True Innovation (& Bacon Strips & Bacon Strips & Bacon Strips)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6s3rKTvV5c&feature=list_related&playnext=1&list=SP84FBB60DFE42481F

Epic Meal Time has developed a product called bacon salt that will make everything it is applied to taste like bacon. What's so interesting is how they have developed desire for this product. Over a year ago they began to make youtube videos that surrounded obscene amounts of meat, most of all bacon. Once a week they would put out a new video of some creation, made out of mostly if not all meat and have developed enough of a following that they have fans not only buy the shirts they wear but imitate some of the meals they make, keeping this in mind what better way to imitate them then to buy the very same bacon salt Epic Meal Time created.

SAP Distribution Game

In the SAP Distribution Game my team (DD) placed third. This was because we did not know how to properly change the 1L clearpures prices and so while we thought we were increasing the price it was selling constantly at $16.99 and at that price we sold a lot of them. Our strategy was to market everything but the clearpures because those sold on their own and rotate where we marketed each, then change the price accordingly if we were selling a lot of a specific product so that we would make more off of that product. I watched the amounts of product we had and our sales and referred that information to my team along with restocking accordingly. When we were picking jobs I had no preference as to which job I wanted and so when my teammates chose marketing and pricing I took overseeing and because watching our stock of each product was needed for restocking I took that job when it became needed.

While in the game the results were based solely off profit that is not the only factor in business. From a financing standpoint return on equity is most important because the higher your return on equity the more people will want to buy your companies stock and the more funding you will have for future endeavors.

What went well was that we messed up the pricing our second round and forgot how to change it so our 1L clearpures sold at a price that a lot were sold. This is what gave us such high profit. What did not go as well was our sales of almost everything else. Without further analysis of the data it is hard to say exactly why we did so poorly selling the other items. Our prices of the other items were just above cost and even though we were marketing them they did not sell. I can only guess that someone was selling them for a loss.

Two things I learned from the assignment are that just because your making a mistake that does not mean your doing it wrong, as long as once you realize you made the mistake, you understand why it did not cause your downfall, and selling a product requires much more work under a highly competitive market especially when you can not see what the other companies are doing.

Can this Apple get thrown out of the tree?

In the article it says, "the company has strict social media rules to protect its commercial reputation, and forbids the posting of any negative comments on any social media site or social network." Whether or not the post was private that's the rule in plain English that the employee violated. A company has to protect it's image and if so if someone who works for them begins putting them down people may take him for a expert because he works for the company. This would make people believe the negative comments and hurt the company.

Decision making software

I use the weather app on my smart phone to check and see if it's raining before I go outside or what the temperature is.

Plagiarism and technology

http://orange.eserver.org/issues/5-1/kennedy.html : "A 2003 study conducted at 23 college campuses by the Center for Academic Integrity, found that 38 percent of undergraduate students had used the Internet for plagiarizing work in one or more instances in the past year (Rimer)."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57836-2004Sep2.html : "One response to the increase in cheating has been to fight technology with more technology. Plagiarism-checking sites provide a service to screen student papers... Colleges qualify for volume discounts, which encourages professors to submit whole classes' worth of papers -- the academic equivalent of mandatory urine testing for athletes."

Ethics and Geometry

In high school I never had any issues doing math, it was easy for me so I just breezed through my math courses. When I was taking geometry this didn't change however one of the other guys in the class had trouble. He was on the football team with me so we knew each other and when he started having trouble he asked me for help. Though it wasn't help studying more of just texting him the answers during the test because our teacher wasn't very good at watching. I told him I would help him study and show him how to do the homework but nothing more, so he offered to pay me. Had he offered a substantial amount I don't know what I would have done as I did not have a job in high school. Luckily I never had to find out what my number would have been, because once I said no to his offer a second time he either found someone else, learned it himself or just failed.

Technology that betters my education... lightbulbs.

I use my smartphone all the time even in class, it has a to do list app so that I don't have to use a assignment book I can just put it on the list and check it when i do it and it goes away. Facebook, if there are events on campus I can check Facebook or just use my status to ask people for help if I get stuck. Youtube has enough instructional videos that you can learn anything from doing a rubix cube to Burnie-ing. I use my laptop all the time researching, writing papers and doing work for my Info class, etc. Most of all I would say the most important piece of technology is the light bulb because with it we can do more then ever thought possible before it was invented. I like the idea of more technology in the classroom though I'm not sure how I feel about doing classes completely online. Some things like projectors and computers can help but too many pieces of technology could prove to be a distraction.