Considerations before planning a website
Time: Flexible
Resource: How much.. is it enough, cost advantageous? Build in-house? Or outsource entirely>
Budget: Right mix of skills
Define Scope>
Its vary important to define the scope of the project. Who are going to access the website and what are their needs to build a website that reflects those needs.
Process of building website involves the follwoin
Strategy formulation
User Experience Definition
Architecture Design Process
Implementation
Test
Fix
Launch
Strategy Formulation
Development/Improvement of new/existing site
User Experience Definition
User Type
Brainstorm to find user type, consolidate in groups based on similarities of needs and try to understand who and what.
User Intention
Describes the tasks that the user is trying to accomplish and what processes they expect to go through in order to be successful
Functionality and content mix
It is possible to define what functions have to be performed and when
Also a process flow from start to finish must be designed , with a description of the screen that the user would see, and the content and fuctions should be available at any given time.
Following these steps, it is possible to build a “use case” scenario.
Architecture Design Process
The look and feel of the website or the context - what functions the site will need and how these functions will be represented on screen
Site map and Page schematics
Technical Discovery
Implementation
Validation
Build Phase
Development
Back-end development
Interface development
Interactive development
Content development
Building process
Design the technical infrastructure
Design the technical components
Build the components
Integrate these components
Test components, individually and integrated
Refine system based on these results
Launch the website
Before building computer language and architecture of hardware and software environments have to be set . Concerning languages the following points have to be considered
Available skills
Portability
Cost
Scalability
Page design
Unique Pages
Template Pages.
Design style guide
Interface Development
Application Development
Test/Fix
Test scripts/use cases
Unit testing
Integration Testing
Systems Testing
Load testing
Launch
Select hosting facility
Build and test the servers
Test the connectivity
Audit the security of the overall system
Monday, November 20, 2006
Dot com bust
Since the so-called “Dot.Com Bust” of 2000-2001, there has been considerable debate and commentary on failed business models. Discuss the main causes of “business model” failure with reference to Stephen Chen’s (2003) analysis of types of business models and key problem areas associated with them (Chen, Stephen (2003), “The Real Value of e-Business Models, Business Horizons, Nov-Dec., pp. 27-33). Do you believe that the problems highlighted by Chen mean that the business models were fundamentally flawed, or are those models still usable in 2006?
Corporate Structure
Pure internet model – copycats; brand awareness
Click and mortar – channel conflict
Revenue model
Free – generating revenues from other sources
Pay – price/product trade off
Supply model
Direct sales: product/service quality, cost of operations
E-tail: logistics, speediness, reliability
Portal: brand awareness…eye popper
Marketplace: generate enough amount of buyers and sellers
Market type
b2b – integrating with ERP systems
b2c – increasing consumer awareness, interest access.
Corporate Structure
Pure internet model – copycats; brand awareness
Click and mortar – channel conflict
Revenue model
Free – generating revenues from other sources
Pay – price/product trade off
Supply model
Direct sales: product/service quality, cost of operations
E-tail: logistics, speediness, reliability
Portal: brand awareness…eye popper
Marketplace: generate enough amount of buyers and sellers
Market type
b2b – integrating with ERP systems
b2c – increasing consumer awareness, interest access.
Define and discuss the advantages and disadvantages for providing effective e-business insights or strategic recommendations, using ONE (1) only of th
Define and discuss the advantages and disadvantages for providing effective e-business insights or strategic recommendations, using ONE (1) only of the following models or approaches:
A traditional marketplace is a physical place where buyers and sellers meet. Today in this age of technology, buyers and sellers now dont have to meet face to face and they meet in marketspace instead of marketplace.
Hence marketplace refers to the digital equivalent of the physical world marketplace. Hence the success of transactions depends on how screens and computers interact with each other and manage customer's expectations. Due to the shift from activities and capabilities in the physical world to a combination of marketplace and marketspace activities, resource systems for many companies are now modiefied to a combination of physical and virtual assets.
Marketplace differs from marketspace in the following manner:
Content - The physical product has now changed to product information
Context - An electronic screen, replaces the face to face transaction.
Infrastructure - Computers and computer lines replace retailers.
In marketspace, members of the value chain are able to manage their relationships more directly and the following acitivities identified by Turban et al (2002) takes place
Customers can search for detailed information on the internet, in just a matter of seconds, at any time of the day and are able to compare products.
Sellers can use websites or marketspaces to provide, update, sell and receive information. Sellers can sell directly from their websites or use electronic retailers
Intermediaries, serve as the middle man between the transactions of buyers and sellers. Each of them facilitate each other to perform the transaction.
Infrastructure companies generally provide hardware, software, security for the marketspace operations.
Content creators create and maintain the websites.
Business partners collaborate on the internet through supply chain.
Competition on marketspace differs from that of Marketplace. There are a number of sellers present. The cost of searching information is very low or nearly negligible. Marketspace allows differentiation and personalization.
There are number of advantages of having a marketspace:
Lower costs: attributed by manufacturer, supplier partnerships and enhanced value chain
Convinience: Information is available to subscriber at all locations at any point in time.
Ubguity: All subscribers can log on anytime, anyone can register and purchase, open to all.
Reach: Greater numbers of buyers are present at one point in time, and the seller can command a 6-7% markup over the price they would get at a physical auction.
• Virtual Value Chain (VVC)
A simple value chain describes a series of value-adding activities connecting a company’s supply side (raw materials, inbound logistics and production processes) with its demand side (outbound logistics, marketing and sales). By analysing the stages value chain managers have been able to redesign their internal and external processes to improve efficiency and effectiveness.
The value chain model treats information as a supporting element of the value adding process, not as a source itself. For eg. Managers often use information that they capture on inventory, production or logistics to help monitor or control those processes, but they rarely use information itself to create new value for the customer.
To create value with information, managers must look to the marketspace. The value adding processes that company must employ to turn raw information into new marketspace services and products are unique to information world. In other words, the value adding steps are virtual in that they are performed through and with information.
The economic logic of the two chins is different: A conventional understanding of economies of scale and scope does not apply to the Virtual Value chain in the same way as it does to the physical value chain.
Companies adopt value adding information processes in three stages:
Visibility: companies acquire an ability to “see” physical operations more effectively through information. Managers use large scale information technology systems to coordinate activities in their physical value chains and in the process lay the foundation for a virtual value chain.
Mirroring Capability: Companies substitute virtual activities for physical ones and they begin to create a parallel value chain in the marketspace. Once companies have established necessary infrastructure for visibility, they can do more than just monitor value adding steps. They can begin to manage operations or even to implement value adding steps in the marketspace ; faster, better, with more flexibility, at lower cost.
New Customers Relationships: Finally businesses use information to establish new customer relationships. At this stage managers draw on the flow of information in their virtual value chain to deliver value to customers in new ways.
Visibility Eg: Frito lay – underlying the manufacture and distribution of a variety of Frito-brand snack foods is an efficient information system that gives managers the ability to visualize nearly every element of the company’s value chain as a part of an integrated whole. Frito’s employees collect information on the sales of products daily store by store across the nation and feed it elecetroniacally to the company. The employees also collect information about the sales and promotions of competing producs or about new products launched by competitors in select locations.
Mirroring Capabilty eg: Boeing 737 and Virtual wind tunnel.
New Customer Relationships eg: DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) and Oracle now sell and promote their products online, so that they can attract new customers and serve existing ones better.
Creating value in any stage of a virtual value chain involves a sequence of five activities:
Gathering
Organizing
Selecting
Synthesizing
Distributing information.
Advantages:
Law of Digital Assets: Digital assets, unlike physical ones are not used up in their consumption. Companies that create value with digital assets may be able to reharvest them through potentially infinite number of transactions, thus changing the competitive dynamics for industries.
New Economies of Scale: VVC redefines economies of scale, allowing small companies to achieve low uni cots for products and services in markets dominated by big companies. Eg: fed-ex has built technology to track products and hence, built a post office at every home.
Transaction Cost compression: Transaction costs along the VVC are lower than PVC. They continue to decline sharply as the processing capacity per unit of cost for microprocessors doubles every 18 months.
New economies of scope: Businesses can redefine economies of scope by drawing on a signle set of digital assets to provide value across many different and disparate markets.
Rebalancing supply and Demand: Combining the above axioms creates a fifth. Business increasingly demands a shift from supply-side to demand-side thinking.
Disadvantages:
Expensive
• Virtual Integration (The DELL Direct Model)
Virtual integration harnesses the economic benefits of two very different business models. It offers advantages of a tightly coordinated supply chin that have traditionally come through vertical integration. At the same time it benefits from the focus and specialization that drive virtual corporations.
Model is based on direct sales and built to order production.
Direct Sales: The direct sales approach is built on two key elements: direct customer relationships, and products and services targeted at distinct customer segments. Direct sales means that Dell must reach out to potential customers, either through its own sales force or through advertising and other marketing efforts. Dell segments its customers into Relationship, Transaction, and Public/International customers.
Build-to-order: Dell’s production system applies principles of lean manufacturing and just-in-time production. These principles aim to minimize parts inventories by requiring suppliers to restock parts only as they are needed, and often to maintain ownership of parts until they are used.
Direct Distribution:
Business Strategy
Performance Effects
Direct Sales
Accurate forecasting of demand
Segmentation of demand
Early indication of shits in demand
Build-to-order
Better control of operations
Reduced inventory and transit points
Better communication during build process
Improved monitoring and evaluation of production and superior quality.
Direct Distribution
Accelerated outbound logistics
No inventory
Optimization of production, quality and distribution globally and locally.
• The Navigation Approach (Evans And Wurster)
On the internet, navigation and selection occur independently of physical warehousing and distribution. Physical shop keepers who used to exert enormous influence over consumer choice, no longer enjoy special advantages. Product suppliers can sell directly to consumers. Electronic retailers can focus on navigation and outsource fulfilment. Pure navigators like Yahoo! Can organize information help people make sense of it without being party to the transaction at all. Many people continue to view Amazon.com as an online bookseller, but its true business is navigation. It has rapidly broadened its offerings from books and CDs to movies, drugs and toys.
Evans and Wurster (1999) have argued that there are three aspects of navigation that are key to achieving competitive advantage online. These are:
• Reach. This is the potential audience of the e-commerce site. Reach can be increased by moving from a single site to representation with a large number of different intermediaries. Allen and Fjermestad suggest that niche suppliers can readily reach a much wider market due to search engine marketing.
• Richness. This is the depth or detail of information which is both collected about the customer and provided to the customer. This is related to the product element of the mix.
Two factors limit rich consumer information. First is privacy constraints, which require that consumers be informed of, and agree to any exchanges of data. The second factor is consumers’ option to search and organize information for themselves.
For eg: CDNOW solicits information about which recording artists its customers like the most. The company relates that information to the individuals’ actual music purchase and then supplies a statistical matching technology, created by Net Perceptions, to identify a universe of people with similar tastes.
• Affiliation. This refers to whose interest the selling organization represents – consumers or suppliers. This particularly applies to retailers. It suggests that customers will favour retailers who provide them with the richest information on comparing competitive products. The player in the worst position to exploit affiliation is the product supplier because the supplier has an interest in the transaction that is different from the consumer’s.
Dell has currently extraordinarily service with a much broader configuration and retailing service. It matches the reach of current computer retailers, and provides comprehensive navigation to products it does not make, and preserves the option to promote its own product.
Syndicate model:
Syndicate involves the sale of the same good to many customers who then integrate it with other offerings and redistribute it.
With syndication, there are three roles that a business can play.
Originators create original content.
Syndicators package that content for distribution and integrate the content from originators.
Distributes deliver the goods to consumers.
Syndication has traditionally been rare in the business world for three reasons. (Disadvantages)
First, syndication works only with information goods: information is never consumed; infinite number of people can use the same information. That’s not the case with physical products.
Syndication requires modularity: While a syndicated good can have considerable value in and of itself, it does not normally constitute an entire product; in old physical economy, modularity was rare. Boundaries between products, supply chains and companies tended to be clearly demarcated and impermeable.
Syndication requires many independent distribution points. There’s little to be gained by creating different combinations and configurations of content if there’s only one distributor, or if every distributor is controlled by a content creator.
Sydnication with E-business: (Advantages)
With the internet, information goods, modularity and fragmented distribution becomes not only possible but essential.
Everything that moves on the internet takes the form of information.
Hyperlinked architecture of Web is modular in nature.
Because anyone can start a website, there are literally millions of different distribution points for users. In such environment syndication becomes inescapable.
Eg: Amazon in 1996, launched an aggressive affiliate program called Amazon.com Associates. Instead of relying solely on attracting customers to its site, Amazon can use this program to take its site to where customers already are. There are more than 400,000 sites that have signed u to be affiliates; each provide their own visitors with hyperlinks that enable them to make purchases through Amazon. In effect Amazon is syndicating its store to other locations. While Amazon loses some control over merchandising and has to pay out 5 to 15% commissions on revenues generated by affiliates, the benefits far exceed costs.Amazon puts itself in front of more potential customers than it could attract directly, especially in niche categories.
Advantages of Syndication over outsourcing:
Because syndication deals with information rather than physical resources, a company can syndicate the same goods or services to an almost infinite number of partners without incurring much additional cost. A physical call centre outsourcer must hire more people, lease office space, etc. E-commerce originator doesn’t have to invest in more people, money and machinery, as software particularly scales for free.
Online syndication can be automated and standardized in a way that physical outsourcing cant. An important feature of syndication relationships is that business rules, such as usage rights and payment terms can be passed between companies along with syndicated asset or service
A traditional marketplace is a physical place where buyers and sellers meet. Today in this age of technology, buyers and sellers now dont have to meet face to face and they meet in marketspace instead of marketplace.
Hence marketplace refers to the digital equivalent of the physical world marketplace. Hence the success of transactions depends on how screens and computers interact with each other and manage customer's expectations. Due to the shift from activities and capabilities in the physical world to a combination of marketplace and marketspace activities, resource systems for many companies are now modiefied to a combination of physical and virtual assets.
Marketplace differs from marketspace in the following manner:
Content - The physical product has now changed to product information
Context - An electronic screen, replaces the face to face transaction.
Infrastructure - Computers and computer lines replace retailers.
In marketspace, members of the value chain are able to manage their relationships more directly and the following acitivities identified by Turban et al (2002) takes place
Customers can search for detailed information on the internet, in just a matter of seconds, at any time of the day and are able to compare products.
Sellers can use websites or marketspaces to provide, update, sell and receive information. Sellers can sell directly from their websites or use electronic retailers
Intermediaries, serve as the middle man between the transactions of buyers and sellers. Each of them facilitate each other to perform the transaction.
Infrastructure companies generally provide hardware, software, security for the marketspace operations.
Content creators create and maintain the websites.
Business partners collaborate on the internet through supply chain.
Competition on marketspace differs from that of Marketplace. There are a number of sellers present. The cost of searching information is very low or nearly negligible. Marketspace allows differentiation and personalization.
There are number of advantages of having a marketspace:
Lower costs: attributed by manufacturer, supplier partnerships and enhanced value chain
Convinience: Information is available to subscriber at all locations at any point in time.
Ubguity: All subscribers can log on anytime, anyone can register and purchase, open to all.
Reach: Greater numbers of buyers are present at one point in time, and the seller can command a 6-7% markup over the price they would get at a physical auction.
• Virtual Value Chain (VVC)
A simple value chain describes a series of value-adding activities connecting a company’s supply side (raw materials, inbound logistics and production processes) with its demand side (outbound logistics, marketing and sales). By analysing the stages value chain managers have been able to redesign their internal and external processes to improve efficiency and effectiveness.
The value chain model treats information as a supporting element of the value adding process, not as a source itself. For eg. Managers often use information that they capture on inventory, production or logistics to help monitor or control those processes, but they rarely use information itself to create new value for the customer.
To create value with information, managers must look to the marketspace. The value adding processes that company must employ to turn raw information into new marketspace services and products are unique to information world. In other words, the value adding steps are virtual in that they are performed through and with information.
The economic logic of the two chins is different: A conventional understanding of economies of scale and scope does not apply to the Virtual Value chain in the same way as it does to the physical value chain.
Companies adopt value adding information processes in three stages:
Visibility: companies acquire an ability to “see” physical operations more effectively through information. Managers use large scale information technology systems to coordinate activities in their physical value chains and in the process lay the foundation for a virtual value chain.
Mirroring Capability: Companies substitute virtual activities for physical ones and they begin to create a parallel value chain in the marketspace. Once companies have established necessary infrastructure for visibility, they can do more than just monitor value adding steps. They can begin to manage operations or even to implement value adding steps in the marketspace ; faster, better, with more flexibility, at lower cost.
New Customers Relationships: Finally businesses use information to establish new customer relationships. At this stage managers draw on the flow of information in their virtual value chain to deliver value to customers in new ways.
Visibility Eg: Frito lay – underlying the manufacture and distribution of a variety of Frito-brand snack foods is an efficient information system that gives managers the ability to visualize nearly every element of the company’s value chain as a part of an integrated whole. Frito’s employees collect information on the sales of products daily store by store across the nation and feed it elecetroniacally to the company. The employees also collect information about the sales and promotions of competing producs or about new products launched by competitors in select locations.
Mirroring Capabilty eg: Boeing 737 and Virtual wind tunnel.
New Customer Relationships eg: DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) and Oracle now sell and promote their products online, so that they can attract new customers and serve existing ones better.
Creating value in any stage of a virtual value chain involves a sequence of five activities:
Gathering
Organizing
Selecting
Synthesizing
Distributing information.
Advantages:
Law of Digital Assets: Digital assets, unlike physical ones are not used up in their consumption. Companies that create value with digital assets may be able to reharvest them through potentially infinite number of transactions, thus changing the competitive dynamics for industries.
New Economies of Scale: VVC redefines economies of scale, allowing small companies to achieve low uni cots for products and services in markets dominated by big companies. Eg: fed-ex has built technology to track products and hence, built a post office at every home.
Transaction Cost compression: Transaction costs along the VVC are lower than PVC. They continue to decline sharply as the processing capacity per unit of cost for microprocessors doubles every 18 months.
New economies of scope: Businesses can redefine economies of scope by drawing on a signle set of digital assets to provide value across many different and disparate markets.
Rebalancing supply and Demand: Combining the above axioms creates a fifth. Business increasingly demands a shift from supply-side to demand-side thinking.
Disadvantages:
Expensive
• Virtual Integration (The DELL Direct Model)
Virtual integration harnesses the economic benefits of two very different business models. It offers advantages of a tightly coordinated supply chin that have traditionally come through vertical integration. At the same time it benefits from the focus and specialization that drive virtual corporations.
Model is based on direct sales and built to order production.
Direct Sales: The direct sales approach is built on two key elements: direct customer relationships, and products and services targeted at distinct customer segments. Direct sales means that Dell must reach out to potential customers, either through its own sales force or through advertising and other marketing efforts. Dell segments its customers into Relationship, Transaction, and Public/International customers.
Build-to-order: Dell’s production system applies principles of lean manufacturing and just-in-time production. These principles aim to minimize parts inventories by requiring suppliers to restock parts only as they are needed, and often to maintain ownership of parts until they are used.
Direct Distribution:
Business Strategy
Performance Effects
Direct Sales
Accurate forecasting of demand
Segmentation of demand
Early indication of shits in demand
Build-to-order
Better control of operations
Reduced inventory and transit points
Better communication during build process
Improved monitoring and evaluation of production and superior quality.
Direct Distribution
Accelerated outbound logistics
No inventory
Optimization of production, quality and distribution globally and locally.
• The Navigation Approach (Evans And Wurster)
On the internet, navigation and selection occur independently of physical warehousing and distribution. Physical shop keepers who used to exert enormous influence over consumer choice, no longer enjoy special advantages. Product suppliers can sell directly to consumers. Electronic retailers can focus on navigation and outsource fulfilment. Pure navigators like Yahoo! Can organize information help people make sense of it without being party to the transaction at all. Many people continue to view Amazon.com as an online bookseller, but its true business is navigation. It has rapidly broadened its offerings from books and CDs to movies, drugs and toys.
Evans and Wurster (1999) have argued that there are three aspects of navigation that are key to achieving competitive advantage online. These are:
• Reach. This is the potential audience of the e-commerce site. Reach can be increased by moving from a single site to representation with a large number of different intermediaries. Allen and Fjermestad suggest that niche suppliers can readily reach a much wider market due to search engine marketing.
• Richness. This is the depth or detail of information which is both collected about the customer and provided to the customer. This is related to the product element of the mix.
Two factors limit rich consumer information. First is privacy constraints, which require that consumers be informed of, and agree to any exchanges of data. The second factor is consumers’ option to search and organize information for themselves.
For eg: CDNOW solicits information about which recording artists its customers like the most. The company relates that information to the individuals’ actual music purchase and then supplies a statistical matching technology, created by Net Perceptions, to identify a universe of people with similar tastes.
• Affiliation. This refers to whose interest the selling organization represents – consumers or suppliers. This particularly applies to retailers. It suggests that customers will favour retailers who provide them with the richest information on comparing competitive products. The player in the worst position to exploit affiliation is the product supplier because the supplier has an interest in the transaction that is different from the consumer’s.
Dell has currently extraordinarily service with a much broader configuration and retailing service. It matches the reach of current computer retailers, and provides comprehensive navigation to products it does not make, and preserves the option to promote its own product.
Syndicate model:
Syndicate involves the sale of the same good to many customers who then integrate it with other offerings and redistribute it.
With syndication, there are three roles that a business can play.
Originators create original content.
Syndicators package that content for distribution and integrate the content from originators.
Distributes deliver the goods to consumers.
Syndication has traditionally been rare in the business world for three reasons. (Disadvantages)
First, syndication works only with information goods: information is never consumed; infinite number of people can use the same information. That’s not the case with physical products.
Syndication requires modularity: While a syndicated good can have considerable value in and of itself, it does not normally constitute an entire product; in old physical economy, modularity was rare. Boundaries between products, supply chains and companies tended to be clearly demarcated and impermeable.
Syndication requires many independent distribution points. There’s little to be gained by creating different combinations and configurations of content if there’s only one distributor, or if every distributor is controlled by a content creator.
Sydnication with E-business: (Advantages)
With the internet, information goods, modularity and fragmented distribution becomes not only possible but essential.
Everything that moves on the internet takes the form of information.
Hyperlinked architecture of Web is modular in nature.
Because anyone can start a website, there are literally millions of different distribution points for users. In such environment syndication becomes inescapable.
Eg: Amazon in 1996, launched an aggressive affiliate program called Amazon.com Associates. Instead of relying solely on attracting customers to its site, Amazon can use this program to take its site to where customers already are. There are more than 400,000 sites that have signed u to be affiliates; each provide their own visitors with hyperlinks that enable them to make purchases through Amazon. In effect Amazon is syndicating its store to other locations. While Amazon loses some control over merchandising and has to pay out 5 to 15% commissions on revenues generated by affiliates, the benefits far exceed costs.Amazon puts itself in front of more potential customers than it could attract directly, especially in niche categories.
Advantages of Syndication over outsourcing:
Because syndication deals with information rather than physical resources, a company can syndicate the same goods or services to an almost infinite number of partners without incurring much additional cost. A physical call centre outsourcer must hire more people, lease office space, etc. E-commerce originator doesn’t have to invest in more people, money and machinery, as software particularly scales for free.
Online syndication can be automated and standardized in a way that physical outsourcing cant. An important feature of syndication relationships is that business rules, such as usage rights and payment terms can be passed between companies along with syndicated asset or service
Googling fo gold
"Googling for Gold" - A market cap over $US120 billion. $US8 billion in cash. Plus 5 billionaires, 1,000 millionaires. No wonder dealmakers, Vcs, and brokers are clamoring for a piece of the action."(BusinessWeek, 5 December 2005). Google's rapid growth is an outstanding case addressing a range of capital infrastructure issues and outcomes for emerging e-business technologies and applications. Using the BusinessWeek Article on Google from 5 December 2005, discuss the different types of investor involved with (or hoping to be involved with!) Google, Google's approach to managing prospective investors and why Google is so attractive to investors.
The main groups interested in riding Google’s fortune are Venture Capitalists (VCs), Entrepreneurs, and investment bankers. There are also financial managers who are keen to manage the wealth of the “Googlers”.
The venture capitalists and investment bankers are looking at financing small start up companies with technology or services that might fill a gap in Google’s portfolio, they are looking at making money by selling the technology/service/strategy/company to Google. As Google are known to be not interested in doing big deals with anyone, Entrepreneurs with smaller investment (e.g. $100,000) are now by passing VCs, and go straight to Google offering their unique service/technology, etc. in the hopes of pocketing a bigger share of the proceeds of a sale to Google. Google has announced that they would fund projects that have a 10% chance of earning a billion dollars over the long term, especially when the initial investment is small. Google’s biggest deal to date is the $102 million it paid for online ad upstart Applied Semantics Inc. in 2003.
These investors or potential investors are interested in sharing Google’s wealth, as Google has a price-earnings ratio of 70, which represents one of the richest dealmaking currencies anywhere. And, Google has market cap of $120 billion, double that of its nearest competitor, Yahoo! There’s also big potential earning from online advertising. In 2004 US advertising spend was estimated between $300 – 400 billion. $10 billion was spent on online advertising, and is growing between 25 – 35% per year. Advertising.com, an e-marketing company, 40% of their revenue came through Google.
For interested investors, Google has Startup Day, where those interested are asked to fill in a spreadsheet with a brief description of each company and its business/technology, an overview of the team, any data points they’d like to share, and a perspective of why the company might work with Google. So, Google basically asking the potential investors to share their trade secrets while Google offers little information in return. Google strongly prefers to gobble up startups before they have embarked on a sales and marketing strategy, viewing companies that are completely tech focused as a better cultural fit. It prefers to acquire small local technology teams that it can simply plug into its headquarters. Google has passed on larger, out-of-town deals, in large part because of integration worries.
The main groups interested in riding Google’s fortune are Venture Capitalists (VCs), Entrepreneurs, and investment bankers. There are also financial managers who are keen to manage the wealth of the “Googlers”.
The venture capitalists and investment bankers are looking at financing small start up companies with technology or services that might fill a gap in Google’s portfolio, they are looking at making money by selling the technology/service/strategy/company to Google. As Google are known to be not interested in doing big deals with anyone, Entrepreneurs with smaller investment (e.g. $100,000) are now by passing VCs, and go straight to Google offering their unique service/technology, etc. in the hopes of pocketing a bigger share of the proceeds of a sale to Google. Google has announced that they would fund projects that have a 10% chance of earning a billion dollars over the long term, especially when the initial investment is small. Google’s biggest deal to date is the $102 million it paid for online ad upstart Applied Semantics Inc. in 2003.
These investors or potential investors are interested in sharing Google’s wealth, as Google has a price-earnings ratio of 70, which represents one of the richest dealmaking currencies anywhere. And, Google has market cap of $120 billion, double that of its nearest competitor, Yahoo! There’s also big potential earning from online advertising. In 2004 US advertising spend was estimated between $300 – 400 billion. $10 billion was spent on online advertising, and is growing between 25 – 35% per year. Advertising.com, an e-marketing company, 40% of their revenue came through Google.
For interested investors, Google has Startup Day, where those interested are asked to fill in a spreadsheet with a brief description of each company and its business/technology, an overview of the team, any data points they’d like to share, and a perspective of why the company might work with Google. So, Google basically asking the potential investors to share their trade secrets while Google offers little information in return. Google strongly prefers to gobble up startups before they have embarked on a sales and marketing strategy, viewing companies that are completely tech focused as a better cultural fit. It prefers to acquire small local technology teams that it can simply plug into its headquarters. Google has passed on larger, out-of-town deals, in large part because of integration worries.
Killer Appliaction
Identify and discuss “killer applications” that have driven commercial acceptance and usage of the Internet, from the early 1990’s to the present.You should also think also new digitally converged devices that may become available between now and 2010.
http://cactus.eas.asu.edu/partha/Columns/2002/07-01-killer-app.htm
killer application (commonly shortened to killer app) is a computer program that is so useful or desirable that it proves the value of some underlying technology, such as a gaming console, operating system, or piece of computer hardware.
Term originally coined to describe a computer program so good or so compelling to certain potential users that they buy the computer that the program runs on for no other reason than to be able to use that program. The term's meaning has since been extended to describe something, such as an idea or a product, which is extremely compelling.
killer app has to be exceptionally appealing, amazingly useful and totally simple. Consider the telephone—a handset and a dial, it could not be any simpler or more useful. Same thing applies for radio, TV, email and so on. If we look to the past, and beyond computer programs, we can find many examples of killer apps, namely electricity, telephones, automobiles, radio, TV and many more. In some ways, the computer itself is a killer app. A wildly popular TV show is also a killer app that runs on a killer app (the television). The Internet is a killer app and Email is a killer app that runs on the Internet.
Developers of new platforms now tend to put a lot of effort into discovering or creating the next killer "app" for their technology, in the hope that it will be the breakthrough needed to get the technology adopted. This has led to the burgeoning list of features on, for example, mobile telephones, such as text messaging, digital cameras, etc., though many maintain that the killer app for telephone technology is, and always has been, live peer-to-peer voice transmission.
Computer experts sometimes use the phrase with reference to other technologies to explain its significance to laypersons. In this context a killer application refers to a certain usage of that technology that makes the technology popular and successful. This usage of the term is especially prevalent when the technology existed before but did not take off before the introduction of the killer application. Examples for this
The most successful was VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet to run on a personal computer (the original Apple II microcomputer). VisiCalc succeeded as a killer application because it provided a unique tool for accountants to manipulate numbers easily without the need for programming skills. Another clear example is PageMaker, the first desktop publishing program, which was responsible for selling the Apple Macintosh to the design and publishing community.
The World Wide Web is the killer application for the Internet: by bringing visual excitement and ease of use to the Internet, it inspired people to buy new computers capable of supporting Web browsers.
IPTV – Internet protocol television allows consumers not only to customize their video programming experience, IPTV also empowers organizations of all types to directly and more inexpensively access new and/or targeted global audiences
Many analysts claim it is the matchmaking sites. Methods of finding a partner rank as one of the greatest successes of the Internet (of course, it was not designed to be). Matchmaking sites allow a person to post his or her personality traits, pictures, likes, dislikes, wishes and other personal information on a public site, all with a very simple interface. Then other people can search the advertisements looking for age ranges, location and other attributes. The pictures and the lengthy descriptions are of course much superior to newspaper advertisements. One of the larger matchmaking sites (www.match.com) has over three million current postings from every corner of the world, and about half a million new postings per month.
Once a person finds someone he or she thinks is interesting an Email dialog can start up. From Email, the relationship graduates up to IM (or Instant Messaging) and maybe even Internet based videoconferencing. Supposedly dating and marriage are quite common outcomes.
DNA computing.
Wireless/bluetooth ipod – share podcasts/music wirelessly.
E-learning : Education over the internet.
http://cactus.eas.asu.edu/partha/Columns/2002/07-01-killer-app.htm
killer application (commonly shortened to killer app) is a computer program that is so useful or desirable that it proves the value of some underlying technology, such as a gaming console, operating system, or piece of computer hardware.
Term originally coined to describe a computer program so good or so compelling to certain potential users that they buy the computer that the program runs on for no other reason than to be able to use that program. The term's meaning has since been extended to describe something, such as an idea or a product, which is extremely compelling.
killer app has to be exceptionally appealing, amazingly useful and totally simple. Consider the telephone—a handset and a dial, it could not be any simpler or more useful. Same thing applies for radio, TV, email and so on. If we look to the past, and beyond computer programs, we can find many examples of killer apps, namely electricity, telephones, automobiles, radio, TV and many more. In some ways, the computer itself is a killer app. A wildly popular TV show is also a killer app that runs on a killer app (the television). The Internet is a killer app and Email is a killer app that runs on the Internet.
Developers of new platforms now tend to put a lot of effort into discovering or creating the next killer "app" for their technology, in the hope that it will be the breakthrough needed to get the technology adopted. This has led to the burgeoning list of features on, for example, mobile telephones, such as text messaging, digital cameras, etc., though many maintain that the killer app for telephone technology is, and always has been, live peer-to-peer voice transmission.
Computer experts sometimes use the phrase with reference to other technologies to explain its significance to laypersons. In this context a killer application refers to a certain usage of that technology that makes the technology popular and successful. This usage of the term is especially prevalent when the technology existed before but did not take off before the introduction of the killer application. Examples for this
The most successful was VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet to run on a personal computer (the original Apple II microcomputer). VisiCalc succeeded as a killer application because it provided a unique tool for accountants to manipulate numbers easily without the need for programming skills. Another clear example is PageMaker, the first desktop publishing program, which was responsible for selling the Apple Macintosh to the design and publishing community.
The World Wide Web is the killer application for the Internet: by bringing visual excitement and ease of use to the Internet, it inspired people to buy new computers capable of supporting Web browsers.
IPTV – Internet protocol television allows consumers not only to customize their video programming experience, IPTV also empowers organizations of all types to directly and more inexpensively access new and/or targeted global audiences
Many analysts claim it is the matchmaking sites. Methods of finding a partner rank as one of the greatest successes of the Internet (of course, it was not designed to be). Matchmaking sites allow a person to post his or her personality traits, pictures, likes, dislikes, wishes and other personal information on a public site, all with a very simple interface. Then other people can search the advertisements looking for age ranges, location and other attributes. The pictures and the lengthy descriptions are of course much superior to newspaper advertisements. One of the larger matchmaking sites (www.match.com) has over three million current postings from every corner of the world, and about half a million new postings per month.
Once a person finds someone he or she thinks is interesting an Email dialog can start up. From Email, the relationship graduates up to IM (or Instant Messaging) and maybe even Internet based videoconferencing. Supposedly dating and marriage are quite common outcomes.
DNA computing.
Wireless/bluetooth ipod – share podcasts/music wirelessly.
E-learning : Education over the internet.
Globalising and Personalising
You should be able to discuss consumers globalizing and personalizing their online information sources with reference to relevant technologies and impacts for marketing
A powerful force drives the world towards a converging commonality and that force is technology. It has proletarianized communication, transport and travel making people in geographically dispersed areas wanting everything they’ve heard, seen or experienced via technology.
The result is a new commercial reality- the emergence of global markets for standardized consumer products on a previously unimagined scale of magnitude. Gone are accustomed differences in national and regional preferences. The globalization of markets is at hand and with that comes the global consumer no longer bound by such preferences. Corporations geared to this new reality benefit from economies of scale in production, distribution, marketing and management. By translating these benefits into reduced world prices they can decimate competitors still operating on old assumptions.
However, the ‘global consumer’ is also more demanding with reference to the technological tools they use. Broadly marketed Web sites face an increasingly diverse and demanding audience. Each visitor may be searching for something different, and each may have unique needs or concerns. Traditional, "static" Web sites can try to serve these diverse users by aiming at generalized types of user. However, generalizing the audience may cause an information designer to overlook users who do not quite fit in a category. A more effective way to reach diverse audiences might be adaptive Web sites that customize content and interface to suit each individual.
Customization is the site’s ability to tailor itself- Tailorization, or be tailored by the user – Personalisation. To better address individual consumer needs, companies must allow their websites to be altered by the user or organization. Personalisation allows users to specify their preferences in content selection, context selection and personalization tools. Once personal preferences have been entered by the user and saved, the site uses a log-in registration or “cookies” to match each returning user to his/her personal settings. The site then configures itself to these settings accordingly.
Personalised online communication is an opportunity to reduce mass marketing expenses
and increase response rate by personalizing their marketing for each customer.
This info gives e-commerce companies an opportunity to create one to one marketing relationship also an opportunity to enhance CRM by adapting to individual user preferences based on information collected through personalization means. Eg financial organizations trying to cross –sell or up sell products.
Personalised communication is a form of Permission based marketing and is divided into 5 primary forms
· Personalised Permission emails – asks personal info when user signs up
· Personalised recommendation- these services use sophisticated algorithms to determine the products that might be of greatest interest to particular customers based on past purchase behaviour . without this information customers might not otherwise know about these recommended products. Some sites make recommendations to the user based on the preferences of other users with similar usage profiles (eg. Collaborative Filtering)
· Personalised advertisements- Based on past behaviour in the form of clicks on advertisements, which web ads must be shown to which users can be pre determined. Eg- ZDNet
· Personalised web pages
· Personalised e-commerce stores- Online merchants use the internet/ technology as well as knowledge on customers to tailor their products and services to them. eg. Amazon. OfficeDepot offers its small business customers personalized catalogs, allowing businesses to create real-time unique catalogs for their employees- based on their buying authority. In addition to making customers shopping experiences more pleasant, personalization is a key for increasing switching costs. Once the customer becomes dependant on the website that offers personalized services, it will be more costly to switch sites.
Following are some features used to attract and retain users:
Log-in registration- having previously registered on a site, the user returns and enters the requisite identification information. The site then recognizes the user and reconfigures itself to the preset preferences accordingly.
Cookies- Website owners can track and gather data about returning users’ behaviour by quietly saving identifying and tracking information on the users’ local disk storage in temporary files called “cookies”.
Personalised eMail accounts- Sites can provide free accounts for users to send and receive emails from the site using a unique email address.
Content and Layout Configuration- Users can select site screen layout and content sources based on their interests.
Storage- sites provide virtual hard disk storage space where users can store e-mail, URL’s and other interesting content.
Agents- Users can initiate computer programs also known as agents designed to perform specific simple tasks (eg. Notify them when product is in stock)
Sites can also dynamically (through software) publish unique versions of the site to address a specific user’s interest’s habits or needs. The site can also be designed to reconfigure and present different contents with various design layouts to individual users depending on each user’s response and/or profile. Some sites make recommendations to the user based on the preferences of other users with similar usage profiles (eg. Collaborative Filtering)
Adaptive Web sites are not the same as adaptable Web sites, although both kinds of sites seek to customize the user's visit. Adaptable Web sites require some deliberate input from a user, such as choosing from a set of preferences, in order to tailor the site's presentation.
Figure 2: Amazon.com's product pages have predicted ratings and recommendations based on other customers' purchases [2].
The adaptability is user-controlled and initiated. [7] Portal Web sites such as Yahoo.com and iWon.com are adaptable; they allow users with Yahoo or iWon accounts to choose how information is displayed on their personal view of the Web site. For example, Yahoo users can choose the types of news that they would like on their my.yahoo.com page.
Adaptive systems, on the other hand, generally customize the Web site by unobtrusively observing the user's actions [7, 10]. Amazon.com uses an adaptive system based on previous purchases and click-throughs to recommend products that the customer might want to buy. It highlights products related to previous purchases and click-throughs on the home page. On the individual product pages, Amazon.com lists items that other people who bought this particular title also bought. This latter feature is a form of collaborative filtering where a peer (in this case someone who bought the music album that the user is looking at) "recommends" a title that the user might like based on their shared interest in that book. Figure 2 shows an Amazon.com product page that lists related music purchases as well as a prediction for how much the author will like this title. Other Web sites that use adaptive systems to recommend products include Qrate.com and MovieLens (http://movielens.umn.edu).
Adaptive Web sites are a subgroup of attentive systems, or systems that attend to what the user is doing and then respond. Paul P. Maglio et al. claim that attentive systems should provide relevant but not critical information [10]. Amazon.com is a good example of this requirement. It recommends products for the user to browse, but these recommendations are not a crucial part of the user's visit to the Web site. The user can ignore the recommendations and still get full functionality from the site.
The theory behind personalization is that it prevents users from being subjected to a series of advertisements or promotions for a product they are not interested in. The idea of advertising is that the “right ad reaches the right person”. Personalisation equips the marketer with the appropriate ammunition for their target audience.
However with personalization comes the potential infringement of privacy of users information. To allow personalization means the marketers / companies must know personal information about the users. Customers on the other hand are increasingly becoming uneasy about their personal information being widely known.
Hence a delicate balance between privacy and personalization is required.
A powerful force drives the world towards a converging commonality and that force is technology. It has proletarianized communication, transport and travel making people in geographically dispersed areas wanting everything they’ve heard, seen or experienced via technology.
The result is a new commercial reality- the emergence of global markets for standardized consumer products on a previously unimagined scale of magnitude. Gone are accustomed differences in national and regional preferences. The globalization of markets is at hand and with that comes the global consumer no longer bound by such preferences. Corporations geared to this new reality benefit from economies of scale in production, distribution, marketing and management. By translating these benefits into reduced world prices they can decimate competitors still operating on old assumptions.
However, the ‘global consumer’ is also more demanding with reference to the technological tools they use. Broadly marketed Web sites face an increasingly diverse and demanding audience. Each visitor may be searching for something different, and each may have unique needs or concerns. Traditional, "static" Web sites can try to serve these diverse users by aiming at generalized types of user. However, generalizing the audience may cause an information designer to overlook users who do not quite fit in a category. A more effective way to reach diverse audiences might be adaptive Web sites that customize content and interface to suit each individual.
Customization is the site’s ability to tailor itself- Tailorization, or be tailored by the user – Personalisation. To better address individual consumer needs, companies must allow their websites to be altered by the user or organization. Personalisation allows users to specify their preferences in content selection, context selection and personalization tools. Once personal preferences have been entered by the user and saved, the site uses a log-in registration or “cookies” to match each returning user to his/her personal settings. The site then configures itself to these settings accordingly.
Personalised online communication is an opportunity to reduce mass marketing expenses
and increase response rate by personalizing their marketing for each customer.
This info gives e-commerce companies an opportunity to create one to one marketing relationship also an opportunity to enhance CRM by adapting to individual user preferences based on information collected through personalization means. Eg financial organizations trying to cross –sell or up sell products.
Personalised communication is a form of Permission based marketing and is divided into 5 primary forms
· Personalised Permission emails – asks personal info when user signs up
· Personalised recommendation- these services use sophisticated algorithms to determine the products that might be of greatest interest to particular customers based on past purchase behaviour . without this information customers might not otherwise know about these recommended products. Some sites make recommendations to the user based on the preferences of other users with similar usage profiles (eg. Collaborative Filtering)
· Personalised advertisements- Based on past behaviour in the form of clicks on advertisements, which web ads must be shown to which users can be pre determined. Eg- ZDNet
· Personalised web pages
· Personalised e-commerce stores- Online merchants use the internet/ technology as well as knowledge on customers to tailor their products and services to them. eg. Amazon. OfficeDepot offers its small business customers personalized catalogs, allowing businesses to create real-time unique catalogs for their employees- based on their buying authority. In addition to making customers shopping experiences more pleasant, personalization is a key for increasing switching costs. Once the customer becomes dependant on the website that offers personalized services, it will be more costly to switch sites.
Following are some features used to attract and retain users:
Log-in registration- having previously registered on a site, the user returns and enters the requisite identification information. The site then recognizes the user and reconfigures itself to the preset preferences accordingly.
Cookies- Website owners can track and gather data about returning users’ behaviour by quietly saving identifying and tracking information on the users’ local disk storage in temporary files called “cookies”.
Personalised eMail accounts- Sites can provide free accounts for users to send and receive emails from the site using a unique email address.
Content and Layout Configuration- Users can select site screen layout and content sources based on their interests.
Storage- sites provide virtual hard disk storage space where users can store e-mail, URL’s and other interesting content.
Agents- Users can initiate computer programs also known as agents designed to perform specific simple tasks (eg. Notify them when product is in stock)
Sites can also dynamically (through software) publish unique versions of the site to address a specific user’s interest’s habits or needs. The site can also be designed to reconfigure and present different contents with various design layouts to individual users depending on each user’s response and/or profile. Some sites make recommendations to the user based on the preferences of other users with similar usage profiles (eg. Collaborative Filtering)
Adaptive Web sites are not the same as adaptable Web sites, although both kinds of sites seek to customize the user's visit. Adaptable Web sites require some deliberate input from a user, such as choosing from a set of preferences, in order to tailor the site's presentation.
Figure 2: Amazon.com's product pages have predicted ratings and recommendations based on other customers' purchases [2].
The adaptability is user-controlled and initiated. [7] Portal Web sites such as Yahoo.com and iWon.com are adaptable; they allow users with Yahoo or iWon accounts to choose how information is displayed on their personal view of the Web site. For example, Yahoo users can choose the types of news that they would like on their my.yahoo.com page.
Adaptive systems, on the other hand, generally customize the Web site by unobtrusively observing the user's actions [7, 10]. Amazon.com uses an adaptive system based on previous purchases and click-throughs to recommend products that the customer might want to buy. It highlights products related to previous purchases and click-throughs on the home page. On the individual product pages, Amazon.com lists items that other people who bought this particular title also bought. This latter feature is a form of collaborative filtering where a peer (in this case someone who bought the music album that the user is looking at) "recommends" a title that the user might like based on their shared interest in that book. Figure 2 shows an Amazon.com product page that lists related music purchases as well as a prediction for how much the author will like this title. Other Web sites that use adaptive systems to recommend products include Qrate.com and MovieLens (http://movielens.umn.edu).
Adaptive Web sites are a subgroup of attentive systems, or systems that attend to what the user is doing and then respond. Paul P. Maglio et al. claim that attentive systems should provide relevant but not critical information [10]. Amazon.com is a good example of this requirement. It recommends products for the user to browse, but these recommendations are not a crucial part of the user's visit to the Web site. The user can ignore the recommendations and still get full functionality from the site.
The theory behind personalization is that it prevents users from being subjected to a series of advertisements or promotions for a product they are not interested in. The idea of advertising is that the “right ad reaches the right person”. Personalisation equips the marketer with the appropriate ammunition for their target audience.
However with personalization comes the potential infringement of privacy of users information. To allow personalization means the marketers / companies must know personal information about the users. Customers on the other hand are increasingly becoming uneasy about their personal information being widely known.
Hence a delicate balance between privacy and personalization is required.
WebServices
CIO’s throughout various private and public companies are currently evaluating adoption of “Web Services”. Discuss the concept of “Web Services” from a business and marketing perspective, with reference to how marketers could be involved in the development of “marketing Web Services”, and how these might to contribute to "Marketing in the Semantic Web".
Web services make it more straightforward for programs to do things on the web. The early conception of web services was primarily of remote procedure calls over the web with both invocations (request) and returned value (response) encoded in XML. This makes it easier to write programs that use other programs across web by making the remote programs feel very similar to code libraries occasionally provided by the operating system and the programming environment.
Web services can be defined as modular Internet-based business functions that perform specific business tasks to facilitate business interactions within and beyond the organization. By this definition Web services reflect and refer to loosely coupled reusable software components that are able to semantically encapsulate discrete functionality and are programmatically accessible over standard Internet protocols.
Benefits of Web services include
faster time to market,
convergence of disparate e-business initiatives,
significant reduction in total cost of ownership,
and ease to use software tailored for trading partners.
reduce the risk that organizations end up using obsolete technologies, third party utilities reduce risk on the reliance on external application providers to offer the latest technologies.
There are two strong motivations for using web technologies for services.
Reusability: Reuse existing deployment of and expertise with those technologies.
Deployment: Deploy the service on the web.
There are some issues which marketers need to look at to attract people to look at their webservice. A webservice is more like a web page or a site. You have put it up, now you want other people to use it.
Problems for marketers:
· If your service is primarily intended for human beings who have already found your associated website, then problem of how to get people using your web service reduces too getting them to your website and once they are there give them enough information so that they can figure out how to use the associated service. Getting people to come to your website as known solutions and programmer can simply read service documentation to rlearn how to invoke it.
· If there are 10 web services, finding the right one isn’t hard. Of there are a few hundred, it is tedious, but feasible.
· While useful webservices might be scarce, they aren’t that scarce. There are a log of players big and small, hence we might have a problem of abundance rather than scarcity.
Solving the above:
A complete solution to the above is semantic web pages. Semantic web pages have a requirement that authors supply correct metadata for their pages. The metadata suggests richer web link structure that could support not just better research but other activities.
Universal Description, Discovery and Integration of Web services (UDDI), is a meta service for locating Web Services by enabling robust queries against rich metadata.”
UDDI has two components:
UDDI is a meta service
It specifically focuses on locating Web services.
With the help of technologies like UDDI, programmers will be able to locate and make effective searches about webservices they would like to use.
With this however arises a question…Now that companies are becoming more and more aware of the use of meta services like UDDI, it has encouraged the development of less sophisticated metadata techniques. At the core UDDI looks especially impoverished next to OWL (Web Ontology language – which is another effort at creating sense to the semantic web dream).
Marketers are confronting a range of new and emerging set of legislative initiatives that are likely to have major implications for future online marketing campaigns. Examples include proposed ant-spamming Federal laws, privacy laws, and emerging laws related to management of customer information.Discuss the potential impact of ONE (1) area only of emerging law, for online marketing campaigns. You should identify specific impacts, and where possible some responses or alternatives for marketers confronted with these impacts.
Privacy:
It has been estimated, that around over a hundred bills regarding privacy are currently the hot topic. A bill sponsored by senators John McCain and John Kerry have proposed that websites let customers know what data the company is collecting, inform them about what the company intends to do and give customers a chance to opt-out of having the company share data with third parties.
Impact: Many internet companies are afraid of government regulation, which they believe could curb the revenue by limiting the amount of information they can collect or prevent from selling their customer databases. Forrester Research claims that consumer fears about privacy resulted in about $3 billion in lost online sales in 1999.
Web services make it more straightforward for programs to do things on the web. The early conception of web services was primarily of remote procedure calls over the web with both invocations (request) and returned value (response) encoded in XML. This makes it easier to write programs that use other programs across web by making the remote programs feel very similar to code libraries occasionally provided by the operating system and the programming environment.
Web services can be defined as modular Internet-based business functions that perform specific business tasks to facilitate business interactions within and beyond the organization. By this definition Web services reflect and refer to loosely coupled reusable software components that are able to semantically encapsulate discrete functionality and are programmatically accessible over standard Internet protocols.
Benefits of Web services include
faster time to market,
convergence of disparate e-business initiatives,
significant reduction in total cost of ownership,
and ease to use software tailored for trading partners.
reduce the risk that organizations end up using obsolete technologies, third party utilities reduce risk on the reliance on external application providers to offer the latest technologies.
There are two strong motivations for using web technologies for services.
Reusability: Reuse existing deployment of and expertise with those technologies.
Deployment: Deploy the service on the web.
There are some issues which marketers need to look at to attract people to look at their webservice. A webservice is more like a web page or a site. You have put it up, now you want other people to use it.
Problems for marketers:
· If your service is primarily intended for human beings who have already found your associated website, then problem of how to get people using your web service reduces too getting them to your website and once they are there give them enough information so that they can figure out how to use the associated service. Getting people to come to your website as known solutions and programmer can simply read service documentation to rlearn how to invoke it.
· If there are 10 web services, finding the right one isn’t hard. Of there are a few hundred, it is tedious, but feasible.
· While useful webservices might be scarce, they aren’t that scarce. There are a log of players big and small, hence we might have a problem of abundance rather than scarcity.
Solving the above:
A complete solution to the above is semantic web pages. Semantic web pages have a requirement that authors supply correct metadata for their pages. The metadata suggests richer web link structure that could support not just better research but other activities.
Universal Description, Discovery and Integration of Web services (UDDI), is a meta service for locating Web Services by enabling robust queries against rich metadata.”
UDDI has two components:
UDDI is a meta service
It specifically focuses on locating Web services.
With the help of technologies like UDDI, programmers will be able to locate and make effective searches about webservices they would like to use.
With this however arises a question…Now that companies are becoming more and more aware of the use of meta services like UDDI, it has encouraged the development of less sophisticated metadata techniques. At the core UDDI looks especially impoverished next to OWL (Web Ontology language – which is another effort at creating sense to the semantic web dream).
Marketers are confronting a range of new and emerging set of legislative initiatives that are likely to have major implications for future online marketing campaigns. Examples include proposed ant-spamming Federal laws, privacy laws, and emerging laws related to management of customer information.Discuss the potential impact of ONE (1) area only of emerging law, for online marketing campaigns. You should identify specific impacts, and where possible some responses or alternatives for marketers confronted with these impacts.
Privacy:
It has been estimated, that around over a hundred bills regarding privacy are currently the hot topic. A bill sponsored by senators John McCain and John Kerry have proposed that websites let customers know what data the company is collecting, inform them about what the company intends to do and give customers a chance to opt-out of having the company share data with third parties.
Impact: Many internet companies are afraid of government regulation, which they believe could curb the revenue by limiting the amount of information they can collect or prevent from selling their customer databases. Forrester Research claims that consumer fears about privacy resulted in about $3 billion in lost online sales in 1999.
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