Colin O’Dowd

Chapter 5

My Business My business would be a video game store

because they are really fun and I would host a tournament to get money. It would be successful because many people like video games and they would buy items from my store.

My competitors would be companies like GameStop and EB Games

GoalsShort: Getting and A on a test, Meeting

with friends to go to the moviesIntermediate: Graduate from high school,

Take 3 AP coursesLong: graduate college, get married

Better Business BureauThe Better Business Bureau (BBB),

founded in 1912, is not a government agency, but a network of local BBB organizations based in the United States and Canada, which work together through the Council of Better Business Bureaus (CBBB). The BBB goal is to foster a fair and effective marketplace, so that buyers and sellers can trust each other ("Start With Trust"). Many BBB services can be accessed online through their website.

SubwayFred De Luca borrowed $1,000 from family friend

Peter Buck to start his first sandwich shop in 1965, when he was only 17 years old. He was trying to raise money to pay for college. He chose a mediocre location for his shop, but by noon on the first day of the opening, customers were pouring in. On the radio advertisement they had promoted the name as "Pete's Submarines", which sounded like Pizza Marines, so they changed the name to "Pete's Subway"; eventually it was shortened to "Subway", as it is known to this day.

30,643 franchised units in 87 countries as of January 2009

Franchise Fee is $10,000 to $20,000

MicrosoftFollowing the launch of the Altair 8800, William Henry

Gates III, (known as Bill Gates) called the creators of the new microcomputer, Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), offering to demonstrate an implementation of the BASIC programming language for the system. After the demonstration, MITS agreed to distribute Altair BASIC. Gates left Harvard University, moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico where MITS was located, and founded Microsoft there. The company's first international office was founded on November 1, 1978, in Japan, entitled "ASCII Microsoft" (now called "Microsoft Japan").On January 1, 1979, the company moved from Albuquerque to a new home in Bellevue, Washington. Steve Ballmer joined the company on June 11, 1980, and later succeeded Bill Gates as C.EO

GoogleGoogle began in January 1996, as a research

project by Larry Page, who was soon joined by Sergey Brin, when they were both Ph.D. students at Stanford University in California. They hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better ranking of results than existing techniques, which ranked results according to the number of times the search term appeared on a page. Their search engine was originally nicknamed "BackRub" because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. A small search engine called Rankdex was already exploring a similar strategy.

Dunkin DonutsDunkin' Donuts is an

international donut and coffee retailer founded in 1950 in Quincy, Massachusetts by William Rosenberg. It is now headquartered in Canton, Massachusetts.

8,000 Locations$10,000 to $20,000 Franchise

Fee