use-us.ie

For an assignment that we had in our last year of college we were asked to conceptualise a business and develop a business plan for it. This was a group project and I joined a group with Gary Flatherty, Damien Burke, Andrew Vaughn and myself.

To decide what business idea we wanted to do we decided to use bubbl.us for brainstorming. We came up with a number of different ideas and conducted a swat analysis on each but the one we settled on was a website that users could submit links to their own websites and get them reviewed for usability, seo, design etc and get feedback from experts and regular users.

We used email and text to communicate and set up a Google wave as a means of collaboration. During these interactions we decided to divide the project up into equal pieces. My section was the revenue mechanism and financial projection.

I developed a projection for what were going to need for one-year vs. what our expected revenue was going to be for the year. After one year we had a loss of just €100, after this point we began to make money. By the third year we had developed the company so that we were able to expand and hire an extra 6 people. Below is a full outline of the project; the executive summary, including is a general description of the product, a description of the customer benefits, the innovative characteristics, a description of our expected users and the revenue mechanism and financial plan.

After we had developed the business plan we also gave a presentation in front of our classmates to 'sell' our product. The PowerPoint is also included below.

Business Plan


Executive Summary

Here is a copy of the PowerPoint we did also.

The Hacking Community

In this blog post I will talk about the Hacking community, with special attention paid to the Hack This Site community. The hacking community is one of many different but related strands. In this paper I talk about the different subcultures of hacking; the computer security culture, the programming subculture and the hacking hobbyist. I also pay particular attention to the hack this site community; talking about the main activities that go on, the channels of communication and the media reports of the group.

Hackers Community

An example of a documentary describing the fight between good hackers(white hats) and bad hackers(black hats)