if you managed to use your heart, I’m sure you will find what you are looking for. Just don’t settle, always keep looking. Just like in every relationship, it gets better and better as time goes by. Keep looking, keep moving.
If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right Steve Jobs said. If you apply that lesson to your everyday life, you can guarantee yourself that you have done something right, something very useful, something that has relevance and something that you love. I also learned to live your life to the fullest without regrets, and without doubts. I also learned that money should not be the priority of every one; it should be our family, our loved ones. Money can’t buy happiness; money can’t buy you an extra life. Yet, money should be set aside, you should take care first of your family, because whatever happens to you, your family will always be by your side, constantly and undyingly supporting you with everything they can. Being with you family gives you energy to continue living and striving.
And lastly, we should not be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of others thinking. Our time is limited, so in turn; we should do our best to leave a mark onto this world, something worth dying for.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
IT Elective - Assignment 3
my purpose in life is ......
To live my life to the fullest.
To enjoy my borrowed time without regrets.
To know myself better and deeper.
and lastly, to find the answer to my question: "why am i here in this world, would it be better if im not here?"
To live my life to the fullest.
To enjoy my borrowed time without regrets.
To know myself better and deeper.
and lastly, to find the answer to my question: "why am i here in this world, would it be better if im not here?"
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Transcript of Commencement Speech at Stanford given by Steve Jobs
Thank you. I’m honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation.
Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife, except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, “We’ve got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?” They said, “Of course.” My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.
This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naïvely chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.
It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example.
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.
If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personals computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.
Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later. Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever—because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.
My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky. I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We’d just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I’d just turned thirty, and then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so, things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our board of directors sided with him, and so at thirty, I was out, and very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me. I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I’d been rejected but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods in my life. During the next five years I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer-animated feature film, “Toy Story,” and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.
In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance, and Lorene and I have a wonderful family together.
I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life’s going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don’t settle.
My third story is about death. When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “no” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important thing I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctors’ code for “prepare to die.” It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope, the doctor started crying, because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and, thankfully, I am fine now.
This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept. No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don’t want to die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it’s quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late Sixties, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. it was sort of like Google in paperback form thirty-five years before Google came along. I was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stuart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath were the words, “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” And I have always wished that for myself, and now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay hungry, stay foolish.
Thank you all, very much.
Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife, except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, “We’ve got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?” They said, “Of course.” My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.
This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naïvely chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.
It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example.
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.
If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personals computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.
Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later. Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever—because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.
My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky. I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We’d just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I’d just turned thirty, and then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so, things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our board of directors sided with him, and so at thirty, I was out, and very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me. I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I’d been rejected but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods in my life. During the next five years I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer-animated feature film, “Toy Story,” and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.
In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance, and Lorene and I have a wonderful family together.
I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life’s going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don’t settle.
My third story is about death. When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “no” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important thing I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctors’ code for “prepare to die.” It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope, the doctor started crying, because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and, thankfully, I am fine now.
This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept. No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don’t want to die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it’s quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late Sixties, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. it was sort of like Google in paperback form thirty-five years before Google came along. I was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stuart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath were the words, “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” And I have always wished that for myself, and now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay hungry, stay foolish.
Thank you all, very much.
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