2013年3月24日星期日

Final Post



       Coming up with an invention/idea was not very difficult, I just thought of something in my daily life that I thought if I had would make it easier and the idea of a bus locating app came to me. When I came up with the idea I was actually waiting for the bus to come, I went to the bus stop a few minutes earlier thinking that the bus would get here on time so I wouldn’t have to wait in the cold for a long time but the bus was late. As I was standing there, I was thinking wouldn’t it be nice if I was able to tell where the bus was at the moment I left to go to the bus stop so that I would catch the bus as soon as I get to the stop instead of standing at the bus stop waiting forever. This waiting for a bus doesn’t happen to me only but to many people so I thought it would be a nice idea to make an app where everyone would probably be able to use. Through working on this project I have learned to develop my idea more and how certain things would make my idea better.
I learned that running a business is not that easy.  You need to think about your competitors, what they are doing that users like and what they are doing that users don’t understand or like or think is too complicated.  Knowing about your competition allows you to make a better product. I also learned how social media can have a really big effect on my business. Sites like Facebook and twitter, if people talk about my app and how they find it useful it could attract more people to use our app or if they have any complaints about it we can fix it imminently so that other users wouldn’t have that same problem. Also with social media, my business could use it as a way to communicate with the customers who use our app and to promote the app and to update users about our app.
Then from learning about Excel, Photoshop, Operating System, Networking and Database, I learned how I am able to make the business run smoother and easier and more effectively. With Excel and Database, I am about to make charts and tables of how users of my apps can get to the information they are looking for. With Photoshop I can use it to design the way I would like my app to look like. With networking it would allow me to communicate with users and see how they like it. Some of these I knew how to use but never would have thought that they would play such an important role in a business.
From applying the knowledge we learned in class to our idea and posting it on the blog, I saw how my idea evolved as each blog post was posted. For instance, I didn’t think of making the app a multi-functioning app (showing more than one thing on the screen such as map of bus on the move on the left with estimated time of bus arrival on the right). Through class I learned that it would make it more appealing to users and it would make my app stand out from competitors.
So in order for my app to become a reality I would first need to learn how to write a program. Once I learn how to write a program I can then apply what I have learned in this class to the programing skills that I learned and may this app real. Then I would need to use social media to advertise my app and let people know about it. Then after that I would like to see the number of people using my app grow.

Lecture Post Database



Entrepreneurial Idea Overview:
The “bus locater” app is free app for all smartphones. It’s an app that will allow people to see the bus schedule and to find, locate and see how far the bus that they are waiting for is away from the bus stop and how long it will take for the bus to come.

Lecture:
                Databases are made for staring large amount of information, quick organization of information and allows for easy access to finding specific information. Database first started as the physical filing cabinet then to text filing then to spreadsheets. Physical filing cabinet were difficult for organizing information and difficult to find information whereas the spreadsheet made it easy to organize the information and easy to find the information. It has also reduced the existence of redundancy of data and possibilities of multi-user access.
                With databases ability to store large amount of information, organize them and reduce the multi-users access ability, companies big and small has the power to control the data efficiently. By using the RDBMS, relational database management system, it has use logical thinking to organize data instead of the simply physically thinking that computers usually do when given information. There are many benefits from using RDBMS; one is that there is no need to decide on the passage of the data and there is no need to manually do data transformation, it will do it automatically. Other benefits of using RDBMS include security management, multi-user access control, and backup and recovery management, which are really important reasons why RDBMS should be used.
                With database, I would use it to store information about bus stops and what other buses or public transport that they could transfer to from that bus stop. It would allow users to just click on the bus stop or the symbol and go directly to the next bus and its information without having to go back to the home page to search up the next bus route. It would make it easy for users of my app to use and easy for me to have all the data in one place and organized. It would also make it easier to fix the route if there is a change or detour on it route (temporary ones) that users might want to know; I wouldn’t need to go through everything and change it, I would just need to go to one spot and change it there then everything else that is connected with it would make sense.

2013年3月10日星期日

Lecture Post Networking

Entrepreneurial Idea Overview:

The “bus locater” app is free app for all smartphones. It’s an app that will allow people to see the bus schedule and to find, locate and see how far the bus that they are waiting for is away from the bus stop and how long it will take for the bus to come.

Lecture:

 An operating system allows users to multitask in using programs in their computers as it “provides a user interface, coordinates tasks, automatically updates, establishes internet connection and so on.” Also the operating system is also similar to that of a guide to software and lets the users know where certain programs are and allow them to access these programs correctly.
 With operating system I could use it to improve my “bus locater” even more. I could use to enhance my app to allow users to operate more than one thing on the app at the same time similar to that as a computer. Also with the operating system, I could also use it to help myself, such as helping me locate where a program is located and takes care of it for me and saves me time from going through the whole system looking and doing all the steps.

2013年3月3日星期日

Blogger's Review



Seattle Transit Blog talks a lot about the public transportation in the United States. There are multiple people posting blogs up on this blog site about public transportation in different cities in the United States. One specific blog post is about the OneBusAway app that I mentioned in one of my previous post.
Oran Viriyincy talking about the OneBusAway app. Viriyincy says how the app has become so useful to transit riders but then became so unreliable after the buses were equipped with GPS. He is saying that the app is only as good as the information provided by the transit agencies. He then brings up S. Morris Rose (I’m assuming that she is someone that is in charge or working on the app) answer on how the problem of this app was going to get fixed.
The way Viriyincy blog seemed a bit of a pro and con. His style of posting is that he presents the problem about the app and an example of when the app had a malfunction. After that he gives a statement of how the app is. And he in a way provides people with ethos from a person working at one of these transit agencies and how they are going to fix the problem.  

2013年2月24日星期日

Lecture Post Bits and Bytes and Cloud Computing



Entrepreneurial Idea Overview:

The “bus locater” app is free app for all smartphones. It’s an app that will allow people to see the bus schedule and to find, locate and see how far the bus that they are waiting for is away from the bus stop and how long it will take for the bus to come.

Lecture:

       As mention in lecture bits and bytes are how fast the data is transferred from system to app and app to system and how big the file is/ how much spaces the app takes up. For my “bus locater” app to be fast accurate and up to date or seconds (in my case) I would need to make it able to transmit data in a rate of x bytes per second. Also the app will also allow users to save their bus stops and to send requires to the coming bus that they need to stop at a certain bus stop so there also needs a number of bytes for storage.
       Also as mentioned in lecture, cloud computing is a system that software exist in the clouds which means that there is no need to pay, buy or install the software as they are ‘floating’ around in the network. My “bus locater” app could use cloud computing by having all the users saved bus stops saved in an excel spreadsheet created in Google Doc this way I wouldn’t have to worry about users stops getting erase and I could have back up data saved into a Google Doc file so that in case I need to back it up due to a malfunction of some kind, I would have may data stored somewhere would out having to buy and/or installing a software.

2013年2月17日星期日

Competitive Analysis



Entrepreneurial Idea Overview:
The “bus locater” app is free app for all smartphones. It’s an app that will allow people to see the bus schedule and to find, locate and see how far the bus that they are waiting for is away from the bus stop and how long it will take for the bus to come.

Competitor 1 Overview: The “Catch the Bus” app created by Jared Egan, has similar functions that the my “bus locater” app would have; locating bus location based on the GPS tracking, providing accurate information on when the bus will arrive. Both my app and the “Catch the Bus” app can and allow users to receive and access the information fast and easy. Also both the apps will use the user’s current location and find bus stops around them. There is also differences between my “bus locater” app and “Catch the Bus” app is that the “Catch the Bus” app people would need to pay $0.99 to use the app while for my app, it is free so people can try it out and if their bus route is not available on my app or if they don’t like it they can just delete it and not have to waste money.  

Competitor 2 Overview: I downloaded the “iNextBus – Realtime bus tracker” app and tried it, it’s quite similar to my but not completely. The “iNextBus – Realtime bus tracker” app is created by Idemfactor Solutions, has similar ideas to what I have for my “bus locater” app; it’s free—it can allow people to use the app and if they don’t like it then they can delete it. It also has a pin-pointing location of every incoming bus on the map as well as an accurate estimate of arrival time however my “bus locater” app is a bit different from the “iNextBus – Realtime bus tracker” app, in my app the movements of the bus would be similar to car movements using GPS tracking. Instead of pin-pointing the locations of incoming buses, it will be a blue arrow similar to that we see on the GPS and it will be on continuous movements and a pin-point location of the bus stop and showing the time (not estimated) of when the bus will arrive at that pin-pointed stop.