Financial Plan

A. Formation of capital
1. Investment
Attracting investors: Business can use the number of visitors and results of the surveys to prove the value that the business provides to its customers. Companies which are interested in short term investment can buy capital stock.
2. Liabilities
Long-term liability: bank loan; bond payable
Short-term liability: accounts payable to servers; notes payable to suppliers
3. Alliance
Co-operate with big mobile companies in future.

B. Managing Cost

Cost of hardware (11%): sever computers; routers; firewalls and load balancing devices
Cost of software (10%): licenses for operating systems; Web sever software; database software and application software
Web site design and game development work outsourced (6%)
Salaries for employees involved in the project (55%)
Cost of maintaining the site (5%)
Cost of redesign the site (13%)

Technology Plan

Requirements
Web Server Hardware
Our web site is a transaction-processing site. It must be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We must have spare server computers for handling high traffic volumes that occur periodically. The web site must run Web and commerce software that is efficient and easily upgraded when the site traffic increase.
Two-Tier Client/Server Architecture is necessary and enough for our web site. All communication takes place on the Internet between the client and the server. There are other computers involved in transporting packers of information across the Internet. But the messages are created and read only by the client and the server computers.
We can use a decentralized architecture. The decentralized architecture spreads that risk over a large number of servers. And the smaller servers are less expensive. However, a load-balancing system is necessary to monitors the workloads of servers and to assign incoming web traffic to the server that has most available capacity at that instant in time.

A summary of some estimated:
1. The database of Web page information will require about 80MB of disk space.
2. The database management software itself will require about 300MB of disk space.
3. About 3000 customers will play the game during the first month, and site traffic will grow about 40 percent each month during the first two years.
4. The site should accommodate a peak traffic load of 1000 visitors at one time.
Web Server Software
We will use Apache HTTP Server as the server software.
Finger can be used for users to obtain some information about other network users.
Route-tracing programs such as tracert can be used to send a series of data packets to every mobile phone and to measure the time of the entire path.
Server is able to detect the approximate position of each active mobile station. Push data to active stations and pull data out of them to keep track of their status periodically.
It is proper to use self-hosting for us because of our existing information technology staff of programmers, Web designers and network engineers.
Web site development tool is Macromedia Dreamweaver.
Payment System
Credit Card, such as a Visa or a MasterCard.
Electronic Cash
Mobile phone Bill
Security
Usernames and passwords provide some element of protection.
Each players identity is registered and kept in server database.
A firewall can be installed at the Internet entry point of a networked system.
Data packets between mobile and server are encrypted.
Special Requirement
Multiple servers may be allocated island wide to take care of certain amount of mobile coverage cells. Each server only deal with the active players within its range. They upload and download players’ information from a central server. Therefore synchronization between the central server and distribution servers are necessarily to be ensured. Moreover, when the player moves from one area to another, handover technique should be implemented.
Assumption
The network condition is not concerned in our scope. Because it’s a issue of our partners, the servers providers’. We only promise availability with the stable network.

Organizational Structure

The marketing department detects the trend of current market. New demand in the market will be quickly fed back to the decision making board (lead by CEO and formed by head officers). It enables LemonT do fast responses to the dynamic market and seize the chances to expand its business.
Technological department is also a very important portion of LemonT. It develops the product of the company, and also provides hardware implementations the wireless network to achieve faster and more stable infrastructure. As a high-tech company, Technological department is also responsible on training of our employees to meet the need of future. We require our technological employees to be creative and learn beyond the current needs to provide leading products.
The financial department does financial forecast and reports of the company. It monitors the company’s financial status to keep the company a positive growth throughout its development.
There will also be seminar sessions between different employees from different departments to exchange the progress of projects and opinions on the changing business world. This enhances the integrity of LemonT, and also provides a good source of good new ideas for the decisions.

Operating Strategy

By focusing on promotion of the new game, LemonT will effectively implement a niche differentiation strategy in a somewhat diverse marketplace. Its target market consists of net game player, mobile phone user and mobile game player. However, due to the proliferation of mobile phone and the growth in technology, there are more mobile game players in the market. This will reduce the difficulty to introduce mobile game to consumer. LemonT will maintain a long-term relationship with StarHub to develop mobile game and provide the related service for mobile phone user. LemonT’s staff focuses on the further development and marketing of the mobile game.

I, as a technological supervisor, will focus more on technological issues. However, exchange of opinions with other colleagues of finace and marketing is also important. This may bring new ideas into technology development.

Business Plan Extract

LemonT Game Company is a small corporation in the first year of development. The company sells mobile phone games and provides the server for the game in the wireless networks. The games are mainly for education and entertainment and are built with leading mobile communication technologies. A major aim for LemonT is to make high profits and cover the expense in short period. LemonT’s 3 employees face promotion challenges, as LemonT’s business just started this year without any credit and reputation. An evaluation of the company’s internal strengths and weaknesses and external opportunities and threats served as the foundation for this strategic analysis and marketing plan. The plan focuses on the company’s growth strategy, suggesting ways in which it can build on existing wireless net, and on the development of new products and/or services targeted to specific customer niches. Since LemonT Company markets a game and a server, it currently is considered a business-to-customers marketer.
The objective of this business plan is to promote the newly developed mobile game “The Great Voyage”, introduce the technical components involved, discuss its marketing issues and conduct a financial forecast on this product.

Intertainer

After reading the case study essay, i have a strong feeling that security is most important issue on such services and will be more critical if it moves to mobile.
to protect the contents, fight against hackers and privacy thefts, is a very important job in very near future. I think its one of my career opportunities:)
maybe i'd read more on this

Shanda?

i found that i dunno shanda at all... is it because of it does more B2B?
however, i know those names of online games. seems they really owns a great market.
i dun like this company because it earns money purely from these games and from those ppl who are not able to ear money themselves (most likely students). in another word, they are earning money from the parents who may not want to their children to play such games.
i'd rather say such a market is not good for the society although its huge.
business for those ppl who can earn money themselves will be more mature and has more potential to last long. i dun think the online gamers now will spend money for their children to repeat their joys when they are old. therefore, an idea to make mobile and online source earn money from business ppl is better, richer and longer.:)

oops~~

almost one month away from here~~ :P
during this month, i had a lot of projects to do and was not able to update this blog with some really infomatic contents. anyway, now i can summarize some gaining related to this subject during this month.

actually i spent much time on MB362, learning to do Flash. I was always wanting to do flash but lack of motivation. this subject's requirement on flash representation drives me towards learning Flash from 0. Luckily, i found it is not difficult and may be more interesting than i imagined. now i am able do simple animations and controls of flash, and am really happy about this. i believe having such a start, later i can go on with flash to developing aspect and have more fun on that.

and things are happening around us during this month, too. The 3 GSM World Congress was held in Cannes, France. From the discussion during that congress, we can see the competetion brought by 3G is worldwide. Big companies are awared of the new power coming into the market and new potatos are fancy to get the chance of having a 3G license. in each country, ppl are talking abt how to make 3G bring money to ppl locally, but there are few thoughts on the global standardization. this is because no one is willing to share the local piece of cake with some outsiders, and protect their market locally. this is good for a short-term plan, but, well, i dunno if its good in long term view.

Original News

StarHub seems to be leading the mobile data service providing insdustry recently. Instead of developing themselves, they used to borrow technologies from outside. last time is DoCoMo, and now is blackberry again. This is a good way to earn money for a company like starhub, but not so good an idea to develop local mobile technology providers. Singapore based companies had better to develop systems very suitable to the local conditions to attract contracts from local service providers. An idea fits Singapore will be a survival key for those small companies.

Original News

A new starhub move towards the leading mobile service provider. NTT DoCoMo is the top mobile player in Japanese market. When we are admire that japanese handphones have so many wonderful functions, we should know DoCoMo is the giant behind. Although in japan it has a different network support, it's very similar to the 3G capability coming soon. SO i believe with their help, Starhub is going to have an advantage in the 3G service competetion.

Learning log

This week the main subject is the flash presentation of the projects.
I think most of the teams did quite well in their flashes, although might be simple, they are interesting.
However, i have to say some of them are not clear enough. After watching them, i still dunno what they prepare to do and what is their advantages.
For our team, i think its quite good since from start learning doing flash till the final product, there were only 3 days. and i think our idea is also quite good. It will be a mix of various games (adventure, simulation, and roleplay, etc) and have mobile network capability. hope one day we can really play such game in real life:)

Original News

--"It's the first time Wi-Fi has outpaced Ethernet, an achievement attributed to growing Wi-Fi support among broadband providers."

WiFi finally found a chance to exceed. but whether this time is just like a spot light of it is a mile stone we dunno yet. although wireless taking over the current network is just a matter of time, whether it is wifi or other technology can achieve this task remains a question. before wifi grows mature, i believe new things will come out and lead the wave of wireless.

Learning log

For last seminar, i was quite interested in the market segmentation part and the revenue models. I guess except the ways of segment the market and the models taught in the lessons, there should be some new creative ways of thinking about the market. When everyone thinks abt the market similarly, refer to the similar set of models, if a new guy can come out with some thing no one dare to do before, it will definitely lead him to success:)
but this may depend on the luckiness bah...

Original Review

MPx is moto's smartest product. After MPx 200 and MPx 220 as simpler version, MPx finally came out.
It is such a hign-end product that I think ppl like me will never get the chance to use it. now it is too expensive for me, and when i am rich enough, there must be some better phones already :p

but we can still see some market trends from this product. although it may not earn as much money as moto's other classic product as E398, it is the sign of technology. More than provide the high-end users an option from moto, this product also shows that moto is strong enough to develop such complecated phones. and therefore not only the users of MPx, even ppl cannot by those expensive phones will have a good image of moto.

I guess this is a more important reason for manufactures fighting in the battle field of the high-end products. They are not making more money from them, but showing off their power through them.

Btw, this week we came out the idea of the product. although it has not been solidated, but i like the idea and hope we can develop a good project from it:)