Final Reflection

I would not say that I could pinpoint any assignment to be the most formative experience. I would say that doing the interviews helped me to get new ideas and redefined what I needed to create and look for. It also helped me to feel comfortable talking about my idea and gave me insight on the best ways to explain it to someone.

The experience I will remember years from now is the absurdity of having to do three of these assignments a week and a cupcake quiz. It was hard enough to be able to complete three assignments, but some of the assignments needed to be planned for and would not be possible to complete last minute. In one of my previous posts, I noted that planning is essential for this course. The cupcakes did not seem like a good way to enhance learning in this class. They focused more on specific moments or topics covered but did not seem to focus on the overall takeaways from Dr. Pryor's lectures.

My most joyous experience is the one I am having right now knowing that this is going to be my last post for this class. This class requires a lot of writing and I am glad that I was able to make it this far.

I am proud of completing as many assignments as I did. I had no intention of doing every single one and I didn’t. I am proud that I should still be able to get an A in this course knowing that I wasn’t going to have to do every single assignment.

I think that the entrepreneurial mindset has become real for me. I am constantly thinking about the way things are done around me and how I can make it better for the people who need it! It has caused me to think about things from all perspectives when making decisions about how to do things.

One recommendation I would make to future students is to always plan and view assignments early so that you know what you will need to do in order to get it done on time. In order to foster this mindset, do not be afraid to come out of your comfort zone and feel embarrassed. Always have a willingness to try!

The Currency Traders Venture Concept 2

Opportunity

               This opportunity arose with the new anti-money laundering act for cryptocurrency. This called for a necessity for personal information to be associated with each trade between currencies. It was noted that this technology does not yet exist. This problem is going to directly affect the bitcoin firms and other cryptocurrency traders. This act calls for the legal requirements of the firms and trader to reveal personal information between the trading platforms. Based on my research, this market is all over the world. Cryptocurrency firms are found throughout the world and I noticed a cluster of them in South Florida. This is where we intend to begin operations. They are currently satisfying their needs by the traditional trading methods. This can now cause legal repercussions, but anonymity has been huge in these trades. This is a big opportunity to provide a service directly to the government and local business in Florida. This window of opportunity will only be around until someone designs an information system capable of transmitting the information. I believe that even if someone else creates it, we can still develop one that will function more efficiently and safely.

Innovation

               We have begun creating an information system that will use unique uuids from the servers to attach the personal information encryptions. An informational video will be used to demonstrate how to use and navigate our platform. We are planning to use fingerprints to generate the uuids and keep this methodology as a safety mechanism. This will allow users to trade by scanning their fingerprint and their personal information will be sent encrypted with the trade information. This information system will communicate with your existing servers to send and receive the data. We are hoping this will be our secret sauce because the complexity of this system and the exclusive knowledge of its functions with my software developer and me. We want to keep safety a priority and we plan to create or recommend our own security software or one that will work with the information system. We plan to charge a percentage of the transactions in the form of a transaction fee. Starting at a 5% fee of the transaction volume, we plan to use this money to fuel our innovation and development for further improvements and fixes that may arise. This money could also be used to fund our next innovation of setting up a currency trading platform so that users can go directly through us rather than using another firm that is using our information system.

Venture Concept

               This information system is designed to transmit your information safely when trading. It was the norm to keep anonymity when trading currencies, but legal repercussions may follow if changes aren’t implemented. I think it will cause users to consider our product because of the legal repercussions that maybe facing if they have not already found a solution. The biggest concern I have is establishing credibility among investors and prospective customers. Our competitors could be the existing cryptocurrency firms. If they are trying to develop the information system themselves then we are directly competing with them. Their weakness comes from the fact that this technology did not already exist in their current operations. We have also decided to put a strong emphasis on the customer support will we provide. Problems may arise and we want to be there to troubleshoot and listen to the feedback so we can make better decisions with further development. I plan to start operations in South Florida. Targeting the existing firms there will give us useful information and feedback we will use to tailor our next steps. I plan to keep the business small to start. The software developer and I will launch the idea ourselves. My role will be in negotiations and arranging contacts. I also intend to provide support to the customers along with the software developer. We won’t need an office right away and already have begun development from home. From here, we hope to expand throughout Florida and continue development for the country potentially with the assistance from the government. In the next five years, I would see myself constantly traveling and visiting different countries to share this information system. This venture will provide a foundation for me to build off of and continue to expand my and the company’s horizons.

Summary of feedback and changes: My previous venture concept post did not receive any feedback from my assigned group. Based on some of the interviews I had, I have decided to create an informative video to explain how to use or platform and possibly include some information on how to do some basic troubleshooting. We have also decided to keep our business small in the beginning and start off with what we have right now. We agreed that finding another person at this time would be expensive and unnecessary until we have more demand for services. We were told to keep it as simple and easy to use as possible and we will do our best to make sure it is easy to use and troubleshoot. It will be a lot easier for us to start with what we have right now than to try and receive funding from external sources. Our main concern was establishing credibility and we do not want something like that to hold us back from development.