E-commerce, successful business ideas, advertisement, small business opportunities 2013

Цей урок є авторською розробкою засновника проекту “English4every1”, посилання на цей ресурс є обов’язковою умовою його використання з навчальною метою.

I. Warming-up discussion

1) E-commerce. Have you ever been shopping on-line? What are the necessary prerequisites of safe on-shopping? What goods do you usually buy on-line? Do you prefer to pay by cash or credit card? There are a lot of on-line currencies: webmoney, privatmoney, bitcoins etc, have you got some electronic money on your account? How many times did someone relieve you of your money on the Internet?

Share your most embarrassing experience of fraud with your partner in pairs. Which of you has suffered more from on-line fraudsters? Report back to the whole class.

2) Successful business ideas: “What’s behind?” How are innovative ideas being matured and realized? Is anyone capable of creating something unique or mere replicas? They say: “History repeats itself”; can this saying be applied to all so-called new ideas? Who are better idea generators, men or women? What skills, talents contribute to successful business ideas? Do you need to obtain a formal education, a university degree in order to become an idea generator?

3) Advertisement. Commercials, hoardings, advertorials, banner ads, outdoor advertising, pop-ups, flyers, posters, word-of-mouth publicity, notices, contextual advertising … we live in an advertising world. Prioritize the means of advertisement starting with the ones you can tolerate easily and finishing with the ones you absolutely loathe. Have you ever advertised or promoted a product or service yourself? What was that? What is the current trend of advertising business in Ukraine? Which services and products are mostly being advertised here?

II.  Listening comprehension

Pre-teaching:

catch up with – talk to (someone) whom one’s not seen for some time in order to find out what they’ve been doing

watchhouse -караульное помещение, караульная будка

peer–to–peer – P2P пиринговый, децентрализованный

collaborative -общий, объединенный, совместный

trot – спешить, торопиться

trudge – идти с трудом, устало тащиться

errand -поручение, задание; командировка

weed out – удалять, искоренять

dodgy – изворотливый, ловкий; нечестный

consumption –  потребление

rigorous – строгий

Work in pairs. Underline key words in the text and briefly outline the main concept of a business idea to your partner.

The history of TaskRabbit success or Метнись кабанчиком в Украине
https://www.taskrabbit.com/	http://www.kabanchik.com.ua/
Created: 2007-07-11	created:          2013-03-31
Now, the story behind TaskRabbit starts like so many great stories with a very cute dog by the name of Kobe. Now what happened was, in February 2008, Leah and her husband were waiting for a cab to take them out for dinner, when Kobe came trotting up to them and he was salivating with saliva. They realized they’d run out of dog food. Kevin had to cancel the cab and trudge out in the snow. Now, later that evening, the two self-confessed tech geeks starting talking about how cool it would be if some kind of eBay for errands existed. Six months later, Leah quit her job, and TaskRabbit was born. At the time, she didn’t realize that she was actually hitting on a bigger idea she later called service networking. It’s essentially about how we use our online relationships to get things done in the real world.Now the way TaskRabbit works is, people outsource the tasks that they want doing, name the price they’re willing to pay, and then vetted Rabbits bid to run the errand. Yes, there’s actually a four-stage, rigorous interview process that’s designed to find the people that would make great personal assistants and weed out the dodgy Rabbits. Now, there’s over 4,000 Rabbits across the United States and 5,000 more on the waiting list.Now the tasks being posted are things that you might expect, like help with household chores or doing some supermarket runs. I actually learned the other day that 12 and a half thousand loads of laundry have been cleaned and folded through TaskRabbit. But I love that the number one task posted, over a hundred times a day, is something that many of us have felt the pain of doing: yes, assembling Ikea furniture. (Laughter) (Applause) It’s brilliant. Now, we may laugh, but Chris here is actually making up to 5,000 dollars a month running errands around his life. And 70 percent of this new labor force were previously unemployed or underemployed. I think TaskRabbit and other examples of collaborative consumption are like lemonade stands on steroids. They’re just brilliant.
The exchange platforms  Stack Overflow and Ask dev
http://www.stackoverflow.com/	http://www.askdev.ru/
Creation Date:   2003-12-26	created:       2009.02.15
Four years ago, tech bloggers and entrepreneurs Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, decided to start something called Stack Overflow. Now, Stack Overflow is basically a platform where experienced programmers can ask other good programmers highly detailed technical questions on things like tiny pixels and chrome extensions. This site receives five and a half thousand questions a day, and 80 percent of these receive accurate answers. Now users earn reputation in a whole range of ways, but it’s basically by convincing their peers they know what they’re talking about.Now a few months after this site launched, the founders heard about something interesting, and it actually didn’t surprise them. What they heard was that users were putting their reputation scores on the top of their resumes, and that recruiters were searching the platform to find people with unique talents. Now thousands of programmers today are finding better jobs this way, because Stack Overflow and the reputation dashboards provide a priceless window into how someone really behaves, and what their peers think of them.But the bigger principle of what’s happening behind Stack Overflow, I think, is incredibly exciting. People are starting to realize that the reputation they generate in one place has value beyond the environments from which it was built. You know, it’s very interesting. When you talk to super-users, whether that’s SuperRabbits or super-people on Stack Overflow, or Uberhosts, they all talk about how having a high reputation unlocks a sense of their own power. On Stack Overflow, it creates a level playing field, enabling the people with the real talent to rise to the top. On Airbnb, the people often become more important than the spaces. On TaskRabbit, it gives people control of their economic activity.

What principle are these successful business ideas built on?  What moral value lies in the base of these ideas? What will be the most valuable asset in the 21^st century?

Watch and check

III.  The Best Small Business Opportunities 2013

Match the opportunity with its explanation.

General contracting services for home renovations	Increasing numbers of people care about the quality of the food they eat, wanting it to be both healthy and safe. Today the organic food market is described by industry analysts as the most dynamic and rapidly growing sector of the global food industry.
Organic food	Bicycling is the second most popular outdoor activity in America by frequency of participation. And many North American cities are trying hard to increase the number of people using bikes to commute to work rather than cars.
Pet farewell products and services	If you’ve been to India, you’re probably familiar with the custom of hot lunches delivered to working people in tiffins (metal food containers). People working in offices would appreciate the convenience of having a hot meal delivered.
Bike store	Increasing numbers of businesses want branded apps and there is still the chance of making a profit by developing an app for consumers
Hot lunch delivery	Elderly people are being forced to give up their driving privileges and rely on being transported by others. And as many of them are not able to just hop on a bus or take other public transit because of physical limitations, transporting seniors is a huge business opportunity that’s only going to get bigger over the next few years.
Scooter sales and repair	Nowadays it takes a small army of tradespeople just to renovate one room. A person with superior organizational skills and contacts with tradespeople could make a fortune overseeing the renovations of other people’s bathrooms, kitchens, house extensions etc.
Mobile apps development	Dysfunctional health care system creates an increasing need for people who can help individual patients and their families navigate our medial system. Helping the families of seniors deal with the different care options available and get the best care possible is one possible niche in this market.
Senior transportation services	For many people, pets are not animals; they’re family members. Therefore, when a beloved pet dies, they want to express their grief in similar ways to the way they would if a loved person died.
Patient advocacy	People who are using scooters to get around anymore – creating three business opportunities for entrepreneurs; selling new scooters, selling used scooters and repairing them.

• Which small business enterprises might be successful in Ukraine? Why?
• Preferential voting. Choose the most demanding opportunity and the least demanding one in Ukraine, vote by ballot.