CS 202

Company Project 2: Dot-Com Startup

Introduction: Your goal is to get your parent company to invest in a new direction that will open a new company that sells products on the Internet. You have a great idea, and you think your time has come, but you must convince the people with the millions in the bank that you are right.

Project:

A) Write a report that describes the following: How will your business operate? How will you make money? How long will it take to become profitable? How much start up money do you need, and how would it be budgeted? What competitive strategies will it employ?

B) Turn this report into a webpage. Create a webpage to pitch your idea to venture capitalists. This webpage should explain the product Idea and should include bio information on all of the people in your group. Get a picture of everyone in your group onto the page with bio information (names/addresses can be faked on the webpages).

C) Create an access database for your company. This should include the following: 1) a table for your customers, including information such as the account number (key), name, address, phone, etc. 2) a table for your products. List a product number (key), a price and a brief description. 3) a table for your sales orders that includes fields for the customer account number, the product id number, the quantity of products sold and the date of the transaction. With this data structure and with at least 10 entries in each of the three tables, you will create the following additional objects: 4) a form for data entry of each of the three tables. 5) a query that will pull up all the products sold to people in California (make sure there are some California people who ordered something so this makes sense). 6) a report based on the query (from #5) that will dump out a nicely formatted listing the name and address of the Californians who bought something and what product they bought and how many.

D) Do a comparative case study on another Internet startup success story, such as Ebay, or Yahoo, or Amazon.com. Give their answers to the same questions as you provided in Part A.

E) You also need to find a site that allows you to register new web URLs. It must be a .COM (not a .BIZ or anything else). Make up a catchy web URL for your company, and research to make sure that it has not been taken. Print out the page from a company such a register.com which provides URL registration is possible. You must also find out if the name is taken as a trademark.

Notes: This project will require a considerable amount of technical work. It is up to your group to decide on the division of labor. You can either work together on everything, or assign each member a different task to complete, or some mixture of the two. Make sure that you all see everyone’s work and progress along the way, so that you aren’t surprised at the end of the course by your grade.