Tech Musing: Internet Radio Streaming Company Comes to an End

https://debuggerdotbreak.wordpress.com/2015/05/21/my-startups-dead-5-things-i-learned/

Today the music industry has changed how individuals collect, store and listen to music. I’m sure almost everyone has a music collection of their own whether they are using iTunes or some program on their computer. This took a major turn with the creation of Pandora and Spotify. These are both companies that provide you unlimited access to music for one low monthly cost. This became an instant hit as most people would rather pay few dollars a month for unlimited music collection library’s across all their devices rather than pay a dollar per song stored on your computer where it needs to be manually synced to your devices. The article I read talks about a similar competitor called BitShuva Radio. This was supposed to be an application similar to Spotify and Pandora but would use a much more sophisticated coding process that would allow users to search for music more descriptively. The company started out strong, but it incurred many issues that eventually led to its own demise.

 The article talks about reasons why the start up failed. Most importantly, this article relates to topics discussed in class about failing business plans. The formal business plan typically starts by writing out your business plan. Once you have a plan, you need to start attracting investors who want to help you generate funding for you business. Next you assemble a team, produce the product, and properly introduce it to the market to begin selling it. BitShuva Radio had a failed business plan from the beginning because they didn’t have one. Once they created and developed the application code it was immediately introduced to the market for sale. Failing to incorporate a business plan made the owner sacrifice his own money and time into the business. He did not assemble a team to help his business, so he oversaw all aspects of the company. In this article, these were both listed as main causes of the business failure, not enough money to fund it and not enough time to run the business alone without help. Of course there were other factor to the businesses failure that does not directly adhere to a business plan such as price, changing technology, custom software and being inexperienced. Had BitShuva created a business plan by following the proper procedures, it could be possible that they could be a successful business.

This information can be very useful to MIS professionals for many different reasons. MIS majors do not have much expertise in running all aspects of a company, but this article does hit home on one very important concept that can relate to MIS professionals, changing technology. Having a career in the MIS field requires the ability to be able to always be able to learn and adapt to new and changing technology. Technology is advancing every day, and if these professionals do not have the ability to adapt to newer technology, they will be out of a job in a matter of a couple years.