Month: June 2014

Advice of the Day- “A Dollar Today is Worth More Tomorrow”

image_title_qpfa5
By: Eli Karam
Any student studying business has heard this phrase over and over again. I remember the first time I heard this was from my first finance professor at Bentley University, and she explained it very vividly. She explained that with money, you have two options; either spend it, or you can invest in it and watch it grow. Now for everyone thinking about inflation and that the dollar can decrease in value throughout the years, that’s not the meaning of it.

If you are in college and have at least $1000 in your bank account, (or in liquid cash under the mattress) you are not utilizing the benefits of increasing your value. Yes, it may be risky…but we also know that HIGHER THE RISK, HIGHER THE RETURN! All I’m getting at is that you should really start looking at other ways to grow your dollar worth, whether it be in stocks, bonds, real estate, start-ups, etc.

For me I’ve lost money and I’ve made some, but only because I took that risk. When I was 19, I invested $900 in Kraft (KRFT) and lost 3/4 of my money, because at the time I didn’t think about future mergers and what not, but still to this day I learned from my mistakes. All I’m saying is you don’t have to be a business savant to know how to manage your money. If you want to be “good” then keep that money in the bank account and spend it when you need, but if you want to be “great” and have that EntreWolf passion…invest, invest,invest!

Google Wants More Women in Coding

Google Glasses of the Future
By: Eli Karam
Google has announced that they are unleashing a new program, in hopes to create more diversity for their IT departments. Woman hold about a quarter of IT jobs, but Google wants to fix this by paying for “thousands” of female tech workers to learn and discover the basics in coding. Google will be offering Code School and self learning courses in hopes to motivate more females into careers in IT. Of course computer programming is no joke, the mathematics and scientific equations behind it is indeed a different language, but it is the future.

 

 

Getting Mad at the Girl Who Wont SnapChat You Back? Well with Facebook’s New App ‘Slingshot’ ….You’re Safe

shot_2-2
By: Eli Karam
With Facebook being pretty much underwater, and Instagram getting somewhat redundant, there’s a new app in town and its called Slingshot. Facebook announced it last week and it will be a main competitor for Snapchat. The app lets you take a quick photo or video, touch it up, add some wording to it, and then send it off to your friends. But what’s so different about it then Snapchat?

In Slingshot, you can’t see the incoming “shot” until you actually send a shot right back to the sender. This creates effort on both sides because its not just about telling your story, its about asking others for their story”, says Slingshot designer Joey Flynn. To me, Slingshot seems to require an ample amount of effort, for most people their days are busy and don’t have time to “shoot” back unless its pertinent to their situation. A plus side of this new app is it gives you the ability to quickly react to posts with either a selfie, or text comment. Unlike on Snapchat where users feel the need to cover the camera and send a black picture back to the person. It’s hard to see which app will take the win, but competition is imperative for any business, so lets keep the dice rolling in the tech world for 2014.

What Jay Gatsby Has Taught Us About Business & Being an EntreWolf

20121221152652

By: Eli Karam
“I always knew I could climb, but I knew I could only climb if I climbed alone”

I recently watched Martin Scorsese’s The Great Gatsby and I finally realized why my junior year high school teacher was so fixated on us understanding every aspect about the novel. The whole story is about the American Dream; about striving for success and reaching your goals. The whole idea of “new money vs. old money”, becoming successful and winning the girl of your dreams is imperative to Gatsby or any man in that matter.

What Can We Learn from Jay Gatsby? Well if you enjoy the art of business and understand what Gatsby did to get where he’s at, you should’ve picked up many signs in the film/novel on how to execute it properly. He was an ordinary man, but he didn’t want to be ordinary or good…he wanted to be great brother! Gatsby is indeed an EntreWolf because he knew what had to be done in order for him to succeed, he took risks, and he was a people person. In life, or for any young wolf who wants to do it on their own remember this…a good business man is a people’s person. Gatsby was generous, and threw notorious parties so people labeled him as a prosperous individual. Sometimes you got to do it on your own, keep going, don’t give up. To climb the ladder of success, work hard and you’ll reach it; and thats what we can take away from Jay Gatsby as America’s most lucrative EntreWolf in the 1920’s.

Can RadioShack Compete in this Market

Radioshack2
By: Eli Karam
Shares of RadioShack plunged on Tuesday after devastating first quarter results. With a loss of $0.97 per share, the electronics retailer store declared a dismal loss of $98.3 million, to close at $1.38.

Their competitor, BestBuy just boosted its dividend by 12% (raising it from 17 cents per share to 19 cents per share). This of course was a tremendous factor in RadioShacks share price. Best Buy CEO Hubery Joly stated “our decision to increase the amount of cash we are returning to shareholders is indicative of our improved cash position and our confidence in the cash generating power of out multi channel business model”.

RadioShack unfortunately is said to close 200 stores which is about 5% of U.S based stores. Unless we see new innovative products come out by new partnerships with the company such as PCH and Quirky, they will just have to put their caps back on and take one for the team.

E3 2014, Whats to Come for the Future of Gaming

By: Eli Karam
Now I’m not a big gamer; I was back in my prime but it just doesn’t benefit me the way it used to. I like to consider myself a simple guy, I still remember the days where I would come home from school, turn on my PlayStation 1 and play Crash Bandicoot or Spyro and that would suffice. Even today I enjoy playing those games just because it brings me back to my childhood and I’m able to see how far the video game industry has evolved…Who knows, maybe ill come around this year.

In other news the most extensive week in gaming is around the corner, E3 2014 is here! And of course Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo are all competing for who can make the loudest roar. This year the launch is more focused on games rather than hardware, and its pretty impressive of whats to come. Microsoft after failing to convince consumers that their Kinect free product was much more than just a regular video game console, now has to really “wow” gamers. While Nintendo is still dishing out the Wii U, which didn’t hit quarterly estimates as expected, Sony is still eradicating both of them in the win with the PlayStation 4.