The Fun of Running a Virtual Business

It all begun on a Thursday morning after we had been made aware of the impending adventure some few days back. We were seated in our lecture room when the Master of Simulation aka MS (yeah, just like in Master of Ceremony, MC) came to give us a brief introduction to the simulator hereby called Marketplace Live and set the rules for what will become a 7-day long business simulation exercise full of ups and downs.

On this day, we had a lecture on culture which was supposed to prepare us for building the culture of our virtual companies. It is said that, building the culture of your company is as crucial as your desire to see your company succeed (are you confused? Never mind am the only who says this).

But wait, something very interesting happened prior to the lecture on culture, it was the team formation. The MS selected 7 people hereby called buyers from amongst the 26 in class and gave them $1,000,000 to bid for the members of their team. This exercise exposed the miserly in the class. Though the money was virtual, some buyers were unwilling to spend (can you believe that). Eventually when the spending begun, guess how much a valuable human being was bidded for, $50,000 (he knows himself) and no one gave a counter bid. And so it happened that we all finally had team mates, some were in groups of 5, some 4 and others 3.

Day 2 which was a Friday started the whole game officially. All the teams by now had a name for their companies as well as all the culture. Company names included Pineloop, Horce Inc, Torus, Iris, AWC (aka AWotse Computers), AxiComm Inc and OakMac. I was the buyer for the Horce company and formed a wonderful team of 4 (you will see why we're wonderful later).

From day 2 to day 4, companies put in place strategies and investments into winning market share and having a good balance scorecard score.

Day 5, a Tuesday was the investor fair. Companies that needed capital injection could raise up to $4,000,000 to continue to push their companies into taking control of the micro computer manufacturing industry. My team needed to raise the maximum amount and so we participated in the investor fair. As at this quarter, our company had just 1% of the total market share, this position was a difficult one for us, we were not strong per our books to make a strong case for the investors to believe in us.

At the fair, our only point of argument was that we had a market research which no team had and so we could use this to soar up our market share by 15%. Though we spoke confidently, some investors did not believe we could salvage our current situation.

But funny enough when the time came for the real investments even though our books told a different story, out of the 6 investors present only 2 declined to invest in our company; can you believe that? A company that was in debt, had a meagre 1% market share and virtually had no proven industry expertise was able to raise 4 million dollars in investment! The excitement amongst my team members was just overwhelming.

But as the saying goes, don’t just talk the talk but walk the walk; and that’s exactly what we did. The next quarter did not only see us move from 1% market share to 16% market share (we predicted this, yes we did), but we were also out of debt, we had lots of resources at our disposal and most importantly we now had a deeper understanding of our industry and knew exactly what to do to grow from strength to strength.

Meanwhile on the other side, some teams were still gambling, others were neck deep in debt, while the rest wondered what the heck just happened to their market share! Well, business is like life itself, you think it's a game  but then things get real and you realize it's no longer a game.

After Day 6 came day 7, the day for the announcement of the winners of the whole simulation exercise. To keep things short my team won (that is Team Horce). We emerged from the bottom to beat the top giants in the market. We were the black horses, yet we never despaired. Interestingly, the market giants at the start of the game now were market followers, some knee-deep in debt.

It was a week long of mixed feelings, frustration and happiness all bundled up in a “game”. It brought our emotions and joys of being an entrepreneur to reality. Virtual world or not.

Valuable lessons were learnt on business, risk and most importantly team work.  That is after all the entrepreneurial life.

Thanks to: Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology, MEST 2015 year group, Kingsley Abrokwah (@Paapakwame) and Anirudh Narla.

Introducing A New Free Transcription Tool For Journalists Especially

The common task of a Ghanaian journalist who wants to transcribe a recording of a speech will require that journalist to open a text editor, start an audio player and know keyboard commands in order to control playback. The combination of these tasks is more of a herculean task for the journalist who cannot afford to hire a transcriber at a fee. Besides the tedious task is the precious time spent going to-and-fro a recorded speech and open windows.

For those journalists who go through this pain regularly, the time has come to heave a sigh of relief. oTranscribe is committed to making transcription a stress free activity. oTranscribe is a web application that will take the pain out of transcribing recorded interviews. This means, you will need not to be changing between open windows and applications. You will get the chance to control the audio playback on the same page where the typing is being done.

How it works

Logon on to www.oTranscribe.com in a browser that supports HTML 5 and click on 'start transcribing' button.

Now, load the audio recording into the browser using the 'choose audio file' button. Your audio can now be played at the top of the typing page. Controlling playback is easy, you can either use the buttons at the top of the screen to rewind, pause or fast-forward, or you can use keyboard shortcuts (F1, F2  to move forwards/backwards in time and Esc to pause) or jump directly to a point in the timeline.

Below the loaded audio recording is a text box where you can start transcribing.

Cool and nice features

The speed of the playback can be controlled. This will be useful when you want to differentiate certain words that sound similar. F3 and F4 are the keyboard shortcuts for controlling the speed.

You can add a time stamp by pressing Ctrl+J. This will insert the time stamp into the text, and clicking it jumps straight back to that point in the recording.

Your finished transcription can be saved to Google Drive or exported. You can simply copy the finished work and paste it into a Word document.

You don't have to worry about privacy as your audio files are not on their servers but locally on your computer.

If you accidentally close a work-in-progress, don't worry, just reopen oTranscribe and you will get back your typed text.

For more interesting, intriguing and informative articles, please visit OpinionGhana.com or follow on twitter @OpinionGhana and on facebook.

My Transformation From Just An Ordinary BloGh Member To A Prize Winning Blogger

Several weeks have passed since I won the BloggingGhana/InnovationGhana blogging competition and earned the right for the first time in my life to describe myself as a prize winning blogger (hope to be an award winning blogger soon). I have won several prizes whilst in school but never won a competition outside of it, the main reason being, I had never really being interested in participating in any competition.

It remains a phenomenon why I took part in this particular competition. I have thought of several reasons but the top two reasons are: 1. I wanted to 'belong' to the BloggingGhana family and 2. I needed the prize money. Luckily, with God on my side (a revised phrase the late Prof. Mills loved to use), I won. I was really proud of myself for 'beating' all those who participated and those who never got the courage/interest to take part.

In Shaa Allah, in this post I hope to tell you what I spent the prize money on, but before I do, let me tell you my history with blogging and BloggingGhana.

I got really interested in blogging because I thought I could make a lot of money to support myself with whilst I was in school, the University of Cape Coast and created my first blogspot blog in 2009 (till date I have not received my first adsense cheque). Due to my heightened interest at that time, I researched and gathered a lot of information about blogging. I realized some countries had a strong blogging community something we here in Ghana lacked. I then thought about starting something similar to BloggingGhana and as I did more research, I came across GhanaBlogging and that's where the love story begun.

I registered my blog and got a GhanaBlogging badge for it. In 2010, I was blogging often and normally about politics and sometimes about campus stuff. At that time, I was reading from David Ajao's blog, Ato Kwamena Dadzie's blog and a few other blogspot blogs. I was more serious about blogging than my academics in that period.

Then something happened, I don't know what and I lost interest in blogging (I guess because the easy money wasn't coming). I did write occasionally but the spirit was gone. Somewhere in 2012/13, I saw advertisements of the BlogCamp Awards and whoosh I remembered I had a writing family I had to go back to. Since then I was looking for ways to make an entry back into the family and then in September or October of 2013, now a trainee at the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST), a BloGh meeting was just a door away. I attended that meeting and that was where I re-activated my relationship with BloggingGhana which had grown bigger since I last fell in love with it.

I met new faces (as if I knew any member back then) and sharp, smart brains. I realized soon enough that in order to belong again to this family I needed to do/show something extraordinary. A month later the InnovationGhana competition organized by BloggingGhana was posted and I took part and won. That was brave of me, don't you agree? Now, to how I spent the money.

The prize money for the competition was GHC 300. I wish it was more but half a loaf they say ... The competition required you had some interactions in the form of comments on your blog post. I engaged my facebook friends and colleague trainees at MEST to garner the interactions. The response was overwhelming. I got over 20 comments and over 60 facebook likes in a few days. As an appreciation to these colleagues, I gave them 1/6 of the prize money (I am forcing you to do some Maths here).

I used the remaining 5/6 in addition to some money I had saved to buy a smart phone. Hitherto, I was using an RLG r7 dual SIM phone (hope you know the type of phone I'm talking about?). Interestingly, at the December BloGh meetup at iSpace, Osu, I was captured in a photo tweeting from the new phone.

Now, I am a tweep thanks to BloggingGhana and I am trying to gain some following (check me out @poeticabdul). This is my story. This is how I transformed from a new BloggingGhana member to a Prize Winning Blogger.

I currently write more tech and business articles at OpinionGhana.com (@OpinionGhana). Do show me some love.

Lord I Need A Sign (My First Poem)

Months have gone
Years have passed
The dream still lives
Will I ever fulfill it

I wish to get it sealed
Sooner than later
From childhood I aspired
To get it done early

The present presents many challenges
Sometimes I wonder
If it could be done
In a timespan I thought it

There is still hope
But Lord I need your sign
I think about
It is my dream
If I will be able to make it happen
Lord please I need a sign

@poeticabdul

6 Things that Hinder Innovation in Ghana

I wrote this article listing 6 things that hinder innovation in Ghana. As part of an effort to drive traffic to my new website, I will like you to visit the link below to read the full article. Thanks.

http://opinionghana.com/categories/business/18485-6-things-that-hinder-innovation-in-ghana