Social Entrepreneurship, as discussed in October 16’s class, is a social venture to tackle some sort of a social problem by using entrepreneurial concepts. A social entrepreneur is ambitious, mission driven, strategic, resourceful, and results oriented.

This article discusses the initiative program called RBS Inspiring Enterprise, this fund supports youth, women, and social entrepreneurs. There is a 1.5million euro funding pot that will mostly be distributed equally within 100,000 people aged thirteen to thirty. In my opinion, this is a bad idea, I believe that social entrepreneurs should take initiatives, rather than being given support packages. Social Entrepreneurs should start from nothing in order to fully understand social hardships that the world faces. This funding may give opportunities to young people who isn’t serious about being a social entrepreneur, but rather just doing it for the money. I believe that this 1.5million pot should go to fewer individuals or small enterprises that have proven to be a successful in being social entrepreneurs.

http://www.socialenterpriselive.com/section/news/money/20121016/%C2%A315m-the-bank-social-enterprises-inspire-young-entrepreneurs

Rahul’s Blog “Marketing: Samsung’s Galaxy S 3 vs Apple’s iPhone 5”

This article and blog is interesting to me because i personally have been in numerous arguments relating to IPhone vs Samsung. Specifications aside, a large part of either company’s success is the marketing techniques that they use. Rahul alongside with many other people, such as professional analysts, believe that Apple is losing market shares and sales, this is believed to be caused by a lack of advertisement.

One distinct advertisement success of Samsung is being the official sponsor phone of the 2012 Olympics, with the motto “Designed for humans, Inspired by nature” which is fitting for the worldwide sporting event. Many of us have seen an advertisement like the one above, this is an example of comparative ads and relative positioning that was discussed during class 5. Even though this is an unofficial advertisement, it still has an effect on customer’s preferences. I believe that if Apple wants to remain their market dominance, they have to find ways to take such advertisement down because they are losing their brand positioning.

Euro currency is constantly dropping, many different attempts have been initiated to jumpstart the economy, but no methods seem to work. 17 nations that currently use the euro dollar is experiencing an astounding 11.4% unemployment rate, this is substantially higher than 8.1% in U.S.A in the month of August. These statistic states that Europe’s recession is only getting worse.
In my point of view, there are minimal beneficial decisions that Europe can make alone, to improve the economy, Europe must seek help from other countries, but during economic depressions of U.S.A., many countries are afraid that they will only drag themselves down. Politicians need to act quicker and to recover Bank deficits, printing money to purchase bonds is a possible fix, although they must be careful to not cause inflation of the currency. Lowering interest rates may also help banks to recover over time with little government help.