Some of you may ask what in the world does and ice rink and Grove City College have anything to do with the internet. Well everything, in a sense. The Entrepreneurship Club here at GCC has been working with the school administration to have an outdoor roll away ice rink that would be open to student for free on Thorn field under the lights from after Thanksgiving break until the weather gets too warm.

To get to this point has taken a lot of hard work and research to put together a feasibility study of the plan to present to the school. Here’s where the internet comes into play. The group conducted a majority of it’s research for the ice rink online. In fact, the group has even received quotes from an online ice rink retailer from www.nicerink.com.

The process the Entrepreneurship Student Group has gone through illustrates a handful of important concepts about the internet. The itnernet is a great place to do research for purchases and more importantly business plans. Second, the internet serves as a great medium for business, otherwise known as e-commerce. Third, the fact that nicerink.com was a top organic search result on google illustrates the importance of SEO in e-commerce.

SEO is an important feature for any online business and pays in unexpected ways. I am sure the investment nicerink.com has made into SEO and their business website will be more than worth it when  GCC purchases the rink and liner from them.

On a side note this is where you come in. Help point out another useful application of the internet by commenting on this blog and giving your feedback about what you think of the ice rink. You can even post questions. This ice rink is a very real opportunity the school is pursuing. The more support and school voice behind it the better it is going to be.

I came across this great article by Sean Ammirati, a Grove City College CIS grad and VP of Business Development and Product Management for mSpoke. He came and spoke at Grove recently and was an incredible speaker. Very inspiring! A few interesting points from the article… The attrition rate for Second Life is horrible for the first 3.5 hours of a user's experience (overall 90%) . If they meet another avatar their chance of staying increases greatly.

1) Do the users who like it, like it a lot? Yes 2) Do a lot of users like it? No