The editor of The Small Business Blog, Stefan Topfer wrote an eye-catching piece I couldn’t help but notice: Top 5 Tips for Making Your First Sale.

As a first-year business student, this particular blog post is relevant to my learning. Sooner or later, I will have to make my first sales pitch. Along with powerful presentation skills, I must employ the proper strategy to ensure success. As a rookie salesman, I must be comfortable with offering my services or products at a low price. Companies will be looking for safe, low-risk, high-reward investments. They want to see the hunger and tenacity in an up-and-comer, ready to become the next Fortune 500 CEO. A physical representation of your product rather than a description would definitely enhance the presentation. Companies want to be able to see what they are buying, instead of blindly investing solely on your words. Social media is a gift to low-budget companies due to its far-reaching capabilities and low-costs.

Blogs like The Small Business Blog are becoming a powerful tool for young business students, allowing me to access and read thousands of business ideas and hints in the limited time I have. Blogs are a simple and efficient way to connect brilliant business minds across the world.

With Black Friday approaching, two American malls have incorporated FootPath Technology to aid with data collection. Path intelligence is a tracking system that works through a series of antennas, capturing identification numbers assigned to individual phones, much like an IP address, determining customer movements from store to store. Collecting this type of data will answer vital questions: How long do customers stay in a particular store? Which stores are complementary of each other? Where are the hot-spots and unpopular spots in the mall? Although personal data is not collected, customers are uneasy with their movements being tracked, especially in an age of skilled hackers.

FootPath is the way of the future. What many do not realize is their movements are already tracked by security cameras, heat maps, and undercover researchers within malls. The use of infotech will not only benefit sellers, but also buyers, by elminiating inefficient dead weight loss to society. Introduction of FootPath will maximize efficiency in terms of clumping complementary stores together for better sales and reducing walking distance by relocations. improving the mall experience. But beware customers, relocations as a result of FootPath implementation will be a long-term investment, rather than a short-term solution. If successful, FootPath could expand to urban planning. The possibilites are limitless.

When someone mentions blog, I think:

1) Ads

2) Writers with no credentials

3) Spam

Seth Godin’s blog has shattered these stereotypes. His writing is intelligent, sophisticated, humorous, and fully credible. An author turned entrepreneur turned professional blogger (with a public speaking stint as well), his background in business has helped his blog become the #1 marketing blog on the internet. He is the father of permission marketing.

Topics on his popular blog range from internet impressions, violin, optimism, sucess, to arithmetic, but one common theme binds them all together: business ideas made easy. Seth uses allusions and vivid images to simplify extremely complex business concepts. I’ve only just eclipsed my third month of business school, yet I understand his writing.

Blogs are entirely different beasts than books. Anyone with internet can access his blog, creating enormous exposure. Due to the greater size and variety of his audience, he must cater to all visitors rather than focus on a select group of readers. The writer of a blog must be an expert in current relevant news, producing pieces regularly. The simplicity, brevity, and logical train of thought was what captured me. Blogging is an art form, and much can be taken from Seth’s brush strokes.

Mick Mountz is not afraid of rejection, “I heard ‘No’ 50 to 100 times in 2002”. From previous experience, the innovator / entrepreneur realized that the labour costs of monotonous warehouse jobs were greater than the revenues earned from selling the actual product. Simply put, the company was LOSING money due to high wages relative to revenue.

The visionary started the company Kiva Systems, a textbook example of entrepreneurship. Mountz envisioned a warehouse run by robots. The idea was outrageous to many companies he pitched to, as the projected break even costs were estimated at $100 million.

Undeterred, Mountz built his own prototype robot that produced at 3 times the rate of a human. This robot would impress Bain Capital Ventures’ managing director (Ajay Agarwal) so much, it went on to earn him an immediate $1.6 million from angel investors, along with $20 million over the next 4 years. Agarwal endorsed Mountz, seeing the limitless potential of this technological application and the possibility of transforming the $100 billion e-commerce market.

Evidently, Kiva Systems has satisfied all the points to qualify as an entrepreneurial venture. Although faced with initial negative feedback (risk), the company has expanded at an exponential rate. The company has skyrocketed to 240 employees and $100 million revenue, with prominent customers such as Walgreens, Staples, The Gap, and Amazon.

The automobile industry is unique in that it relies heavily on parts and services coming from many different geographical regions. The Japanese earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown disaster, coupled with Thailand’s flooding, has autombile manufacturers scrambling for safety. Toyota, Nissan, Honda, and even Ford are struggling to protect their factories in Asia. Production in 3 plants in Thailand will be halted as well as delayed production in other regions: North America, South Africa, Indonesia, the Phillippines, and Vietnam. According to estimates, auto production in Thailand will be down 130,000 units this year, due to flooding. Automakers are looking to re-evaluate the supply chain and come up with short-term solutions. The Thailand floodings alone will cause a 10% drop of profits for Honda, Toyota, and Nissan, respectively. The Thailand floods will certainly hinder the recovery of Japan.

Thailand Floods

The automobile industry is one of the most diverse, but comes with a cost. Although spreading plants throughout the world cuts costs, natural disasters and political uncertainty cause problems in the supply chain. Failure to produce in one plant will cause a ripple effect in other plants. The automobile industry in Japan is enormous, and a halt in production is utterly devastating. Japan’s road to recovery seems dim.

Price Floor

All sports fans are exposed to the power of microeconomics: the black market. We are familiar with scalpers outside stadiums and also distributors on the Internet. Classmate Nathan Yu explains fans of bands or sports teams are willing to pay fortunes for live tickets. This incredible demand coupled with limited supply creates a massive shortage. Suppliers are unable to satisfy the desires of consumers, either due to government intervention (binding price ceiling) or limited supply. “Entrepreneurs” capitalize on this opportunity to monopolize the market, reaping enormous illegal profits (black market). At Qs, sellers realize consumer’s willingness to pay much more, thus selling at a price satisfying demand. The inability of supply and demand forces to reach free market levels is an issue, causing black markets, rationing, seller’s preferences, and first come first served policies.

Scalping

I have voluntarily been victimized by multiple black market operations. Paying free market prices for sporting event tickets is merely a fantasy. Five times the face-value of a Canucks or Olympics ticket is reasonable. The free, competitive market cannot be stopped, only disrupted. The market is a self-serving, self-sufficient machine that runs smoothly by itself, thus, I must accept the black market as a naturally occuring phenomenon.

Grey Market

Classmate Stephen Illagan raises a valid point that never previously concerned me. Google essentially has a monopoly over the entire cyber world.

Googolopoly

Google owns the real-estate of the entire Internet, with all sources “renting” space on Google’s empire. Google’s search engine has become God over all things cyber-space, a dictatorship with absolute power (afterall, it does have satellite images of every inch on Earth – Google Maps). What we see is what Google wants us to see! Enormous acquisitions have Google directing traffic back to its own products! Imagine: Google has the power to bury ANY SITE deep in its search results. With this God-like status, any competitor it has is virtually worthless. The money made from advertising and Internet search is used to expand its empire even further (eg. Youtube, Motorola, DoubleClick, etc…). Google has created an alternative to every leader in the technological world: Facebook vs. Google+, Internet explorer vs Google Chrome, Hotmail vs. Gmail, Microsoft Word vs. Google Docs, Android vs iPhone, Library Databases vs. Google Scholar, the list goes on.

Google’s expansion is literally otherworldy. The Internet belongs to Google.

Google 2084

(I wish I had seen this before I finished writing)

Google\’s Masterplan for Domination & Power

The article I stumbled upon while browsing CNN perfectly coincided with our current studies in microeconomics. A binding price floor (price set above market equilibrium) causes an excess of labour (unemployment). Cost of labour to firms rise, who have no choice but to eliminate workers and increase the workload of existing workers to match previous levels of production. Workers fortunate enough to keep their jobs are beneficiaries. Firms, workers laid off, and those unable to find jobs in this new market, are the losers. The government has caused a disequilibrium (demand of labour exceeds supply of labour).

Eight states in the U.S. have announced minimum wage increases. The U.S.A. is in a sticky situation at the moment. On one hand, the federal minimum wage ($7.25/hr) amounts to $15,000/yr for a full-time worker, below the poverty rate for a family of four. These struggling families would be winners. On the flip side, 6.9 million jobs were lost during the recession, with minimum wages driving this number up. Spending will get the economy going, but increasing the minimum wage creates joblessness, further compounding the problem. The American government must collaborate with economists to develop both short-term and long-term solutions, avoiding social unrest.