Money never sleeps

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According to the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce, every Oklahoma City Thunder game pours $1.3 million into the local economy. As The Atlantic recently pointed out, Spurs games generate $95 million for San Antonio, the Portland Trail Blazers made a $2 billion local impact between 1970 and 2004.

Without questioning, the NBA lockout has a strong negative imp act on the local economy for most cities. A group of people who rely on the NBA for revenue and employment such as concession stand operators, ticket takers, vendors, arena staff and security guards will be out of a job. At the same time, low-skilled blue collar worker are having huge trouble to find a job. The restaurants and bars near to the arenas suffer a big hit financially. For many bars one basketball game equals what they would make in a week.

Overall, NBA lockout would bring an serve economic lost to cities but each city has different responses related to the lost.  For example, the lack of a Kobe Bryant may hurt Los Angeles deeply inside, but it will not be the economical downfall of the greater Los Angeles area. However, the lack of a Kevin Durant three-pointer in Oklahoma City, that’s a different story.

(Read more: http://moneyland.time.com/2011/11/07/the-nba-lockout-and-the-economy-an-overstated-impact/)

Today my attention is catched by a post with an interesting topic “$ impact of international students.”

I totally agree with the viewpoint presented by Wepps. As globalization becomes a inevitable trend, more and more students choose to come to Canada for higher education.  Considered about economy, international students resulted in a $6.5 billion infusion to Canadian. That is a huge number. Not only does the come of tons of international students mean a huge number of tuition, but the need of accommodation, living cost, taxes, etc. Many schools also rely on the financial contribution from international students. For example, international students have five times amount of tuition but only one fifth amount of scholarship compared to Canadian in UBC. I also believe we international students not only can contribute on Canadian economy, but also its education and culture. I really love  Wepps’ words “let’s not forget that international students bring a wealth of experience and knowledge to our schools which provides a “priceless” aspect to learning for all students (staff & faculty). ”

I am interested in this post because I am actually an international student and I want to know international students’ impact on Canadian economy and other aspects. This post is concise and effective due to the personal opinion and statistics.

The link of the blog is http://www.glenweppler.com/2010/02/impact-of-international-students.html.

This is a response to a post published by  classmate Logangraham. The blog link is https://blogs.ubc.ca/logangraham/2011/10/21/get-mobile-get-rich/

I am totally with the principle Logangraham raised, “prepare for change and structure for flexibility, because nothing ever stays the same.” Some people say that the innovation of technology guides people’s demand. That is true because our demand trend changes every time when a big innovation shows up. For example, when PC came to the world, people rushed to buy PC. When smart phone came to the world, people started to abandon simple phone. But I think it is actually people’s demand that stimulates the innovation of technology. It can be said that when people’s demand tranforms into a tangible commodity or an innovation, people will rush to purchase what they demand.

Although currently mobility is a fad, preparing for change is essential for businessmen to take care of and grasp the future fad because people’s demand cannot be constrained by technological mobility for a long time. Demand is expanding all the time. However, based on the current situation, “Get mobile, get rich” is doable! Quoted from Logangraham, “wise future business people, take note. Here’s a fad for you!”

http://www.myprinterworks.com/

PrinterWorks is Western Canada’s leading provider of Managed Print Services. From consulting services, to procurement and installation, to total outsourced solutions, PrinterWorks is unique in its ability to support large fleets of print, copy, scan, and fax environments.

PrinterWorks is the company that I consider to be entrepreneurial because of its new product and new markets. PrinterWorks is not the traditional print company whose main products are printers, papers, inks, repairing and so on. What is the most impressive to me is that PrinterWorks sells ideas and solution which I seldom see in the business about printing.

The market for PrinterWorks is large and potential because few companies  focus on managed print services and how to reduce the expenditure on daily printing. Most companies have the traditional sales models for selling copiers and printers, which simply were not working anymore in the new Multifuntion world. Therefore, PrinterWorks starts its business in a promising and relatively new direction.

We have known that Zappos treats employees very well, offering free food, recreation breaks, and other unconventional perks in exchange for employee loyalty, and even tests the effectiveness of its perks by offering to pay employees to quit. The secret to Zappos’ success is doing everything to ensure their customers are happy.

The companies that treat employees like customers are not only Zappos, Southwest Airlines is only one of them.  Over the years, whenever reporters would ask the founder of Southwest, Herbert D. Kelleher,  the secret to Southwest’s success,he had a stock response. “You have to treat your employees like customers,” he told Fortune in 2001. “When you treat them right, then they will treat your outside customers right. That has been a powerful competitive weapon for us.”

Overall ,  the precondition to ensure their customers are happy is that their employees are happy, especially the customer-facing employees because those front-line employees deliver the real value to the customers.  Vineet Nayar even published the book “Employees First, Customers Second.” http://amzn.to/aNrQek. (Vineet Nayar is an Indian businessperson, IT executive, the CEO, Vice Chairman and fulltime member of the Board of Directors of HCL Technologies.)

Last, how can we treat employees like customers, the websites introduces 5 ways which you can reference. http://www.baileyworkplay.com/2008/07/five-ways-to-treat-employees-like-customers/

http://nikeid.nike.com/nikeid/index.jsp#home

Nowadays, many companies such as Nike, Starbucks, Apple have met one of the hottest startup trend–Mass customization. Personally I love Nike sports and I usually use the  customizing service–NIKEiD for shoes and T-shirts. It is more applicable to say that I buy a creative experience which allows me to fiddle with colors, patterns, textures, shapes and sizes online than I just purchase some goods. I think it is a clever way to stimulate costumers’ design and transform it into demand which equals to money!

From what I have known, NikeiD’s online community has recently reached 15 million people. In the same period Nike’s market share has grown from 48-61%. The most surprising fact is that  NIKE iD now is 20% of store revenue! It is 3.5 billion!!!

However, not every firms succeed in mass customization as Nike did. Industry leaders, including Toyota, Dow Jones, and Motorola, have tried to employ mass customization but  failed.  For me, customization is potential to scale but also limited because the innovation space has remained small when more and more companies want to have a finger in the pie.

Last, I want to ask a question: What products would like to customize?

On the purpose of making Sauder more active and increasing the communication between professors and sutdents, I think Sauder can design a phone app to achieve so. The phone app is like a BBS. In the BBS, not only should the managers immediately upgrate the instant events happening in Sauder, but also the business events happening in the world. The information can be maily devided into two parts: Sauder, and Outside. In the “Sauder” column, students can post and communicate freely. The information they disscussed can be anything like academic topic or just simple chat. The “Outside” column is consist of all popular brands such as Apple, Nike, Mcdonald’s and so forth. It almost include evey brands in evey business field. Of course, the main events happening in that brand are available. The click volume will be recorded whenever students enter that brands. The managers can see the most popular brand and topic of discussion that students are interested in. In the class, professor can give a lesson or discussion about  the events happening in the most watched brand. In this way, the lessons will be closer to students’ life and interesting.

(This app is upgrating…)

According to the Lieber Case, Lieber Light is standing in a disadvantageous competition with Vancouver Ligh, in which Vancouver Ligh provides a lower price than Lieber Light because it has 25% savings on variable cost.

In order to deal with the problem, personally I think Lieber needs investors. Firstly, investors could bring vast investment to Lieber Light.  The rich capitalization means Lieber  can allocate more money to enhance the brand value; innovate the new technology to cut the cost;  promotion and so forth.  Secondly, the investors themself will  improve the transportation of delivery because the investors can bulid fatories and filliales in other places instead of only the current primary maket area. In this way, Lieber Ligh can grap more maket share which is lost due to the cost of transpotation. Thirdly, investors could make the business of Lieber Light more active and diverse. That is to say that every investor has different element and creativity which can be melt into the business.

I hope investors can help Lieber Light stand up.