I am a college student with a major in business administration studying information systems, which tell you a lot about this blog. I was recently in a class that assigned a group project to create an e-business, and then present these ideas to the class. My group came up with a very feasible e-business idea which I will not divulge to protect my group members that might want to follow through with the idea, but I will rant and rave about some of the other groups projects and the issues that make them seemingly outlandish.
3rd Place: Wait, I am going to pay $300 for that?
One main issue I had with most of the groups was that most of the ideas already exist. This group hoped to reduce the cost of textbook for college students by selling electronic copies of textbooks, and by selling pocket-size PDA hardware to view these files. Definitely not an invalid idea, some people might like this idea, but I was not as easily convinced. Here my problem, you can buy textbooks in an electronic file format through many publishers, and they have hardware that you can use to store these files and view them at you leisure, it is called a laptop. Increasing number of students bring their computer to class, and a hand held PDA would be impractical for most textbooks because of the multimedia aspects needed. It would be very difficult to store such large files on a PDA device that they proposed would only have 256 MB of storage. This system seems a little outlandish.
2nd Place: Find the cheapest textbooks near you!!
I feared that this group would have the same problem as the group before when they took the reign of the classroom, but I was thoroughly surprised as they shocked me with an even bigger blunder. Their idea was to have a website where local bookstores would be able to post the prices of every book in their store and students (target market) would be able to search for the book they needed for class, and the query would result in a form of where the book could be found and the prices for each store. I go to a college where you either shop at the bookstore on campus, or at the locally owned store just off of campus. The problem arises because these two stores obviously know what the other is selling, and there would be no incentive for either store to give this valuable data to students. As it stood last semester, the off campus store sold textbooks at around $1-$5 less than the bookstore on campus. I understand that textbooks are expensive, but is an entire website applicable to a less than half a percentage discount? I think not. My reaction to their project was simple, Half.com. If you have never used the site to buy textbooks, you are missing out. Save money, and make money very easily with this subsidiary of eBay.
1st Place: It's cheaper than porn!
I became inspired to create this post when my favorite group in the class got up to present. A very optimistic group throughout the semester, this group always had the most positive outlook for the future and always put their game faces on when giving a presentation. Their e-business was simple, get every sports game ever shown on TV and put it on a website. When this idea was presented I could not help but chuckle a little bit. Maybe it's possible, maybe. They gave their argument to how cool it would be to download streaming videos of the Chicago Bulls 1996 championship season, or watch a cricket game (match?) anytime that you wanted, but I failed to see the legitimacy of their plan. My first problem was the shear scope of this project, and all the data and files that would have to be uploaded and obtained. Yes, YouTube has a lot of videos, but that's because they have millions of users that upload these videos every day. This doesn't mean that putting every sporting event ever published on a website would be simple or practical, but again if it actually could happen it would be SWEET!
Add to this the fact that the NHL, NFL, NBA, MLB, ICC (International Cricket Council), AFL, PBA, MLS, CFL, NLL, WNBA, PGA, ATP, WTA, IndyCar, and NASCAR to name a few, would ever agree to giving up these tightly held copyrights to a website that was proposed as being an offshoot of ESPN. There is a reason why ESPN can't air NHL games anymore, its because TV networks love money, and so do sports leagues and all the parties involved. To top the cake off, the group proposed a pricing system that I personally thought was hilarious, by offering memberships at around $50 per year to watch unlimited games from your personal computer. I'm not sure $50 per year would support the royalties for one Yankees inning, let alone a website that's mission is to have available every single sports game in the history of broadcasting and like I said, that's way cheaper than internet porn
The rest of the groups had some pretty good ideas, many were already in place, but these seemed to be the most outlandish of the bunch.
