Monthly Archives: April 2012

AAPL: a view from the top of the heap

A blog post that John passed along:

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2012/04/14/a-decade-of-apple-visualized.aspx

An excerpt:

I’ve compiled more than 10 years of operating data on the Mac maker, starting with the first quarter of fiscal 2002, the fiscal quarter when the iPod was launched — and I’m happy to share my findings with you, my Foolish reader. Let’s take an illustrative trip down memory lane and see the inner workings of Apple’s meteoric rise to become the largest company in the world over the past decade.

Final Assignment Instructions

Final Assignment – to be presented and turned in Thursday, 5/3

Many of our discussions have focused on the strengths and weaknesses of well-known companies like Facebook, Zynga, Amazon, Twitter, and Yelp. For the final assignment, you and your team will consider how you would take down a leader in the field of information-centered ventures. You’ll analyze the market, assess the competition, develop a the outline of a business model, and formulate a market entry strategy. Your deliverables:

  • A seven minute presentation to be delivered to the class with the elements above (Please e-mail your presentation to Paul before class and make sure to bring handouts of your slides – 4 to a page is fine.)
  • A five page paper in the style of a “memo to the board” that details your approach. Use 11 point type, one inch margins, and 1.5 spacing.

Two notes: Yelp is off limits given that we already spent a class session considering how to take on Yelp. If your group is short on inspiration, talk to us for help in coming up with a good target company.

Team Assignments

Team 1:

Ariel C, Andrew C, Brendan C and Travis Y

Team 2:

Ian D, Philipp G, and Lena Hoeck

Team 3:

Casey L, Kari M, and Thomas M

Team 4:

Prayag N, Angel R, and Darya S

Questioning Gamification, and some unintended consequences

Ian mentioned CowClicker today, and I highly recommend reading this article about Ian Bogost and his quest to make a point about the rise of social games of the Zynga variety:

http://m.wired.com/magazine/2011/12/ff_cowclicker/all/1

An excerpt:

Remembering his cow-clicker idea, Bogost threw together a bare-bones Facebook game in three days. The rules were simple to the point of absurdity: There was a picture of a cow, which players were allowed to click once every six hours. Each time they did, they received one point, called a click. Players could invite as many as eight friends to join their “pasture”; whenever anyone within the pasture clicked their cow, they all received a click. A leaderboard tracked the game’s most prodigious clickers. Players could purchase in-game currency, called mooney, which they could use to buy more cows or circumvent the time restriction. In true FarmVille fashion, whenever a player clicked a cow, an announcement—”I’m clicking a cow“—appeared on their Facebook newsfeed.

And that was pretty much it. That’s not a nutshell description of the game; that’s literally all there was to it. As a play experience, it was nothing more than a collection of cheap ruses, blatantly designed to get players to keep coming back, exploit their friends, and part with their money. “I didn’t set out to make it fun,” Bogost says. “Players were supposed to recognize that clicking a cow is a ridiculous thing to want to do.”

Bogost launched Cow Clicker during the NYU event in July 2010. Within weeks, it had achieved cult status among indie-game fans and social-game critics. Every “I’m clicking a cow” newsfeed update served as a badge of ironic protest. Players gleefully clicked cows to send a message to their FarmVille-loving friends or to identify themselves as members of the anti-Zynga underground. The game began attracting press on sites like TechCrunch and Slashdot.