links for 2007-08-01
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I really like this FORTUNE blog. Very tech-savvy with some credible business perspective.
July 31st, 2007
Archive for July, 2007
links for 2007-07-20
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Aye caramba. Shades of Long-Term Capital Management.
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What would you do with 40 gigabits per second?
July 19th, 2007
links for 2007-07-17
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Great location for a condo. The quotes are enjoyable…even at the closing table these guys are selling.
July 16th, 2007
links for 2007-07-14
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Good idea in theory, but this app does require some desktop components for people to install. The banks will eventually need to provide this on their own.
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ME TOO. Fun with numbers: if you assume 700K new iPhone owners, and 11% were with Sprint, that means Sprint lost 77,000 subscribers (!). Gee, maybe Sprint would have “fired” them anyway?
July 13th, 2007
links for 2007-07-11
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I don’t see it. Lots of people have experience starting businesses, but it’s the harvest where you prove your worth. Also, “fully funded to profitability” does NOT equal return on invested capital.
July 10th, 2007
links for 2007-07-10
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I forgot about this article when it came out last year. Brilliant tactic…the shame of being rejected is too much for most people.
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Uh oh, no more futures contracts for Southwest? Nice while it lasted.
July 9th, 2007
Red Hat Challenge Results: 7th Place! (OLPC-related)
I wrote a bit on competing in the Red Hat Challenge. The contest, which completed back in March, involved (1) assembling a team of 4 MBA students and (2) producing a document outlining a new way for Red Hat to make money. Well, seems like Red Hat liked it a LOT. We finished 7th Place! That was out of:
- 144 Schools
- 344 Teams
- 978 Contestants from 15 Countries
Not bad at all!
Here are the official results:
Have you ever competed in something where you knew that you did well? Maybe a marathon, or a bike ride, or an intramural softball game. Somewhere along the way you felt really good about the level of effort you were putting into it. Maybe it was a good sustainable pace, or a couple of tough catches in the outfield. Well just from our initial outline I felt like we had a winner.
What was the idea? It was a play on the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative. Here’s a snippet of what we submitted:
Red Hat is one of the six founders of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization. We propose that Red Hat support the proliferation of the XO laptop by building volunteer support communities, recruited from middle school, high school, and undergraduate students of means, mainly located in the local OLPC participant countries. The volunteer communities will train, support, and tutor the XO users, providing this service on a remote basis and with a small on-site presence. Red Hat will supply the online training programs and support the community in the first 5 years before the community becomes self-sustaining.
Part of the problem of OLPC, we felt, was that there was a total dearth of a support system to help kids (and their parents) once these laptops were in their hands. Surprisingly, we could not find an OLPC advocate of this pressing issue. After all, you can’t just airdrop these laptops and walk away. Yet that’s exactly what one OLPC volunteer suggested:
Edward Cherlin, a volunteer with the OLPC project, says he expects children will respond enthusiastically to the opportunity to learn how to do their own machine maintenance. “Any sufficiently nerdy 12-year-old can beat out an adult on learning computer software and hardware any day. We don’t recognize the existence of nerds in village societies because they traditionally have nothing to be nerdy about, but they are there. So the cost is nearly nothing, as long as the manuals are free in electronic form.”
Seriously! Enjoy your leap of faith.
Red Hat, we feel, is in just as good a position as any to offer a wide variety of training and troubleshooting services to the OLPC community, and our strategy reflected that belief. As for the part about making money? Well, since it’s a volunteer effort, no revenue is being realizing immediately. The monetization would come in the form of increased awareness of the Red Hat brand in these countries, reflected in higher future sales as these countries continue to emerge and develop into viable technology providers. So there you go.
All credit goes to the team, which consisted of 3 fellow classmates in the McCombs TEMBA program. We used our allotted two weeks brainstorming, choosing, developing, and refining our idea, quite vigorously I might add. It’s typical in evening MBA programs for classmates to be unable to meet in person for projects, so we spent a lot of time on Skype and email. And it went right down to the wire…final edits were going in 20 minutes before the deadline.
Our early focus was trying to come up with a idea so unique that it would stick out from the crowd. I think it’s fair to say we achieved that goal.
July 9th, 2007
