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One Panel at the South Sound Technology Conference

I just went to the conference today and I can say it was enlightening in many more ways than one. The first one doesn’t really have much to do with business but I can say it was the most important. For some reason, I’ve been viewing the University as more like a high school than as the academic powerhouse that it truly is. What I mean by that is when I found out that the conference was happening at the school I was a little disappointed. In my head it went from this collection and forum of the top technological minds in the South Sound to a bunch of half-educated students and their very proud parents. When I got there (late) I was pleasantly surprised to see student led projects that are well deserving of recognition on any scale, educational or not. Because of the nature of the end of a quarter at a college, I wasn’t able to stay very long due to all of the finals I have to study for and all of the projects I need to finish but I was able to sit through one panel at least. That pa
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Startup.com and its Struggles

Unfortunately, I was sick during the class day that we watched this. And the class before. And the class after. I felt as if I was ready to go to class but I was far too dizzy to let myself get behind the wheel of a car. Now, fortunately, one of the many Davids in the class sent me the URL to watch the video at home. The first thing I noticed was the title on YouTube. Now I’m not sure this was the correct video but I thought “Full Documentary From Docshit.com” was very fitting for this class. As I’ve said before, in this class we are treated like adults and I’m very thankful for that. Even though I would have been 7 years old at the time of this documentary, watching this I felt as if I could have been watching something from 50 years ago. Until this class, I didn’t know that tech companies spiked as drastically as they did. I thought the only bubble that’s happened in my lifetime was the housing bubble. During this documentary I watched a company with maybe not the greatest idea i
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Shadrach White Visit

Shadrach White was an interesting man. Just like all of the other guest speakers, he was very intelligent, well spoken, and understood everything he talked about. That being said, something felt very different about this guest speaker. It could have been, as Andrew Fry said, he is the picturesque image of a CEO. Or it could have been because it was more relaxed and less guided. Truth be told, I was a little bit confused at the beginning of the class since I assumed the three gentleman giving the short presentation about internships for their company were the guest speakers. I saw the man who was sitting down and just assumed that he was part of their group and was just watching or something along those lines. Shadrach White mostly talked about his experience starting his companies and then opened the floor for discussion. That could have been what was slightly weird. I think the majority of the time he was there it was just questions and answers. Although I think I may have learned
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John Dimmer Visit

John Dimmer amazed me with the amount of information he has in his mind and is able to present at a moments notice. I’ve met people who are abnormally well knowledged in one topic but that topic is normally something in the sciences. For example, the surgeons I’ve had operate on me are often very talkative and when prompted to discuss the topic they’re an expert in will talk for 20 minutes about every complicated detail. I can say, with at least how it seemed, that he differs from the surgeons in the way he delivers the information. The surgeons (much like me, I admit) will spew all that enters their head while ignoring the social cues that would encourage most to pull back the reins or maybe even allow the semi-willing participant to get some words in. John Dimmer was not this way. He would answer questions or explain topics with the correct amount of well-educated information. I’m not sure how he does it considering that as much as I try, I often weird people out or completely an
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Intellectual Property and YOU!

As I’m consistently told by those smarter than I, code is very hard to copyright or patent to any meaningful extent. They say that if you copyright it you are pretty much only protecting what’s written verbatim. Also, to patent anything you can only patent that specific algorithm, not what you’re attempting to accomplish with the algorithm. To put it into terms of recipe writing (which also has its own set of intellectual property struggles), if I write a recipe for a unique cake that says to bake for 35 minutes at 400 degrees fahrenheit, someone could copy it almost completely except for saying that it goes in the oven for 30 minutes at 425 and they for the most part have covered their asses. I understand that a lot of different people write similar algorithms for drastically different purposes and people make cake recipes for drastically different cookbooks so obviously their needs to be some leeway when it comes to how strictly these patents should be enforced but I think my compla
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Dot.com to Dot.Bomb

Unfortunately, I don't think I could come up with a more creative title than the one we were already given. All in all, this was very entertaining. If you actually read this Andrew, I want you to know that while you were giving the presentation, I took a picture and sent it to my girlfriend who thought it was the most creative and endearing thing she’s seen a college level instructor do. As a matter of fact, I wrote in my instructor review that I’m really thankful that Andrew Fry actually treated us like adults and this class was no exception. He was able to find an entertaining, yet on topic medium to show and explain an otherwise potentially dry topic. This is the type of thing that spreads the reputation of both a class everybody wants to take as well as an instructor everybody wants to take classes from. Excluding the case of AOL, which I think at this point in time is barely creeping along, I think the use of dinosaurs to explain them was very fitting. As was described
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How I Plan to Price My Service

I’m going to price what I deliver by groups or “packages”. What I’m thinking is that as more equipment is added to the fray that the cost to produce will, for the most part, grow linearly. I understand that there will be a whole lot more intricacies to the cost to develop and produce this product than I’m imagining but for the purposes of this blog post I think I shall proceed with some semblance that I know what I’m talking about. The packages will all cover the base fee of the main processing unit (whatever that may be), bulk wire (which will always be a flat rate since it’s relatively cheap), and the cost to physically send guys out there. The variable pricing comes with the added cost of man hours, the amount of devices to be individually powered, and any other add-ons that we deliver such as full home audio, solar power and battery, and automatic blinds. Before anything is started we will need to send people out to the home to see if the job is even possible. This will be free
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