On November 15, Sony PlayStation 4 is offered for sale at a price of $399 in North America. With only $100 less than the Microsoft latest gaming console, the Xbox One, which is scheduled to be released on November 22, this will make Sony a strong competitor in gaming consoles market for Microsoft.

Sony is providing some freebies for the early buyers, this included a free usage of the Sony Music Unlimited and the PlayStation Plus for a month and also a $10 credit in the PlayStation Store. With only mere $10, some players can opt to upgrade several selected PlayStation 3  games and make them compatible to play with PlayStation 4.  With this, Sony can ensure the loyalty of a handful of buyers and gamers to support their product.

Nevertheless, some reviewers complaint about the incompatibility of many PS3 games, thus shrinking the size of PS4 gaming library. Reviewers have appealed that buyers should wait for more features and games to release before they buy it.  The lack of compatible game can badly affect the sales of Playstation 4. It would be nice if Sony can delay PS4 releasing date and expand their game library by developing more games that are compatible for the utilization of PlayStation 4.

References: Brien, Lucy O’. “Sony Posts Troubleshooting Guide for the PS4 ‘Blue Light’ Issue.” IGN. N.p., 17 Nov 2013. Web. 15 Oct 2013.

Carnoy, David. “PS4: Everything you need to know.” Cnet. N.p., 14 Nov 2013. Web. 15 Oct 2013.

Images: Long, Neil. PS4, next gen rivalry and the Vita rescue plan: in conversation with PlayStation’s Jim Ryan. 2013. Photograph. EdgeWeb. 15 Oct 2013.

In San Francisco, a brand new type of credit card is currently being developed by Coin’s team. This brand new slim-looking magnetic stripe might soon replace the plastic credit card we are using right now because innumerable cards, debits and credits can be stored into this all-in-one credit card. 

Although the prototype is still in development, Coin’s team has created a website which enable public for pre-order to fuel Coin’s fundraising campaign.  People can purchase a completed black card at a price of $50 for a limited period of time.  Nonetheless, the device will cost $100 after the fundraising campaign ends.  It seems that this new credit card could revolutionize the uses of credit card but it is definitely not an easy task to punch through the market. Nowadays we know that the plastic market and credit card market is monopolized by MasterCards, Visas, and ATMs.  Coin’s team needs to employ several tactics to ramp up the sales or at least acquire a foothold in credit cards marketplace. For example, Coin can hold a few promotion campaign to advertise his product or utilize the social media to help him to publicize the advantages of having an all-in-one credit card.

References: Statt, Nick. “Inside Coin’s techie vision for the all-in-one credit card.” Cnet. N.p., 14 Nov 2013. Web. 15 Nov 2013.

Images: New All-In-One credit card concept. 2009. Photograph. Oled-infoWeb. 15 Nov 2013.

Luxuries often link me to fine quality and quality connects me to comfortable. Likewise, Vista Jet provides their customers the best of the best. They probably have the most outstanding air stewardess, food and utilities. However, normal person like me will not be able to enjoy this kind of luxuries. My classmate, Rui Wu, had mentioned that Vista Jet’s customer segments are very narrow. They can only target groups and business companies.

In my opinion, if they are willing to pull down the price for their services, and also construct bigger planes, they can then accommodate more people and hence, revenue shoots up. Currently, I noticed that a lot of China people enjoy travelling the world ever since their economy has been opened up to the public. If Vista Jet is willing to lower themselves down a little bit and target these travellers, I am pretty sure that their annual revenue will escalate even quicker than their current pace. Nevertheless, this also depends the company’s own objective. If they value their contemporary reputation as a high-end service more than revenue, then no implementations should be made.

References: https://blogs.ubc.ca/ruiwu/2013/10/08/vista-jet-to-give-you-the-very-best/

Images: English, Jennifer Leach. Bizjet Order Is Largest Ever. 2012. Photograph. bjtonlineWeb. 1 Nov 2013.

Honesty is indeed the most important criteria for every entrepreneur. As I went through Raymond Jiang’s blog, one of his posts immediately caught my attention. It was about some business ethics such as making use of partnerships and bank loans to shield their deprivation instead of reporting the accurate amount that were violated by Enron Corporation. I had also quoted one of his conclusion which said “Unethical business behaviors lead to collapse”, and I totally consent to this notion.

As a consumer myself, I do hope that the companies I do trading with always practices ethical manner especially honesty. For instance, if I pay an extremely high amount of money for a certain product, I will expect the product to be a durable good which uses fine raw material instead of some low quality product. However, if I found myself to be cheated by the company, I will turn to be incredibly upset and shall not trade with them anymore or even spread this piece of news to my friends and family. I hope that every enterprise will keep in mind that dishonesty will only brings bad reputation and decreasing revenue like Raymond had mentioned.

References: https://blogs.ubc.ca/raymondjiang/

Images: Ghatneker, Payal Loma. Oversharing is not honesty. 2011. Photograph. BlogspotWeb. 24 Oct 2013.

These recent years, Apple company and Samsung company have been spending a large amount of time and money on the lawsuit. Knowing that both of these companies wanted to dominate over each other, or we can say monopolized the market, lots of unnecessary resources have been wasted on this case.

In a long run for both companies, I strongly disagree with this ongoing lawsuit which also takes place in different countries. As a matter of fact, both of these companies have imitated each other’s patents like “copycats”. Although it is not fair to sound like their products serve the exact same functions,which also means they do not have any self-innovation, however, the truth is they did imitate each other’s patents.

So, why does the lawsuit have to continue? In most of the circumstances, both companies are caught guilty anyhow. Instead, they should focus on producing more varieties of products and improving their old ones, and of course, they should also discontinue from copying each other’s patent again. This is because variations and improvements as well as innovations keep customers, but lawsuits drive customers away since you are actually making a joke out of yourself.

References: Bosker, Bianca, and Dino Grandoni. “Apple-Samsung Lawsuit: What You Need To Know About The Verdict.” Huffingtonpost. N.p., 25 Aug 2013. Web. 21 Oct 2013.

Images: Apple vs Samsung Lawsuit. 2013. Photograph. GgsokuWeb. 21 Oct 2013.

Eight months ago, the game company “Electronic Arts and Maxis” released the game, “Simcity”. Simcity received many positive commendations in the game’s post-release. However, many players reported that they suffered from network interruption and problems with saving game. This is because of Simcity has utilized a type of digital-right management (DRM) called “Always-online DRM”, which require the users to constantly connect to network or server to play Simcity.

It seems that the popularity of Simcity acquired has backfired an enormous amount of players packed into limited servers and caused the instability of game servers. Many game reviewers labelled the game as broken and unplayable, urging players to think twice before buying the game and wait for the issues to be solved.  The Amazon.com had to discontinue selling the virtual version of the Simcity. Also, the game has received very low rating in terms of game’s and server’s stability from customers. These issues could cause lower sales, thus minimize the net income made by selling the game.

In my opinion, the best solution for this circumstance should be the termination of Always-Online DRM. This enables players to play the game without suffering from server instability and other network issues.

References: Benedetti, Winda. “Simcity launch disaster continues as gamers petition EA, White House.” NBC News Technology. N.p., 08 March 2013. Web. 10 Oct 2013.

Images: Nath, Preetam. SimCity receives 4.0 update, new areas and re-enabled features in two. 2013. Photograph. vr-zoneWeb. 10 Oct 2013.

Great Smoky Mountain National Park is one of the most famous tourist area that is situated in Tennessee, USA. As for Jeff Smith, he is the proprietor of Jonathan Greek Inn. His business relies highly on the prominent Smoky Mountain because it is a tourist-only destination.

Jeff is always very fortunate to boost up his sales since the Smoky Mountain is the most visited national park in the USA. However, the government of the state halts all of the official functions and hit Jeff’s business really hard. Due to the fact that the government came to a shutdown, most of the national park facilities such as the hiking trails and visitor centers are closed.

Even though it seems like Jeff can only pray hard to hope for the government to get back to operation, nonetheless, he can always come up with new ideas to compete with the other small businesses which are affected, since all of them are currently facing the same issue. For instance, he can utilize the attractive environment and come about with amusing activities to appeal a different market. Through these, he might not have to depend solely on tourists who visit the Great Smoky Mountain.

References: Kavilanz, Parija. “Shutdown hits Great Smoky Mountains at peak season.” (2013): n.pag. Web. 3 Oct 2013. <http://money.cnn.com/>.

Image: 2011. Photograph. n.p. Web. 3 Oct 2013. <http://blog.auntbugs.com/>.

Back then, people used the barter system to fulfill their desire. Later on, money was introduced to replace the barter system because there were too many difficulties caused and people were lacking of a medium of exchange. With the existing of money, things are given with a value and trading becomes simpler.

Nevertheless, when a country is not attaining its economic equilibrium, there might be a significant decline in the currency’s value. For instance, Malaysian ringgit’s currency is having a substantial drop. According to the Southeast Asia Nation, they are now working on a strategy to strengthen Malaysia’s fiscal position by reducing subsidies, detaining infrastructure tax and imposing consumption tax to secure the country’s finance. The Malaysian government also mentioned that they will announce the further steps they are planning to take to reduce spending and addressed the structural issues that mainly affect the drop of the currency.

From my view, The rising and dropping of the currency is not plainly the government’s responsibility, the country’s citizens such as entrepreneurs are also responsible to flourish the economy by attracting more foreign investors through businesses. Or else, high rate of inflation, budget deficits and the economic growth of the country will be impacted.

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Ever since China opened up their country to foreign investment for entrepreneurs, the country soon picked up extremely quickly and turned to become one of the world largest economy. The standard of living in terms of housing, daily necessities and luxuries have then shoot up substantially.

Nonetheless, the income disparities among the people is indisputable. No doubt, human overpopulation is one of the mainspring of the matter. Also, the country is lacking the right method to deal with wealth distribution as the wages rise or fall for individuals is not determined by the government. With the GDP increasing these years, which, too, brought up the government fiscal revenue stream, and the earnings disproportion between the State and the people increase even further.

Hence, the government decided to pressure the enterprises towards a reform by focusing on advanced industrial development to not only boost up productivity, but also profitability. Eventually, workers’ income will rise up accordingly to the improvement.

In order to make things better and to allow the entire nation to savor the product out from the flourished economy, it is time for the government to set in to make a difference.

References: Liang, XiaoMin. “China has grown rich, now it’s the people’s turn.” (2011): n.pag. News China Magazine. Web. 1 Oct 2013.

Images: Klein, David G. Income Inequality, Writ Larger. 2007. Painting. The New York TimesWeb. 1 Oct 2013.

Eyes and words are the fundamental components of social interactions. Have you ever conveyed your frustration by rolling your eyes upward? Or did you ever blurt out words like ” Jesus Christ! He is such a beast! “? What comes into your mind? For me, ‘MORALITY’ immediately pops up in my head.

Loss of business ethics in the society has been quite an issue in recent. In particular, the most sizable retailer, Walmart claimed that they had halted from manufacturing its commodities at a list of factories due to labour violations and severe security problems. Even though it had already been 2 years since Walmart claimed that they had discontinue business with the problematic factories, still, it was found that a substantial amount of garments from the factories of the Bangladesh were shipped to Walmart Canada.

Not only so, it was reported that Walmart has not signed onto an agreement to upgrade the safety appliances of the Bangladesh factories. Walmart spokesman, Kevin Gardner claimed that they are formulating an alternative plan which will exceed the expectation of the other proposal offered by the International Labour Group. Profits might be one of the biggest of concern for the corporations, however, the safety of the employees should be taken into consideration as well.

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