Guest Speaker - Robert Coons

      Our second guest speaker of the quarter was a man named Robert Coons who is the co-founder and CEO of Scout Military Discounts. Scout is a company that offers users of their mobile application a chance to see whether a place has military discounts and what kind of discounts they provide. Also they can check whether or not the user is eligible for the discounts depending on your rank and years of service, which I personally did not know was a factor and just thought if you served you get any military discount. My lack of knowledge aside the initial impression I had from Robert was that he was very hardworking and he was passionate about his services. He talked the majority of the time about his company, he first talked about how it all began for him and ultimately went all the way to what he wants in the future and where he wants to take the company going forward. For example he talked about how he manually has to call businesses and figure out exactly what kind of military discounts they provide. In the future however, he would like it so that others can input the data themselves with a way of checking legitimacy.

      Robert also talked about the database that his company has created and how this database could be their primary attraction if looking to sell. Lastly the thing I most appreciated him for taking the time to discuss was advertisements and how they work. He explained to us that his company uses advertisements and that is a source of income for them, but he explained how there are different types of ads, there are the ones that just show up and you get paid little money, but they are not required to be clicked on for the company to pay. There are also clickable ones, but you don't get paid unless the users click on them, however you get paid a lot more money than the others. As someone getting their degree in Computer Science I have to admit I never really done research on digital advertising and I aspire to create my own mobile application one day so the insight to the topic really helped. Overall I enjoyed having Robert Coons as a guest speaker he sounds like a very busy guy so it was nice for him to take time out to come and talk to us. Hope to see him again one day!