Market Capitalization

Market capitalization is the total dollar value of a company’s shares. In mathematical formula:

Market capitalization = Number of shares X Price of 1 share

The investment community uses this figure to determining a company’s size, as opposed to sales or total asset figures.

An example, Apple (AAPL) has a 932.15 million shares and the current price of each share is $424.33. Thus, Apple’s market capitalization is $ 395.53 billion.

Starting my MBA

It’s been over a few weeks since I began my MBA program and while one of the classes I wish I had a waiver for, I have thoroughly enjoyed the material being presented. The tools and techniques that I have learnt so far have been enriching.

a. Presentation skills

Loved the lecture on how to be an effective presenter. Thanks to Stephen Friedman for really pointing out how to get people to listen to you. Presentation is a form of story telling and people remember stories better than they do facts. People like themselves more than they like you. And people like to talk more than they like to listen to you talk. How then can we really deliver our message across to the people? I’m still experimenting with this. I’ll continue to experiment with these tips in student group meetings.

b. Case Analysis

Several frameworks were presented by Yvan Baker. I would say that my current problem-solving process is some small subset of the one presented by Yvan but it was still very useful that he outlined all the steps in great detail.

  1. Gather information and identify the problem
  2. Decompose the problem and prioritize
  3. Hypothesize
  4. Recommend
  5. Outline Implementation

c. Framing and reframing, and gaining alternative perspectives

Though it seems common knowledge to open our minds to different perspectives, again it’s always really useful to have it all spelt out in black and white for you. And I think these are great techniques that I can definitely apply for my websites.

It’s time for me to start applying all these lessons learnt to my software business. I can’t really decide what I want to focus on yet but I have some idea on what would be the easiest one for now. Keys to success? Start simple and keep it simple. And listen to your customers to see them guide you through the way.

First Github Project

I finally had the guts to put up my work for public consumption. It’s not much but it is a start. I have been meaning to do it for a good number of months and years but I haven’t really got down to organizing anything as yet. Recently though, I read an article by Tom Preston-Werner who is one of the co-founders of Github. He brings up the idea of “Readme Driven Development” and personally, I think it does make sense.

I’ve been keeping track of all the features of my half-completed projects in a simple textfile – basically a list of how it all works and what the software needs to do. But it’s tough. It’s also pretty disorganized. I’m not sure how great a README file will improve things but I am willing to try. At the very least, forcing myself to think about other people reading my code will get me focused on customers right?

Without further delay, introducing Takoyaki — a simple link manager. Ever since Delicious was sold, things just started to get wonky and cluttered. I had been using a plain old Google Docs to save my links but I thought it might be a simple enough to build a link manager on my own. I decided to use Java in Google App Engine for no real purpose other than to learn it. Haven’t really tested it yet so don’t take my word for it just yet! It should save links for you under your Google Account. I’m hoping to add more features in future releases.