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Irvine Business ~ From neighborhood stores to global companies. By Ian Hamilton, the Orange County Register

Archive for the 'Business' Tag

How do you define the focus of a business?

November 9th, 2009, 10:57 am by Nick Haschka

Nick Haschka

Nick Haschka, co-founder of the 532 Development Group

Editor’s note: This is part of an ongoing series chronicling the triumphs, challenges, failures and questions facing one Orange County startup, the 532 Development Group, written by the founders themselves with as much openness as competition allows.  If you’re new to the series, start here and come back.

After picking our name (or in our case, our number), we were finally forced to pony up to the question we’d been contemplating, but avoiding a decision on for weeks.

  • What is our business going to do?
  • Who are we going to be?

We decided to start out by seeking the familiar - consulting. We first crafted our value proposition by identifying our most valuable and unique strength, the ability to translate back and forth between the languages of science and business. From this we decided to target technology businesses. We defined and prioritized, based on our own level of excitement, the 4 broad technology industries we had professional experience working in.

After putting up a Web site, probing our business networks, and attending some local networking events, we found a number of attractive leads and received a few proposal requests. Within 2 weeks, we landed two projects. Fortunately, one was in alternative energy, our #1 priority industry, while the other was in mobile software, our #2 priority industry.

Within 2 weeks of embarking on the two projects simultaneously, we found ourselves naturally focusing more on the project we were most excited about. To us, exploring solar opportunities in Arizona was much more exciting than figuring out how to enter the mobile payments market. As a result, the second project became tougher and tougher to manage. Despite successfully completing the mobile payments project, we decided to re-evaluate our target markets and cut out 3 industries to focus exclusively on alternative energy.

This decision to focus seemed obvious in hindsight, but we continue to confront similar decisions.

Questions:

Are there any good rules of thumb people use help decide whether something is too far outside of focus?

How do you balance the desire to explore the unfamiliar with the need to stay focused on your expertise?

Related Links:

Posted in: Follow The Sun • Innovation • • • • • • | Post a Comment »

Inspiration for the creative professional

November 6th, 2009, 5:51 am by Ian Hamilton

printedslideshow

Walking around Roland DGA’s new Creative Center I couldn’t help but be surprised by how many products are created, or at least made more visually appealing, using printers and engravers.

Roland is a worldwide printing company with its North and South American marketing and sales headquarters in Irvine. The company doesn’t quite have the household presence of a Hewlett-Packard or an Epson because their products aren’t for your average household or daily user. Their machines are priced in the thousands to tens of thousands of dollars and geared more toward the creative professional. Roland printers, engravers and scanners might be found in the design studios of companies around the world.

The company recently announced their Irvine Creative Center where they display a variety of products made by Roland customers.

“I don’t know that [the Creative Center] would mean a lot to the general public, but to creative people who are looking for tools to explore their dreams, I’d say this is a neat place to give them a lot of ideas,” said Rick Scrimger, vice president and general manager at Roland DGA.

From etched rings to a giant replica flying machine hanging overhead, the variety of products made using printed and etched graphics is surprising. Roland officials said the company’s machines were used to help create the illusion of certain locations in Hollywood movies like Charlie Wilson’s War, Miami Vice and Public Enemies. Even the floors of the creative center are covered in different types of printed graphics that give the illusion of different surfaces, from wood to asphalt. There’s an Xbox 360 wrapped in a colorful dragon and tiger design and a Sierra Nevada beer tap station with labels made by Roland printers. There are drums, shirts, jerseys, walls, bottles, cereal boxes, rings, plates, purses, blinds, refrigerators, sinks, windows, paintings, puzzles, toys and more all made visually stunning using Roland machines. Even braille door signage can be made using engravers. Check out this slideshow of various things made with the help of Roland machines.

One of the more impressive pieces Roland had on display was this toy in the video below, made with the help of a Roland engraver. If you can’t hear the audio, it was created by an Italian toymaker who designed this on a computer and then he used a Roland machine to help cut the pieces:

http://www.vimeo.com/7468886

Visitors to the creative center are welcome. Check out www.rolanddga.com for details.

Related Links:

Posted in: Business • • • • • • • | Post a Comment »

Why do business in Orange County?

October 14th, 2009, 2:28 pm by Ian Hamilton

A panel of executives from Orange County companies discussed topics ranging from why people do business in Orange County to what can be done to bring more business here at a business reception on Monday night at Irvine City Hall.

Dave Key, the founding CEO of Aliso Viejo-based YouMail.com, joked that he does business in Orange County because he has the “Orange County disease,” a disease contracted by people who like living in Orange County too much to leave.

YouMail is all about giving people access to a more robust voicemail service than what’s provided by their cell phone company. They offer voicemail-to-text transcriptions and permanent storage of your voicemails, among other things.

For a tech company like YouMail.com, what does it mean to do business in Orange County?

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in: Business • • • | Post a Comment »

114,000 square foot Diamond Jamboree center nearing capacity

October 7th, 2009, 6:30 am by Ian Hamilton

iwn.diamondjamboree.p0927.mv4The bustling Diamond Jamboree shopping and restaurant center is getting close to being filled just a year after it opened.

There are eight spaces left, four upstairs and four downstairs with room for one more restaurant and a couple of retail shops, said Diamond Jamboree leasing manager Helen Wang.  She hopes to have it filled to 95 percent capacity within a month or so.

There are around 30 businesses in the Asian-themed center including the recently-opened Kula Revolving Sushi Bar. The restaurant offers rolls on an ever-circulating belt for $2 a plate. Kula has more than 50 reviews on Yelp already and 3 1/2 stars.

Stay tuned for more on Diamond Jamboree as we visit some of the new businesses in the center and see how it’s going for them. If you don’t know where it is, it is located at the southwest corner of Alton Parkway and Jamboree Road.

Have you visited the center yet? If so, let us know your experience in the comments.

Posted in: Business • Entertainment • • • • • | Post a Comment »

Irvine car enthusiast magazine turns off the presses

December 15th, 2008, 11:14 am by Cameron Bird

Velocity Magazine, an Irvine-based bimonthly publication for car enthusiasts, is going on hiatus to make way for a new digital product.

“… As the economy changes, so, too, must our business model,” wrote publisher David Threshie in a press release. “To get out in front of this paradigm shift, we feel we must accelerate a transition from a print-based business to that of an Internet-based business.”

Velocity debuted in October 2007 with an initial circulation of 25,000. After shutting down, the company plans to develop a cable television show about Orange County car culture and, once the economy recovers,  resurrect the print version of the magazine.

Threshie, also a scion of the family that founded the Orange County Register, mentioned the sour economy as reasons for closures and bankrupcties in print media, but did not disclose details about Velocity’s own financial status.

Last year, in an interview with Register reporter John Gittelsohn, Threshie called Velocity a “passion project.”

“It would be great if we make money. But it’s really a service,” he said. “I’m lucky that what I’m passionate about also happens to be an underserved segment.”

For more information, e-mail newsletter@velocitymag.com or visit www.velocitymag.com.

Posted in: Closings • Economy • • | Post a Comment »