ICS 691 News 2(1)

[Philip Johnson <johnson@hawaii.edu>]

ICS 691 News, Week 2, Issue 1

In this issue:
* Company assignments posted
* Team responsibilities for this week
* Topic assignments posted
* E-commerce, Internet time article
* No paper turn-ins from now on
* Oahu people only: Please email me your Pizza Portal eval.

---
Company assignments posted

I have posted the company assignments. See
http://csdl.ics.hawaii.edu/~johnson/691s00/teams.html, or the link from the
home page. With any luck, each company contains at least one person with
business skills and one person with CS skills. 

This list is "semi-final".  I reserve the right in the next few days to
make some adjustments if there are clear problems. (For example, one person
was left off the list of assignments, so he emailed me and I added him to a
company.  Another person was initially listed twice.)  

---
Company responsibilities for this week

First, you should contact your company members immediately via email or
phone to set up a meeting, use the resumes for contact info.  You should
meet as soon as possible--this weekend or Monday at the latest. You should
schedule at least three face-to-face meetings a week for the next several
weeks.  Remember that after this round, you will be free to join other
companies.  In particular, other companies may want to find out from your
current company members how well you worked during this round.  You are
well advised to create and maintain a good reputation within the class, or
else you won't be finding much work down the road. Just like the real
world. 

Second, there are three distinct skill areas in your VCommerce work: (1)
business plan development, which requires research and writing skills, (2)
web page layout and design, which requires graphic and writing skills and
simple HTML skills, and (3) ASP programming, which requires trivial to
sophisticated programming skills.  I expect everyone in the class to
contribute to their companies in ALL THREE of these areas.  In other words,
you should NOT organize your company into one person that creates the
business plan, one person that lays out the web page, and one person that
does the ASP programming.  The result will be a junky company, and worse,
you will come out of the class knowing very little more than what you came
in with.  But the worst part of all is that you won't be qualified to be a
Internet entrepreneur.  Wally Roth, for example, programs AND builds
business plans. So do virtually all of the successful Internet
entrepreneurs I know.  You are wasting a big opportunity if you don't use
this class to learn "the other side", and you will be worth far more to a
real-world company in the future if you do. You may have to work some late
nights this semester, and struggle with some difficult concepts, but that's
life in the Internet leagues. 

You'll see that the schedule page has been edited to refer to "Company"
presentations.  I did this to make it clear that virtually every week from
here on in, your company will be required to make a brief 3-5 minute
presentation to the class on some topic related to your business.  You
should prepare some sort of visual aid to accompany your talk, such as
powerpoint slides. (3-5 slides is enough). 

For next Friday, each company will present a brief report to the class
concerning the following topics:
* Name of company and members
* Internet domain name (must not be currently allocated. See prior email on
'whois')
* Overview of product/service idea
* Initial market research results

You should summarize your progress in a one page report, and email it to me
before class on Friday. Only one progress report per company, please. You
can use HTML, ascii text, or word doc format. Note that a class member has
already sent me a virus-infested document.  Please check your machines!

---
Topic assignments posted

The schedule page
(http://csdl.ics.hawaii.edu/~johnson/691s00/schedule.html, also available
via a link from the home page) now contains a list of the people assigned
to each topic. I have tried, when possible, to observe your preferences but
could not satisfy all requests.  Again, I reserve the right to make minor
adjustments if necessary.

Almost every topic has four people assigned to it.  This was necessary due
to the large enrollment in the class.  I therefore want to modify the
approach as follows.  Please divide your four person team into two
two-person teams.  Then, divide up the area into two parts.  Each two
person team will do a 20 minute presentation on their part of the topic
area.  You are free to divide up the area in any way you want.  There is
one further addition: I would like you to spend some time on each topic
area talking about how it applies to VCommerce in a practical way.  So, in
the graphics talk, for example, you might talk about the graphics software
that can be used to create banner ads or image maps or whatever, and how to
do it. The database people can talk about some aspect of ASP programming
for databases. And so on.  The goal is for each group to spend some part of
their time presenting "practical" information that you can use right away.  

The online business plan group might want to come talk to me on Monday if
they want some hints on how to get started, since they have to talk on
Friday. Note that I will be much more forgiving in my evaluation of the
early groups, since they have less time to prepare and can't learn from
other people's mistakes.  Be warned that my standards for group
presentations will be quite high by April!

---
E-Commerce, Internet time article

If you think things are moving fast in this class, you should get a
"reality check" by reading this article passed on to me by Keith Mattson of
University Connections (http://www.hawaii.edu/connections/):

>> http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20000123mag-brekke8.html

Compared to the pace of life in the real world of Internet businesses, the
pace of this class is positively leisurely!

---
No paper turn-ins from now on

I started looking through the Pizza Portal evaluations, and found that some
of you had done a really excellent job.  I then realized that a great
additional form of feedback would be to see some of the other assignments,
but that I can't do that with paper.  

Therefore, I am banning paper turn-ins for the remainder of the semester.
Instead, everything from now on has to be submitted to me electronically.
That way, I can have the option to "republish" some of the best work
products (with authorship removed) to the class so you can learn from each
other as well as from me.  It will also be far simpler for me to
administrate than shuffling through piles of paper.  

---
Oahu people only: Please email me your Pizza Portal eval.

To implement the strategy in the last blurb, please email me your PP
evaluation if you turned in hardcopy to me yesterday night at class.  This
applies to the Oahu people only who came to Kuykendall. Sorry for the
confusion and for forcing you to waste paper. 

---
VCommerce consumer/investor questions

A student writes:

> In regards to the students that will be visiting our websites as test
> customers, what are the backgrounds behind how they are being chosen to
> do this?  For example: 
> 
> 1. Are they students with so much time on their hands that
> they want to do this?  
> 
> 2. Are they being given the assignment from another class,
> like a finance class where they have to practice investment skills that
> might be being taught in that particular class?  
> 
> 3. And are they students from elsewhere and Hawaii in
> general, or just from Oahu? 
> 

I expect that it will take them about an hour or so to go through the site.
I am assuming that you guys will come up with interesting, entertaining,
"sticky" sites that the students will *enjoy* exploring and even returning
to during the week.   

I will initially be soliciting voluntary involvement by appearing in
certain classes (ICS and other classes) and giving a pitch about VCommerce,
then collecting email addresses of interested students who want to "play"
VCommerce.  I will try to "hook" their participation by talking about it as
a kind of game---that if they spend their money on interesting stuff, and
in particular make the right investment decisions, they could "win" in the
sense of having the highest valued stock portfolio after the companies "go
public" at the end of the round.  Some professors have volunteered to give
the students extra credit, but it won't be a required aspect of any class.
So, in other words, initially the makeup of the consumer/investors will
roughly parallel the college student population in general, which is why
that's the target population for VCommerce businesses.

For the final round, however, I plan to solicit participation from both UH
college students and others. These "others" could include members of the
local high tech community, high ranking University officials, local and
national venture capitalists, members of the local and national press, and
members of the State government.  Of course, this messes up the
demographics a little bit, but my goal is for all of you to become highly
sought after entrepreneurs with high visibility as a result of this class,
so that you can join promising companies and/or get access to the resources
you need to start your own.  The more effort you make building your
VCommerce companies, the more sophisticated and interesting your sites are,
the more polished your business plans, and the better the look and feel of
the game, the more likely this is to happen.   Ultimately, it's up to you
guys to make of this opportunity what you will.  

You saw Wally Roth's presentation last night.  You've seen with your own
eyes someone who had an idea in college as an undergraduate, began pursuing
it as an academic exercise in his spare time, and is now working 18 hour
days to make it a reality and build an IPO-able company within a couple of
years. And he's done this up until recently with just a couple of other
student friends as helpers. In other words, he's gotten this far with
*less* academic resources and support than you're getting this semester.
(He told me he wished UWisconsin had offered a course like ICS 691 for him
to take :-). 

Cheers,
Philip