Guest Speaker: Erik Hanberg

Having a guest speaker visit a classroom is always a pleasure.  It provides students with several good opportunities; for starters it adds an additional voice to the mix besides just the professor's rambling.  But more importantly it adds additional perspective about the subjects at hand.  Erik Hanberg is an entrepreneur that has had both success and failure with his businesses during his career, not entirely different from our professor, but his path, like the path of almost every entrepreneur, was distinctly different.  Erik and his wife started their "Entrepreneurial Adventure" with a semi-solid foundation built from the salaries they received working for well established companies.  After leaving those companies, their income has streamed from a number of sources; a graphical design company, a theater, a startup, and even selling a number of books Erik wrote.  The variety of sources and variety of work created some new possibilities, as well as some new risks.

Erik detailed for our class, a numberless chart of his income over the last several years, broken down in terms of what source the money came from to help illustrate how his ventures have ramped and faded over time.  This of course, started with his salaried career.  The first thing I noticed was that the salaried career made a very flat, predictable, and fairly large amount of money for him and his wife (at least compared to the income from the other sources).  Once the "entrepreneurial" activities started, the income immediately took a dive and the rate began to jump up and down sporadically.  Some of this jumping was due to vacations, and travel, that in a regular company would have been impossible.  But some of it was simply the instability of business in a recessed economy.  Personally, that kind of unstable income, by choice or not, gives me heartburn, and I’d much rather work my salaried job with 4 weeks of vacation per year, 10 holidays, and an 11 week sabbatical every 7 years.  But everybody is different, and Erik seems quite pleased with how his ventures are fairing.

My key take away from his presentation was that creating your own job can enable you to structure your life in a way more suitable to your taste at the potential cost of stability.  Like all things in life it seems to be a trade off, more dynamic hours with less income predictability vs. more income predictability with less dynamic hours.  Whatever floats your boat… If you do it right, you can get a rock solid income foundation layered with pits and planes, if you do it wrong you can hit a pretty epic iceburg.

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TINST 475 [Insert Witty Blog Title]

       
I've never composed a blog before, and likely never will again.  I generally stick to highly technical writing, so please bear with me if my blog is dry, I'll try not to bore my readers too much.  For this initial entry I have decided to write about two potential business opportunities that have occurred to me in the past.  At this point, I have not done any research on these ideas, and I'm almost certain that someone has beaten me to market.  Nonetheless here are my proposals.

 

 

 

 

First, some background; a friend of mine has a projector in his living room, and very often, he'll host parties at his house.  During the parties, the keyboard/mouse (wireless) will be passed around, or picked up randomly by people who will use youtube to play a music video.  In this manner, everyone gets to listen to songs they like, and there's always an interesting video playing in the background.  The annoying part about using Youtube for this is that Youtube is not designed to be a "Music Player".  Sure it has playlist features, but I'm not aware of any simple means to start playing, and queuing up videos, while searching for others, w/o using multiple tabs.   Thus, my first idea, is a Youtube Music Video Player website, that will use embedded music players in tandem with a search pane.  The website will give users the ability to queue up songs, create playlists, and potentially even search and embed videos from multiple video sources.

Second, for those of you who don't know me, I'm a pretty big Starcraft fan.  As such, I enjoy watching e-sports online, primarily replays and casts of professional Starcraft 2 players.  Just like more common sports some players in e-sports are more interesting to watch than others, and some matches between players can be even more exciting.  However, searching videos for these players can be problematic, because not all casters use a standardized naming scheme for their videos, and a lot of the details about the match aren't necessarily contained in the video title.  My second idea is a front end website created for searching and playing SC2 casts with a database backend that will use a comprehensive schema to track all videos.  In this way, users can search for not just the players, but additional details such as the maps, the casters, the events/tournaments, the winner/loser, the length, the races, etc.  This way a user could conceivably perform a search as complex as "Find videos casted by Husky, on Sakuras Plateau, where Idra loses"

Product Ideas:

1) Web Based Youtube Music Video Player

•   Plays embedded youtube/vevo music videos (possibly other sites as well)
•   Allows searching youtube for other videos while still playing (on same tab)
•   Possible to search multiple video DB's from single search ?
•   Allows user to queue up videos, using links
•   Allows user to create playlists, including normal features like repeat, shuffle, etc.

2) SC2 Replay Website / Game Database

•   Store all casted replays from various casters (Husky, HD, Force, etc...)
•   DB schema uses dozens of attributes, allowing users to search by variety of means
•   Rank/Rating system for Casters & Replays