When I attended the two miniEnterprize conferences in my senior years of highschool, I learned about this revolutionary app company called Kiip (a rewards network). The CEO of the company is Brian Wong, who is a Sauder alumni.

The company’s goals are “to create technologies that facilitate beautiful, streamlined experiences around achievements, games, and rewards”. Brian pioneered change in the world of app gaming by redefining what it is to obtain achievements in gaming. In a recent project, it teamed up with an app company (interface was iPhone, iPod, and Android) to make getting achievements in MegaJump more satisfying for users and to give them incentives to win by entitling the person with the highest score a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records. Megajump to that, eh!

In the QuickMBA definition, an entrepreneur’s “innovation may be in the product or service itself, or in the business processes used to deliver it“. This is the case with Kiip’s services. Achievements for gaming have been around for several decades, they were always virtual achievements and the users were only recognized in their small virtual communities which the games constituted. The revolutionized idea was to give real rewards for virtual achievements.

How could you use the liquidity of cash to better govern your future? What are the advantages and disadvantages of investing that liquidity in say, stocks or bonds, keeping in mind the factor of Time Value of Money.

The most important thing to keep in mind is this: What could you have gained from that extra cash on your hands? If you are someone who spends most of their money on expensive foods, extra cash on your hands would be gone in the blink of an eye. This is because food is a necessity for humans and we must satisfy that first level in the Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs before we can advance into the Safety Needs, eventually reaching Self Actualization. This affects consumers’ buying decisions, as one who is chronically ill will spend most of their income on medication and hospital bills and maybe forgo that plane ticket to the Caribbeans for the summer holidays.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t invest in a healthy and/or lavish lifestyle, and it is certainly not to encourage a stingy lifestyle either. Spend money where money need be spent and use the rest of your income to better your future.

Since the “bottom line” of a successful corporate business is ultimately, the profits, does a corporate business know when to draw the line for sustainability (environmental issues) and its profits? Would a corporate business go that extra mile to reduce its environmental footprint, knowing that this strategy could potentially reduce its profits? The costs for implementing environmentally friendly technology would result in a lower net profit in the short run, and has the possibility of increasing profits only if the company can pay off its average variable costs.

In reality, many large corporations are primarily concerned about its profits (not so much about the environment). Take the oil industry for example; large corporations in the oil and petroleum industry (i.e Exxon Mobile) fully understand the extent to which their products are negatively impacting the environment. Not only is Exxon Mobile aware of its actions, the corporate giant is “Helping Write State Laws” and manipulating the same laws that were instated to protect the environment.

Profits are definitely important concerns for corporate businesses, but I feel that many corporate businesses are taking their concerns too far. These businesses may not be aware of the long-term effects of their attempts at profit maximization.

When I was still in my junior years of High School, I came across an article “Child sweatshop shame threatens Gap’s ethical image”

Dan McDougall, The Observer, Sunday 28 October 2007 in a Sunday Paper. The article immediately caught my attention because The Gap Inc. was (and still is) a well-known international clothing retailer with large subdivisions such as Old Navy and Banana Republic. It also owned a substantial portion of the clothing retail market. Based on the information presented in this article, a contract-supplier of GAP clothing was exploiting children as a cheap form of human capital to reduce production costs (and maximize profits) for a line of GAP clothing. Although GAP Inc.’s policy specifically states: “…if it discovers children being used […] to make its clothes the child [must be removed] from the workplace”, it failed to enforce its policies. In my opinion, this directly resulted in the unethical practice of child labour by the contract-suppliers, as the sweatshops were administered for the sole purpose of catering to GAP’s demand for inexpensive means of production.