Entries in the Category "MEM"
What a week
It gives me an immense pleasure to share with readers of this blog, that yours truly Arpit Gupta has completed an exciting year long journey leading to Masters of Engineering and Management degree on May 18, 2008. Looking back at the year, I have enjoyed every bit of this journey comprising of long working hours, team projects, meetings, documentation and presentations. Beyond doubt I feel greatly excited upon reaching at the other end, but I am surely going to miss everything related to this program. I would like to give special thanks to all faculties in M.E.M. program and TiME staff for organizing this unique program successfully year after year.
This past week I enjoyed attending couple of meetings back to back. One of which was “The Leading EDGE Awards program” organized by Entrepreneurs EDGE to honor the 95 Northeast Ohio value creating companies. Second event was organized by ‘The founder’s café’, a, organization to connect entrepreneurs across North East Ohio and help them out in their various ventures. In the span of two days I met partners, VP’s, CEO’s, Investment bankers, Entrepreneurs (my favorite of course), professors and lot many friends.
These meetings have helped me identify the broad range of organizations that are working to drive value in North East Ohio. I consider myself extremely lucky to have got the chance of working with Entrepreneurs Edge, one such organization in a 2 month internship called as CEO for NEO (Creating Entrepreneurial Organizations for Northeast Ohio). It might sound strange to work on internship after graduation, but for me it’s a one of its kind opportunity to get hands on experience in Entrepreneurship, new product development, and working with various executives and key people of North East Ohio.
Future does looks exciting ahead and will keep all readers updated about my journey.
Mobile Discovery, blog and Web 2.0: Sharing and Collaboration is the key
Case hosted a daylong symposium on Web 2.0 and its impact on May 8, 2008. I lost my detailed notes that I took during the whole event. But, it was really encouraging to see that everyone talked about utilizing different Web 2.0 tools to create an impact on society, employees and company. During a break out session Mobile Discovery, elaborated on the results and impact of 2Dcode trial. Participants of event applauded the trial and took keen interest in exploring Mobile Discovery museum of codes. I still don’t have pictures of gallery, but it comprised of various use cases of 2d codes in trial and mockups of how this technology could be used by advertisers. Click to see an example of one such mock up
Whole MEM team and CASE community would like to thank Mobile Discovery for conducting first of its kind 2d code trial at CASE.
Mobile Discovery
For past eight months me along with my MEM friends are working with Mobile Discovery, a revolutionary startup organization which would redefine the future marketing solutions for advertisers (Call it Marketing 2.0, if you wish). Our role is to carry out a Beta test in CWRU which would help them glean how Mobile Discovery would be accepted by consumers and more essentially to prove their technology to wireless carriers. A quick and simple way to define this technology is “Hyperlink for mobile phones”. A 2d code is just a pattern of black and white colors in a rectangle, but in it is embedded the information about content. You need to download a software on your mobile phone (300 KB-1 MB, depending on the cell phone) called Scan life which turns your “mobile phone into scanner” (Powerful caption to get attention). So, all you have to do is make sure you are connected to a network (Wi-Fi or a data plan provided by wireless carriers) and open this application and you are ready to scan 2d codes and access the content. To download and get going, register at Mobile Discovery (but as of now access is limited to Case community only).
Potential of this technology lies in the fact is that it makes print advertisement interactive, by letting users scan and know more about the product/service that advertisers are trying to sell. Experience of carrying out this test has been really useful to us and Mobile Discovery. We would be pushing our efforts in the remaining one month. I would be updating here more about our progress and results. To read more about the ongoing trial, please read:
CIO.com
Observer Magazine
Update
Last five months since I last posted here, have been a steep learning road for me. I would try to summarize some of the key developments in the past and what's awaiting for me in this post.
My last post in this blog has been selected by Businesspundit in the Management and Leadership category.
Fall 2007 of my Master of Engineering and Management has been really fruitful for me. My group won the prestigious Nottingham Spirk Design Innovation Award and as a team leader for this group it meant a lot for me. Rewards, a 2 foot tall trophy and $1000 donated to Cleveland Institute of Arts in our name.
I was offered the full time role of Business Financial Analyst by Sysmind LLC. I worked on lot of other challenging projects and their results are no less than any achievements for me. This semester in fact ended in a unique journey, I completed my end semester take home exam in flight to Amsterdam and mailed it back to professor upon reaching there.
I enjoyed a good break in India and am back in Cleveland for my final semester of MEM. This time I am not taking any additional elective but my Investment Banking elective is equivalent to two of my last semester electives. This year started in a good note as I was offered the assistantship from American Societies of Material with a good pay of $20/hr.
Its, going to be another challenging journey ahead to juggle around 5 courses, 5 projects, an assistantship, and lots of other work. But who is scared of them.
So, in the words of a great professor, Let the Learning Begin !
Elevator Pitch
Its now six weeks into my MEM program and I could not publish any single post after the introductory post on this blog. I did work on numerous topics that I write about, but they just remained as a Word file in my Laptop. Longer I would take to put my thoughts and ideas on this blog; they would lose its relevance. I spend quite a lot of time reading through long lists of blog feeds and searching on internet to keep myself updated about the technology and business knowledge and developments taking place around me. I came across a term called “Elevator Pitch” an interesting phenomenon which represents presenting your idea/business to your intended audience in a very short time and to meet your objective.
Elevator Pitch is all about selling your idea to potential customer in a short time frame, which as this term indicates is taken to be as an average time it took to complete an elevator ride typically less than a minute. In a business environment, it’s always the case that we would want to pass on the message to the desired person/entity to get them triggered towards our business. In a Business to Business (B2B) scenario, if Elevator pitch represents the right requirement of what other business organization is looking for, then it could result in a possible follow up to award your organization a contract leading to your business growth!
Recently, I came across the usage of this term in the context of Venture Capitalist (VC) Funding. An entrepreneur seeking investment from a VC would have just few minutes to speak about their proposal and you are expected to speak everything that is important about your venture in a nice and crisp manner such that VC gets triggered towards your venture and gives you a follow up meeting time. If you miss this opportunity, chances are that you would never get a chance to speak this VC again; so in Economics jargon a LOST Opportunity. I believe Elevator pitch is not limited to speech; but other forms of communications as well like Email, advertisement, self made videos(yes new form of marketing technique), hand written documents, etc. No body reads full email or full form of your message. What he/she takes out of this would depend on your understanding of requirement of your reader.
Another area where I find Elevator Pitch pretty common is Business to Customer scenarios. Customer gets interested in your product if you market it rightly and sell them the features they are interested in buying. So, Elevator Pitch is an important Marketing and Public Relations strategy and if used in a right manner would result in growth for your organization.
Introduction
Hi,
I am Arpit Gupta, a student of MEM class of 2008 and I am from India. I would make an honest attempt to blog frequently here about my learnings from my Masters of Engineering Management program here at CASE. I have been blogging earlier at http://lifeanendlessjoy.blogspot.com/
I have good amount of experience with various conferences, projects and prsentations that I have done in my four years of engineering. You can have a look at my resume at my Website.
I look forward to contributing here and would like to see comments from MEM students, faculty, staff and all the other readers.