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.
7 c's
You should be able to identify the elements of customer interface.
You should have examples of at least 2 websites that may exhibit exemplary designs for at least two customer interface elements.
The 7 C’s are Context, Content, Community, Customization, Communication, Connection and Commerce
Context
The context is the look-and-feel of a screen-to-face customer interface, and can be classified by both aesthetics and functionality:
Aesthetics: it is created by visual choices such as colors, graphics, photographs and fonts. In general it includes interactive video and other rich media applications. The two most critical aesthetic features of the website are the following:
Color Scheme: designers often use a consistent palette of colors throughout the site to put users in a specific mood.
Visual Themes: they help tell a story. It’s like have a character that helps the users in which page of the website
Functionality: it is related to the performance of the website. Below, the critical elements:
Section breakdown: it refers to a website subcomponents. Ex: Optus website:
optus.com.au
Optus website uses a top-level tab structure and product categories structure.
Top-level tab structure: home, contact us, site guide, pay my bill, my optus mobile and thumbprint
Product categories structure: about Optus, business services, home services, mobile services and clever and useful
Linking structure: this means how easy is to move among the sections, i.e., no matter which page I’m visiting, the Top-leval tab and product categories structure are always visible
Navigation Tools: it facilitates the user navigation through the site. Ex: Search tools
Speed
Reliability – how often a site experiences “downtime” is one indicator of reliability
Platform independence: It is a nmeasure of how well a website can run on multiple platforms, including old versions of Web browsers or outdated hw (ex: slow modems)
Media accessibility: the ability of a site to download to various media platforms
=> The context can be classified in:
Aesthetically dominant: high on form, low on function. These sites use various art forms to create a pleasant escape for users
Functionally dominant: these sites assume users care about information than visual elements (ex: yahoo)
Integrated: they balance form and function – try to be both attractive and easy to use.
Content
=> Content can be evaluated in 4 ways:
Offering mix: what they offer: products, services and/or information
Appeal mix: cognitive or emotional. Cognitive: appeal focus on functional factors such as low price, reliability, availability, breadth of offerings, customer support and degree of personalization. Emotional: appeals on personal ties to the product or brand and are often made through humor, novelty or stories.
Multimedia mix: how text, audio, images, video and graphics are combined.
Timeliness mix: it refers to a website’s choice of time-sensitive material. A example of time-sensitive site is that one that offer information as stock prices or breaking news. A non time-sensitive site that offers legal advice, for example
=> The content can be classified in:
Product dominant: online stores whose primary purpose is selling physical goods. They can be classified as follows:
Superstore: one-stop shop where users can find a wide range of goods in several product categories
Category killer: it concentrates exclusively on one product category. They offer a comprehensive selection of goods, but only within one category.
Specialty store: it focuses on exceptional quality and exclusivity in one or more product categories – users find high-quality photographs and graphics with wellwritten and in-depth descriptions of products. Ex: www.frontgate.com
Service dominant: ex: e-bay, once it provides the service of being the interface among the users
Information-dominant: sites with vast archives of info or tools to find specific topics. Ex: http://www.nytimes.com/
Community
It creates a sense of membership through involvement or shared common interests. The interaction can be one-to-one or one-to-many.
Characteristics
Cohesion: develops a group identity, members feel sense of belonging
Effectiveness: impacts on members’ life
Help: members help each other
Relationship: interaction leads to friendship
Language: specialized language and abbreviations, unique meaning in the community
Self-regulation: rules of interaction and system of policing developed by the group.
How members participate on a community
Passives: just watch or just attend sometimes (not actively engaged)
Actives: participate on activities and take part in conversations.
- Motivators: create conversation topics and plan activities
- Caretakers: act as intermediaries between members
Why members are motivated to join the community
socialize with others
share a hobby or special interest
emotionally intense support group
etc: actions, games
Member benefits – emotional benefits
need fulfillment
inclusion in plans and activities
mutual influence
shared experiences and info
Interaction tools
Interactive: chat rooms or message boards
Non-interactive: members submit content to a website for other members to see, but they cannot talk among themselves
Community classifications
· nonexistent
· limited: non-interactive tools
· strong: interactive tools
Customization
It is the website ability to present a different content to each user.
=> Customization Types:
Personalization: when the website is customized by the user – he/she sets his/her preferences and they are saved by the website. Sometimes users know (they have to enter name and password), but sometimes not (info saved through cookies). Ex:
· e-mail account:
· content and lay-out configuration: users can design their own homepage, with limits, by choosing background colors, lay-out design and content colors
· storage: users can store e-mails, favorite content or items they want to buy
· agents: programs can notify users by e-mail when a product is in stock
Tailoring: when customization is initiated by the website. Websites present different content and lay-out depending on each user’s profile (products offered and recommended services, information, banner, etc. Ex: recommendation of different products at Amazon.com based on previous purchases
=> Customization Classification
Generic: same face and content for every user
Moderately customized: especially for shopping users
Highly customized: provide users an individualized experience
Communication
It is the dialogue between the organization and the user.
Types of communication
Broadcast: one-way info from organization to users, with no way for user to response. Ex:
mass e-mailing
FAQ’s
E-mail newsletters
Content up-date reminders: e-mail tailored to reflect each subscribers’ interests and remind them of new content
Webcast events
Interactive: two way communication. Ex:
E-commerce dialogue
Customer service (e-mails or live online dialogue)
User input: user content used in the website
Hybrid: broadcast and interactive in the same website
Communication classification
One-to-many, non responding user
One-to-many, responding user
One-to-one, non-responding user. Ex: remember users of birthdays
One-to-one, responding user
Connection
It is the degree to which a website links to their sites.
Types of connection
Outside links: take the user completely out of the original site
Framed links: the new website is literally framed in someway by the original site
Pop-up windows: opens the new site in another browser window while the original site stays in the background
Outsourced content: it refers to content that comes from an outside supplier. There is a link to the supplier’s website, but the user does not need to leave the original site to view the content.
Connection Classification
Destination site: provides self-generated content almost exclusively, with very few links to other websites
Hub site: combination of self-generated content and links to related websites. They function as gateways to info on a specific industry or topic.
Portal site: consist almost exclusively of outsourced info and links to other sites.
Commerce
It is the website’s ability to perform financial transactions.
Functional features that enable e-commerce
Registration: user registration that allows a site to store credit card information, shipping address, and billing preferences
Shopping cart
Security
Credit card approval: if the website has the ability to receive instant credit approval for credit card purchases through electronic links to credit card clearance houses
One-click shopping: the site has users’ info stored, so when they want to buy something, they order products almost instantly
Orders through affiliates: websites with affiliate programs must be able to track orders that originate from affiliate sites, as well as determine the payment due for referrals.
Configuration technology: it helps users to put products and services together in a variety of ways to allow analysis of performance, interoperability, etc
Order tracking
Delivery Options
Commerce classification
Low: it has the ability of process transactions, but with few or no features
Medium: some features
High
PS: This answer was based on the theory presented at Rayport & Jaworski book, Chapter 5 – Strategy Formulation: Customer interface - pages 149 to 191.
You should have examples of at least 2 websites that may exhibit exemplary designs for at least two customer interface elements.
The 7 C’s are Context, Content, Community, Customization, Communication, Connection and Commerce
Context
The context is the look-and-feel of a screen-to-face customer interface, and can be classified by both aesthetics and functionality:
Aesthetics: it is created by visual choices such as colors, graphics, photographs and fonts. In general it includes interactive video and other rich media applications. The two most critical aesthetic features of the website are the following:
Color Scheme: designers often use a consistent palette of colors throughout the site to put users in a specific mood.
Visual Themes: they help tell a story. It’s like have a character that helps the users in which page of the website
Functionality: it is related to the performance of the website. Below, the critical elements:
Section breakdown: it refers to a website subcomponents. Ex: Optus website:
optus.com.au
Optus website uses a top-level tab structure and product categories structure.
Top-level tab structure: home, contact us, site guide, pay my bill, my optus mobile and thumbprint
Product categories structure: about Optus, business services, home services, mobile services and clever and useful
Linking structure: this means how easy is to move among the sections, i.e., no matter which page I’m visiting, the Top-leval tab and product categories structure are always visible
Navigation Tools: it facilitates the user navigation through the site. Ex: Search tools
Speed
Reliability – how often a site experiences “downtime” is one indicator of reliability
Platform independence: It is a nmeasure of how well a website can run on multiple platforms, including old versions of Web browsers or outdated hw (ex: slow modems)
Media accessibility: the ability of a site to download to various media platforms
=> The context can be classified in:
Aesthetically dominant: high on form, low on function. These sites use various art forms to create a pleasant escape for users
Functionally dominant: these sites assume users care about information than visual elements (ex: yahoo)
Integrated: they balance form and function – try to be both attractive and easy to use.
Content
=> Content can be evaluated in 4 ways:
Offering mix: what they offer: products, services and/or information
Appeal mix: cognitive or emotional. Cognitive: appeal focus on functional factors such as low price, reliability, availability, breadth of offerings, customer support and degree of personalization. Emotional: appeals on personal ties to the product or brand and are often made through humor, novelty or stories.
Multimedia mix: how text, audio, images, video and graphics are combined.
Timeliness mix: it refers to a website’s choice of time-sensitive material. A example of time-sensitive site is that one that offer information as stock prices or breaking news. A non time-sensitive site that offers legal advice, for example
=> The content can be classified in:
Product dominant: online stores whose primary purpose is selling physical goods. They can be classified as follows:
Superstore: one-stop shop where users can find a wide range of goods in several product categories
Category killer: it concentrates exclusively on one product category. They offer a comprehensive selection of goods, but only within one category.
Specialty store: it focuses on exceptional quality and exclusivity in one or more product categories – users find high-quality photographs and graphics with wellwritten and in-depth descriptions of products. Ex: www.frontgate.com
Service dominant: ex: e-bay, once it provides the service of being the interface among the users
Information-dominant: sites with vast archives of info or tools to find specific topics. Ex: http://www.nytimes.com/
Community
It creates a sense of membership through involvement or shared common interests. The interaction can be one-to-one or one-to-many.
Characteristics
Cohesion: develops a group identity, members feel sense of belonging
Effectiveness: impacts on members’ life
Help: members help each other
Relationship: interaction leads to friendship
Language: specialized language and abbreviations, unique meaning in the community
Self-regulation: rules of interaction and system of policing developed by the group.
How members participate on a community
Passives: just watch or just attend sometimes (not actively engaged)
Actives: participate on activities and take part in conversations.
- Motivators: create conversation topics and plan activities
- Caretakers: act as intermediaries between members
Why members are motivated to join the community
socialize with others
share a hobby or special interest
emotionally intense support group
etc: actions, games
Member benefits – emotional benefits
need fulfillment
inclusion in plans and activities
mutual influence
shared experiences and info
Interaction tools
Interactive: chat rooms or message boards
Non-interactive: members submit content to a website for other members to see, but they cannot talk among themselves
Community classifications
· nonexistent
· limited: non-interactive tools
· strong: interactive tools
Customization
It is the website ability to present a different content to each user.
=> Customization Types:
Personalization: when the website is customized by the user – he/she sets his/her preferences and they are saved by the website. Sometimes users know (they have to enter name and password), but sometimes not (info saved through cookies). Ex:
· e-mail account:
· content and lay-out configuration: users can design their own homepage, with limits, by choosing background colors, lay-out design and content colors
· storage: users can store e-mails, favorite content or items they want to buy
· agents: programs can notify users by e-mail when a product is in stock
Tailoring: when customization is initiated by the website. Websites present different content and lay-out depending on each user’s profile (products offered and recommended services, information, banner, etc. Ex: recommendation of different products at Amazon.com based on previous purchases
=> Customization Classification
Generic: same face and content for every user
Moderately customized: especially for shopping users
Highly customized: provide users an individualized experience
Communication
It is the dialogue between the organization and the user.
Types of communication
Broadcast: one-way info from organization to users, with no way for user to response. Ex:
mass e-mailing
FAQ’s
E-mail newsletters
Content up-date reminders: e-mail tailored to reflect each subscribers’ interests and remind them of new content
Webcast events
Interactive: two way communication. Ex:
E-commerce dialogue
Customer service (e-mails or live online dialogue)
User input: user content used in the website
Hybrid: broadcast and interactive in the same website
Communication classification
One-to-many, non responding user
One-to-many, responding user
One-to-one, non-responding user. Ex: remember users of birthdays
One-to-one, responding user
Connection
It is the degree to which a website links to their sites.
Types of connection
Outside links: take the user completely out of the original site
Framed links: the new website is literally framed in someway by the original site
Pop-up windows: opens the new site in another browser window while the original site stays in the background
Outsourced content: it refers to content that comes from an outside supplier. There is a link to the supplier’s website, but the user does not need to leave the original site to view the content.
Connection Classification
Destination site: provides self-generated content almost exclusively, with very few links to other websites
Hub site: combination of self-generated content and links to related websites. They function as gateways to info on a specific industry or topic.
Portal site: consist almost exclusively of outsourced info and links to other sites.
Commerce
It is the website’s ability to perform financial transactions.
Functional features that enable e-commerce
Registration: user registration that allows a site to store credit card information, shipping address, and billing preferences
Shopping cart
Security
Credit card approval: if the website has the ability to receive instant credit approval for credit card purchases through electronic links to credit card clearance houses
One-click shopping: the site has users’ info stored, so when they want to buy something, they order products almost instantly
Orders through affiliates: websites with affiliate programs must be able to track orders that originate from affiliate sites, as well as determine the payment due for referrals.
Configuration technology: it helps users to put products and services together in a variety of ways to allow analysis of performance, interoperability, etc
Order tracking
Delivery Options
Commerce classification
Low: it has the ability of process transactions, but with few or no features
Medium: some features
High
PS: This answer was based on the theory presented at Rayport & Jaworski book, Chapter 5 – Strategy Formulation: Customer interface - pages 149 to 191.
Open Source
“Open-Source” application development philosophy has the potential to revolutionise development and sharing of information for business and throughout society” (H. Pattinson, 2004).
Discuss business and marketing issues associated with emergence of an “Open-Source” approach as preferred policy - initially for business and government-related application development - and then for more broad business and societal information/knowledge development and sharing.
Open Source requires the source code of computer software to be made available openly for study, modification and improvement in its design through the availability of its source code under an open source license (Wikipedia, 2005). An open source license is certified by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) which is an unincorporated non-profit research and educational association with the mission to own and defend Open Source trademark and advance the cause of Open Source Software (OSS).
Open source does not only mean access to source code. The distribution terms must comply with the following criterion
Free Redistribution ( by constraining the license to require free redistribution, short term gains are eliminated in favour of long term gains)
Source Code ( access code facilitates modification and hence evolution of programs)
Derived Work ( modifications and derived work must be distributed on the same terms as the original work)
Integrity of the Authors Source Code
No Discrimination against People and Groups
No Discrimination against Fields of Endeavour
Distribution of License
License must not be specific to a product
License must not restrict other software
License must be technology neutral
(Open source Initiative, 2005)
The open source business model has its focus on creating value. The profits are centered on the service of the products (as opposed to the selling price of the product) with different revenue sources and different pricing strategies. This strategy makes sense if your value proposition is not in the software itself but the service and expertise associated with the software.
The first challenge for the open-source entrepreneur is mobilizing top notch programmers. In some cases, when no viable commercial alternatives exist or when they are too expensive, it may, in fact, be easier to attract top programmers to open-source projects than to commercial development. Developers of standard off-the-shelf software often find it difficult to judge whether a product feature will have a major impact on satisfying user needs, and they also recognize that users often have difficulty expressing their needs. As a result, the high development (and marketing) costs for standard packaged software typically cause software firms to spread these costs among a large population of users.
Because project learning in the open-source world is transparent for others to see, a project accumulates the development efforts of volunteer users and seems to encourage the software’s diffusion in order to build a developer’s reputation and spread the products.
In the short to medium terms, some managers may encourage the use of open-source software in their own firms. Others may attempt to build a business based on distributing and servicing open-source software. Us based Red Hat and German based SuSE, which distribute Linux software, serve as templates for such activity. Other companies may sell computer hardware running open-source software, such as IBM, which offers Linux as an option. Managers may also try to reduce development costs and boost software standards by using the open-source software development model. Such an example is Sun Microsystem’s decision to rely on open-source methods to develop and distribute Java. There are also potential advantages to a model whereby resources used for innovation are widely distributed throughout the world. Also, the value of specialization through self-selection and how norms of meritocracy and peer recognition help ensure product quality.
For company to use the open-source software, more flexibility to adapt it to their business needs.
Other application benefit is the online research, Open-source collaboration methodology. In the world of academic survey research, a form of “open-source” methodology reigns. Survey data and methodology are fully disclosed and shared. While we certainly lack of a single unified survey methodology analogous to the Mozilla browser or Unix operating system, academic survey researchers have reached broad consensus around the set of “ best practices” on many issues. Moreover, the “source code” of academic survey research is free and available to all practitioners to modify as they see fit.
Discuss business and marketing issues associated with emergence of an “Open-Source” approach as preferred policy - initially for business and government-related application development - and then for more broad business and societal information/knowledge development and sharing.
Open Source requires the source code of computer software to be made available openly for study, modification and improvement in its design through the availability of its source code under an open source license (Wikipedia, 2005). An open source license is certified by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) which is an unincorporated non-profit research and educational association with the mission to own and defend Open Source trademark and advance the cause of Open Source Software (OSS).
Open source does not only mean access to source code. The distribution terms must comply with the following criterion
Free Redistribution ( by constraining the license to require free redistribution, short term gains are eliminated in favour of long term gains)
Source Code ( access code facilitates modification and hence evolution of programs)
Derived Work ( modifications and derived work must be distributed on the same terms as the original work)
Integrity of the Authors Source Code
No Discrimination against People and Groups
No Discrimination against Fields of Endeavour
Distribution of License
License must not be specific to a product
License must not restrict other software
License must be technology neutral
(Open source Initiative, 2005)
The open source business model has its focus on creating value. The profits are centered on the service of the products (as opposed to the selling price of the product) with different revenue sources and different pricing strategies. This strategy makes sense if your value proposition is not in the software itself but the service and expertise associated with the software.
The first challenge for the open-source entrepreneur is mobilizing top notch programmers. In some cases, when no viable commercial alternatives exist or when they are too expensive, it may, in fact, be easier to attract top programmers to open-source projects than to commercial development. Developers of standard off-the-shelf software often find it difficult to judge whether a product feature will have a major impact on satisfying user needs, and they also recognize that users often have difficulty expressing their needs. As a result, the high development (and marketing) costs for standard packaged software typically cause software firms to spread these costs among a large population of users.
Because project learning in the open-source world is transparent for others to see, a project accumulates the development efforts of volunteer users and seems to encourage the software’s diffusion in order to build a developer’s reputation and spread the products.
In the short to medium terms, some managers may encourage the use of open-source software in their own firms. Others may attempt to build a business based on distributing and servicing open-source software. Us based Red Hat and German based SuSE, which distribute Linux software, serve as templates for such activity. Other companies may sell computer hardware running open-source software, such as IBM, which offers Linux as an option. Managers may also try to reduce development costs and boost software standards by using the open-source software development model. Such an example is Sun Microsystem’s decision to rely on open-source methods to develop and distribute Java. There are also potential advantages to a model whereby resources used for innovation are widely distributed throughout the world. Also, the value of specialization through self-selection and how norms of meritocracy and peer recognition help ensure product quality.
For company to use the open-source software, more flexibility to adapt it to their business needs.
Other application benefit is the online research, Open-source collaboration methodology. In the world of academic survey research, a form of “open-source” methodology reigns. Survey data and methodology are fully disclosed and shared. While we certainly lack of a single unified survey methodology analogous to the Mozilla browser or Unix operating system, academic survey researchers have reached broad consensus around the set of “ best practices” on many issues. Moreover, the “source code” of academic survey research is free and available to all practitioners to modify as they see fit.
B2B models
(a) Describe and discuss the three most common business-to-business internet models according to Roberts with reference to characteristics, served market and market orientation.
(b) Discuss current evolution and possible future developments for an application service provider business model.
The most common business to business models are as follows:
Marketplace Model
Infomediary Model
Application Service provider model
MODEL
CHARACTERISTICS
SERVED MARKET
MARKET ORIENTATION
Marketplace/Exchange
A place where buyers and sellers meet to effect transactions
Can serve either horizontal or vertical markets. Usually specializes in one or the other based on expertise or relationships.
Generally oriented to the buy side.
Infomediary
Meets specialized information needs of internet businesses and consumers.
Can serve either horizontal or vertical markets. Usually specializes in one or the other based on expertise and technological requirements.
Can serve either horizontal or vertical markets. Usually specializes in specific software application.
As an intermediary, can serve either buy or sell side, or possibly both depending on the nature of the information product.
Application Service provider/ Managed Service provider.
Provides software on a contract or fee-for service basis. Frequently provides other services like Web hosting.
As a provider of enterprise level services can serve either buyers or sellers.
Marketplace Model:
There are three types of marketplaces – public, private and industry owned.
Public marketplaces serve any qualified purchaser or supplier. marketplaces had a simple business model: to capture a share of business-to-business transactions in a defined market, charge fees for connecting buyers to sellers, and wait for the money to roll in.
Private exchanges serve only a single firm. Throughout 2002 Pepsi Bottling Group, Volkwagon AG etc opened their own private marketplaces. Volkswagon’s goals are to conduct private negotiations with key suppliers and to find ways to align parts shipments with factory demand.
Industry exchanges often called consortia, serve several competitor firms in a given industry. Convisint founded in 2000 by GM and Daimler Chrysler and later joined by Renault, Nissan and Peugeot. Its goal was to handle a single marketplace that would nhandle $300 billion a year in annual procurement.
ISPs at the lowest level simply provide access to internet. Large ISPs like AOL have added multitude of services including e-commerce to their sites to make it one stop shopping. Hosts who appeal to small business market typically offer these services at a low level, such as templates for web design and simple data aggregation and reporting. Hosts who have an appleal to large corporations offer the same set of services at a higher level. They are likely to have sophisticated consulting services skilled web and data base programmers, realtime on demand site performance reporting and high quality technical support.
Application Service Providers are third party entities that manage and distribute software based services and solutions to customers across a wide area network from a central data center. ASPs rent softwares to clients on a usage fee basis. They normally specialize to particular e-commerce and large business applications.
Eg: Chillicom.com, OBT.com.au
User count is important because of the typical ASP revenue model Fees are pegged to the number of registered users at each client site in much the same way as software vendors charge for site licenses. As ASPs also look for multiple revenue sources and away from sole reliance on a user-based fee structure a new variant is emerging the managed service provider.MSPs handle issues ranging fomr security to identifying the appropriate software application or systems integrator by partnering with wide range of specialized providers.
MSP eg.. Kaseya.com
Although MSPs can provide software applications, they donot see themselves as competitive with preexisting ASPs but instead as providing infrastructure services that permit ASPs to concentrate on serving their customers. Many early customers of MSPs have actually been ASPs.
The MSP market has evolved and expanded significantly over the past decade. Although network and IT infrastructures are more business critical than ever, factors such as complexity of technologies increase in internal support costs and necessity toi focus on core business are forcing enterprises to outsource more and more of their infrastructure management. The scale, performance and efficiency that are necessary to succeed in this market can be achieved only through infrastructure management solutions that are comprehensive, seamless and proven.
(b) Discuss current evolution and possible future developments for an application service provider business model.
The most common business to business models are as follows:
Marketplace Model
Infomediary Model
Application Service provider model
MODEL
CHARACTERISTICS
SERVED MARKET
MARKET ORIENTATION
Marketplace/Exchange
A place where buyers and sellers meet to effect transactions
Can serve either horizontal or vertical markets. Usually specializes in one or the other based on expertise or relationships.
Generally oriented to the buy side.
Infomediary
Meets specialized information needs of internet businesses and consumers.
Can serve either horizontal or vertical markets. Usually specializes in one or the other based on expertise and technological requirements.
Can serve either horizontal or vertical markets. Usually specializes in specific software application.
As an intermediary, can serve either buy or sell side, or possibly both depending on the nature of the information product.
Application Service provider/ Managed Service provider.
Provides software on a contract or fee-for service basis. Frequently provides other services like Web hosting.
As a provider of enterprise level services can serve either buyers or sellers.
Marketplace Model:
There are three types of marketplaces – public, private and industry owned.
Public marketplaces serve any qualified purchaser or supplier. marketplaces had a simple business model: to capture a share of business-to-business transactions in a defined market, charge fees for connecting buyers to sellers, and wait for the money to roll in.
Private exchanges serve only a single firm. Throughout 2002 Pepsi Bottling Group, Volkwagon AG etc opened their own private marketplaces. Volkswagon’s goals are to conduct private negotiations with key suppliers and to find ways to align parts shipments with factory demand.
Industry exchanges often called consortia, serve several competitor firms in a given industry. Convisint founded in 2000 by GM and Daimler Chrysler and later joined by Renault, Nissan and Peugeot. Its goal was to handle a single marketplace that would nhandle $300 billion a year in annual procurement.
ISPs at the lowest level simply provide access to internet. Large ISPs like AOL have added multitude of services including e-commerce to their sites to make it one stop shopping. Hosts who appeal to small business market typically offer these services at a low level, such as templates for web design and simple data aggregation and reporting. Hosts who have an appleal to large corporations offer the same set of services at a higher level. They are likely to have sophisticated consulting services skilled web and data base programmers, realtime on demand site performance reporting and high quality technical support.
Application Service Providers are third party entities that manage and distribute software based services and solutions to customers across a wide area network from a central data center. ASPs rent softwares to clients on a usage fee basis. They normally specialize to particular e-commerce and large business applications.
Eg: Chillicom.com, OBT.com.au
User count is important because of the typical ASP revenue model Fees are pegged to the number of registered users at each client site in much the same way as software vendors charge for site licenses. As ASPs also look for multiple revenue sources and away from sole reliance on a user-based fee structure a new variant is emerging the managed service provider.MSPs handle issues ranging fomr security to identifying the appropriate software application or systems integrator by partnering with wide range of specialized providers.
MSP eg.. Kaseya.com
Although MSPs can provide software applications, they donot see themselves as competitive with preexisting ASPs but instead as providing infrastructure services that permit ASPs to concentrate on serving their customers. Many early customers of MSPs have actually been ASPs.
The MSP market has evolved and expanded significantly over the past decade. Although network and IT infrastructures are more business critical than ever, factors such as complexity of technologies increase in internal support costs and necessity toi focus on core business are forcing enterprises to outsource more and more of their infrastructure management. The scale, performance and efficiency that are necessary to succeed in this market can be achieved only through infrastructure management solutions that are comprehensive, seamless and proven.
CRM
Outline a comprehensive Customer Relationship Management system, referring to the main modules and how marketers may use information from them.
CRM has originated from Relationship marketing. Marketers wanted to change focus from one time relation to long term value relationship. It enables a company to provide customer service in real time by focusing on relationship development with each individual customer through the effective use of individual account information. A better understanding of customer behaviour patterns can enhance the long term profitability of the lifetime value of a customer’s relationship with the company because it will lead to more sales, better service and higher customer retention rates. Shift from product-focus to customer-focus.
Customer relationship management consists of four steps:
Identify your customers
Differentiate them in terms of both their needs and their value to company
Interact with them in ways that improve cost efficiency and effectiveness of your transaction.
Customize some aspect of the products or services you offer that customer.
As competition increases marketers are realizing the importance of building and maintaining long-term customer relationships to sustain and grow their businesses. In many places customers are not just valued by each individual transaction but by their lifetime value to the firm. Studies have show that a customer retained for life is more cost effective, requires less service provides more business and contributes to new customer acquisition by offering positive referrals.
One recent study (Kalakota, Ravi(1999),et al) shows following
It costs six times more to sell a new customer than to sell to an existing one.
A dissatisfied customer will tell eight to ten ppl abt bad experience
A company can boost its profits by 85% when it increases its annual customer retention by 5%.
Odds of selling to a new customer are 15%, where as odds of selling a product to an exisiting customer are 5%
Implementing CRM
Most companies revolve around products and services, hence it means realigning around the customer – which can be a radical change in the company’s culture. Since all companies cannot afford to automate all CRM functions at once, they are advised to begin by examining carefully all their business processes and determining which need to be automated first and what technical features are required.
Success of CRM depends upon complete, clean, consistent, current and accurate data from all customer touchpoints across the company. Company must apply strict rules to incoming customer information.
CRM data are entered into database in data warehouses and mined using specialized software to transform data into meaningful information.
CRM system is not independent of the people who operate it. They must be trained properly. This includes demonstrating how to gather information correctly and use CRM information and so on.
There is no “one size fits all” software package. A company has to build its own CRM strategy or customize an off the shelf solution.
Several large Australian companies (for example Westpac and Commonwealth Bank) have recently announced acquisition and implementation of large new Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems valued at over $A100 million. However, there is considerable debate as to successful implementation or otherwise of large-scale CRM systems. Some corporations have written off large sums of CRM related software development, while others are claiming early benefits for customers from new CRM system implementation.
Discuss this issue with reference to your understanding of both philosophies and systems related to CRM from a marketing perspective.
Profitability is now geared towards getting more from each customer, more of their banking activity and more of their investment and retirement-savings action.
After a decade of watching customers spread their loans and accounts around in search of a more competitive deal as the non-banks chipped away at their business, the banks have a mountain to climb to win them back.
Despite their lack of success in wealth management forays so far, the banks are still chasing the big prize -- converting their millions of basic banking customers into lucrative investor clients with their superannuation and funds-management arms.
In doing so, they are embracing ``relationship banking'' that may sound like an cliché to many with unpleasant memories of dealing with their banking provider in recent years.
While those with small incomes and savings are largely forgotten, ``valued'' customers -- those with a growing asset base or above-average income -- are being promised something for which they have been crying out for years; lower fees and personal service.
Use a range of banking and investing services at the one institution, and the big and small institutions are promising a cheaper deal and attentive service in the hope of winning your confidence and ever more valuable business as you get older and wealthier.
What used to be special terms offered in ``professional packages'' to accountants and doctors has widened considerably,
The lower fees, along with other discounts and bonuses, are here for many already, but you're going to have to wait a while for the service.
Customers might also be taken aback at some big brother-style developments. As IT systems are improved and ``data mining'' of our usage profiles continues, there'll be some unexpected phone calls from the local branch as banks try to pre-empt our financial decisions.
The head of relationship-managed customers at Westpac, Mike Chesworth, says the bank now uses customer relationship management (CRM) technology in this way but maintains it is not just a trigger to sell another product.
``If a customer makes a large deposit or takes a large chunk out of a home loan, we're able to say to our staff in the branch `talk to the customer about their objective in doing that','' Chesworth says. ``To be able to offer a total financial solution, including convenience of advice and point of contact, is a definite competitive advantage.''
Playing to their strengths in size and product range, NAB, the Commonwealth, Westpac and ANZ are all pushing their ``relationship packages'' hard, as are the regional banks and some non-bank institutions (see accompanying story).
And the thresholds for qualification for these packages do not limit them to the super rich.
Although the more you have the better, borrowing $150,000 for a home is enough to get you into the ballpark. With $250,000 in borrowing, savings and investments the options are even better.
The banks are guarded with their figures but it appears that more than half of all new mortgage borrowers are qualifying for a benefits package.
ANZ's head of distribution marketing, Stephen Spiller, says its Breakfree package is aimed at a fair chunk of the mass market and particularly the ``mass affluent'' market.
The old marketing adages have been rediscovered. It's cheaper to retain customers than obtain new ones and cheaper to sell a new product to an existing customer.
Roy Morgan Research says the major banks' ``share of wallet'', or their holding of customers' total financial business, averages 43 per cent. This share includes banking, managed funds and investment borrowing and is up less than 1 percentage point in six years.
With customer bases in the millions, the potential for increased profitability -- if they can lift this share to 50 or 60 per cent or more -- is huge, analysts say.
The banks have been trying, but now there is the realisation that it will only work if that ``relationship'' is good.
Major bank customer satisfaction levels have consistently lagged those of smaller financial institutions, Morgan surveys show.
The proportion of customers of the Big Four that are satisfied or very satisfied was 59 per cent in May this year, up slightly in recent times but still down from 68 per cent in 1997.
This compares to 83 per cent satisfaction among credit unions and building societies and 73.5 per cent for second-tier regional banks.
Westpac's Ask Once program to overhaul service levels on common customer problems.
ANZ's ``Best deal with a human face'' strategy and CBA's Retail Banking Strategy outlined in May are also manifestos for transforming service, even to the extent of opening new branches and offering ongoing personal contact with one employee. Whether this is ultimately achievable or not is in debate, and few inside or outside banking would argue there isn't a long way to go.
There remains a big gap between rhetoric and reality as the banks struggle to overhaul the old culture and disjointed IT systems of their monolithic organisations.
ANZ provides a good case in point in the challenges banks face with their new strategy.
Its move to offer very competitive Access transaction accounts limiting transaction fees to $5 a month is an attempt to lift customer numbers -- its 4 million customer base is the smallest of the Big Four and well behind the Commonwealth Bank's 10 million.
The idea to then cross-sell new customers on to other products via its now defunct Premier Select discount package ran into familiar trouble.
Widespread complaints about discounts not being passed on and fees incorrectly charged did more damage than good.
Assuming they can get the simple things right, financial institutions have to realise that true relationship banking has to be more than just securing a customer and up-selling to other products.
A ``relationship'' is giving advice not just in the first instance but right throughout the relationship with that organisation,''
CRM has originated from Relationship marketing. Marketers wanted to change focus from one time relation to long term value relationship. It enables a company to provide customer service in real time by focusing on relationship development with each individual customer through the effective use of individual account information. A better understanding of customer behaviour patterns can enhance the long term profitability of the lifetime value of a customer’s relationship with the company because it will lead to more sales, better service and higher customer retention rates. Shift from product-focus to customer-focus.
Customer relationship management consists of four steps:
Identify your customers
Differentiate them in terms of both their needs and their value to company
Interact with them in ways that improve cost efficiency and effectiveness of your transaction.
Customize some aspect of the products or services you offer that customer.
As competition increases marketers are realizing the importance of building and maintaining long-term customer relationships to sustain and grow their businesses. In many places customers are not just valued by each individual transaction but by their lifetime value to the firm. Studies have show that a customer retained for life is more cost effective, requires less service provides more business and contributes to new customer acquisition by offering positive referrals.
One recent study (Kalakota, Ravi(1999),et al) shows following
It costs six times more to sell a new customer than to sell to an existing one.
A dissatisfied customer will tell eight to ten ppl abt bad experience
A company can boost its profits by 85% when it increases its annual customer retention by 5%.
Odds of selling to a new customer are 15%, where as odds of selling a product to an exisiting customer are 5%
Implementing CRM
Most companies revolve around products and services, hence it means realigning around the customer – which can be a radical change in the company’s culture. Since all companies cannot afford to automate all CRM functions at once, they are advised to begin by examining carefully all their business processes and determining which need to be automated first and what technical features are required.
Success of CRM depends upon complete, clean, consistent, current and accurate data from all customer touchpoints across the company. Company must apply strict rules to incoming customer information.
CRM data are entered into database in data warehouses and mined using specialized software to transform data into meaningful information.
CRM system is not independent of the people who operate it. They must be trained properly. This includes demonstrating how to gather information correctly and use CRM information and so on.
There is no “one size fits all” software package. A company has to build its own CRM strategy or customize an off the shelf solution.
Several large Australian companies (for example Westpac and Commonwealth Bank) have recently announced acquisition and implementation of large new Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems valued at over $A100 million. However, there is considerable debate as to successful implementation or otherwise of large-scale CRM systems. Some corporations have written off large sums of CRM related software development, while others are claiming early benefits for customers from new CRM system implementation.
Discuss this issue with reference to your understanding of both philosophies and systems related to CRM from a marketing perspective.
Profitability is now geared towards getting more from each customer, more of their banking activity and more of their investment and retirement-savings action.
After a decade of watching customers spread their loans and accounts around in search of a more competitive deal as the non-banks chipped away at their business, the banks have a mountain to climb to win them back.
Despite their lack of success in wealth management forays so far, the banks are still chasing the big prize -- converting their millions of basic banking customers into lucrative investor clients with their superannuation and funds-management arms.
In doing so, they are embracing ``relationship banking'' that may sound like an cliché to many with unpleasant memories of dealing with their banking provider in recent years.
While those with small incomes and savings are largely forgotten, ``valued'' customers -- those with a growing asset base or above-average income -- are being promised something for which they have been crying out for years; lower fees and personal service.
Use a range of banking and investing services at the one institution, and the big and small institutions are promising a cheaper deal and attentive service in the hope of winning your confidence and ever more valuable business as you get older and wealthier.
What used to be special terms offered in ``professional packages'' to accountants and doctors has widened considerably,
The lower fees, along with other discounts and bonuses, are here for many already, but you're going to have to wait a while for the service.
Customers might also be taken aback at some big brother-style developments. As IT systems are improved and ``data mining'' of our usage profiles continues, there'll be some unexpected phone calls from the local branch as banks try to pre-empt our financial decisions.
The head of relationship-managed customers at Westpac, Mike Chesworth, says the bank now uses customer relationship management (CRM) technology in this way but maintains it is not just a trigger to sell another product.
``If a customer makes a large deposit or takes a large chunk out of a home loan, we're able to say to our staff in the branch `talk to the customer about their objective in doing that','' Chesworth says. ``To be able to offer a total financial solution, including convenience of advice and point of contact, is a definite competitive advantage.''
Playing to their strengths in size and product range, NAB, the Commonwealth, Westpac and ANZ are all pushing their ``relationship packages'' hard, as are the regional banks and some non-bank institutions (see accompanying story).
And the thresholds for qualification for these packages do not limit them to the super rich.
Although the more you have the better, borrowing $150,000 for a home is enough to get you into the ballpark. With $250,000 in borrowing, savings and investments the options are even better.
The banks are guarded with their figures but it appears that more than half of all new mortgage borrowers are qualifying for a benefits package.
ANZ's head of distribution marketing, Stephen Spiller, says its Breakfree package is aimed at a fair chunk of the mass market and particularly the ``mass affluent'' market.
The old marketing adages have been rediscovered. It's cheaper to retain customers than obtain new ones and cheaper to sell a new product to an existing customer.
Roy Morgan Research says the major banks' ``share of wallet'', or their holding of customers' total financial business, averages 43 per cent. This share includes banking, managed funds and investment borrowing and is up less than 1 percentage point in six years.
With customer bases in the millions, the potential for increased profitability -- if they can lift this share to 50 or 60 per cent or more -- is huge, analysts say.
The banks have been trying, but now there is the realisation that it will only work if that ``relationship'' is good.
Major bank customer satisfaction levels have consistently lagged those of smaller financial institutions, Morgan surveys show.
The proportion of customers of the Big Four that are satisfied or very satisfied was 59 per cent in May this year, up slightly in recent times but still down from 68 per cent in 1997.
This compares to 83 per cent satisfaction among credit unions and building societies and 73.5 per cent for second-tier regional banks.
Westpac's Ask Once program to overhaul service levels on common customer problems.
ANZ's ``Best deal with a human face'' strategy and CBA's Retail Banking Strategy outlined in May are also manifestos for transforming service, even to the extent of opening new branches and offering ongoing personal contact with one employee. Whether this is ultimately achievable or not is in debate, and few inside or outside banking would argue there isn't a long way to go.
There remains a big gap between rhetoric and reality as the banks struggle to overhaul the old culture and disjointed IT systems of their monolithic organisations.
ANZ provides a good case in point in the challenges banks face with their new strategy.
Its move to offer very competitive Access transaction accounts limiting transaction fees to $5 a month is an attempt to lift customer numbers -- its 4 million customer base is the smallest of the Big Four and well behind the Commonwealth Bank's 10 million.
The idea to then cross-sell new customers on to other products via its now defunct Premier Select discount package ran into familiar trouble.
Widespread complaints about discounts not being passed on and fees incorrectly charged did more damage than good.
Assuming they can get the simple things right, financial institutions have to realise that true relationship banking has to be more than just securing a customer and up-selling to other products.
A ``relationship'' is giving advice not just in the first instance but right throughout the relationship with that organisation,''
1. E-Business and E-Marketing. 2
2. World-Wide Web. 3
3. Marketspace. 4
4. Customer Relationship Management 5
5. Datawarehousing/Datamining: 6
6. E-Business Infrastructure Model (2005 onward) 7
7. Open-source. 7
8. Podcasting. 8
9. Grid Computing. 8
10. Viral marketing. 9
11. 3G Mobile services. 10
12. VOIP. 10
13. Digital Television. 10
14. Search Engine Marketing. 11
15. Web Services: 11
E-Business and E-Marketing
Electronic business, or "e-business", may be defined broadly as any business process that relies on an automated information system. The term "e-business" was coined by Lou Gerstner, CEO of IBM
E-business is more than e-commerce. IT involves business processes spanning the entire value chain. Electronic purchasing and supply chain management, processing orders electronically, handling customer service and cooperating with business partners. Special technical standards for e-business facilitate the exchange of data between companies. E-business can be conducted using the Web, the Internet, intranets, extranets, or some combination of these.
Ebusiness includes:
Internal business systems
Enterprise communication and collaboration
Electronic commerce.
Electronic Commerce has changed over a period of time. Originally electronic commerce referred to facilitation of commercial transactions electronically, using technology like Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) which was introduced in the late 70’s to send commercial documents like purchase orders or invoices electronically.
The electronic or e in ecommerce or ebusiness refers to technology/systems; “commerce” refers to traditional business model.
Few years later activities precisely termed as “web commerce”, which was the purchase of goods and services over World wide web via secure servers with shopping carts and electronic pay services like credit cards, e-cash, etc.
Ecommerce according to Wikipedia, consists “primararily of distributing, buying, selling, marketing and servicing of products or services via electronic systems such as the internet or other computer networks”
According to Rayport and Jaworski, “ecommerce is technology-mediated exchanges between parties as well as electronically based intro or interorganizational activities that facilitate such exchanges.
The essence of e-commerce is characterized by several attributes:
It is about exchange of digitized information between parties
It is technology enabled
It is technology mediated.
It includes intra and interorganizational activities that support the exchange.
Ecommerce consists of four categories:
B2B – DELL, GE etc
B2C – Amazon, Yahoo, etc
C2C – ICQ, Monster.com
C2B – Speakout.com.
According to Wikipedia, E-marketing is a type of marketing that can be defined as achieving objectives through the use of electronic communications technology such as Internet, e-mail, Ebooks, database, and mobile phone. It is a more general term than online marketing which is limited to the use of internet technology to attain marketing objectives.
World-Wide Web
A hypermedia-based system for browsing Internet sites. It is named the Web because it is made of many sites linked together; users can travel from one site to another by clicking on hyperlinks. Or "The World Wide Web is the universe of network-accessible information, an embodiment of human knowledge." - Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.
On the World Wide Web, a client program called a web browser retrieves information resources, such as web pages and other computer files, from web servers using their URLs and displays them, typically on a computer monitor. One can then follow hyperlinks in each page to other resources on the World Wide Web whose location is provided by these hyperlinks. It is also possible, for example by filling in and submitting web forms, to post information back to a server to interact with it. The act of following hyperlinks is often called "browsing" or "surfing" the Web. Web pages are often arranged in collections of related material called "websites."
At its core, the Web is made up of three standards:
the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), which is a universal system for referencing resources on the Web, such as Web pages;
the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which specifies how the browser and server communicate with each other; and
the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), used to define the structure and content of hypertext documents.
Marketspace
Traditionally, ‘marketplace’ referred to the physical place where buyers and sellers met for transactions. Today, most transactions at the marketplace are managed or mediated not so much through human contact but largely by technology. Hence the term ‘marketspace’ refers to the digital equivalent of a physical world market place. Hence, the success of the business depends on how well screens and machines manage customers and their expectations. The marketspace offering could include a product, service, information or all of the above and the business model decisions need to be based on the forces unfolding in the marketplace. Due to this shift from activities and capabilities in the physical world to a combination of marketplace and marketspace activities, resource systems for many companies are now modified to a combination of the physical and virtual asset bases.
Rayport, Jeffry, Sviokla and John (1995b: 75) define the marketspace as "a virtual realm where products and services exist as digital information and can be delivered through information based channels". It is also defined by Bloch and Segev (1996) as the buying and selling of information, products, and services via computer networks. Markets are primarily Internet-based, and all business is done with Electronic Commerce (EC), from gathering, selecting and synthesizing information, to finally distributing the information. The marketspace has resulted in changed processes used in trading and supply chains. Additionally, the marketspace has increased effectiveness due to the speed of transactions, lower transaction and distribution costs, and markets are more efficient. (Turban et al 2002)
In the marketspace, members of the value chain are able to manage their relationships more directly and the following activities, identified by Turban et al, (2002) can take place:
Consumers can search for detailed information in a matter of seconds, at any time of the day. They can easily compare products, for example, if one supplier is out of stock or is too expensive, there is no need to drive miles to a competitor, they are just a “mouse-click away”. Consumers are additionally able to bid or negotiate prices online.
Sellers can use websites as marketplaces to provide, update, sell and receive information. Service sellers can sell direct from their Web site or from electronic markets.
Intermediaries, on the other hand, can create and manage online markets, match buyers and sellers, provide infrastructure services and aid transactions.
Infrastructure companies generally provide hardware, software and EC support.
Content creators create and maintain websites, which are used as marketing tools by the sellers.
Business partners collaborate on the Internet along the supply chain
Competition in the marketspace differs from that in the traditional marketplace: it is far more intense for the following reasons.
Firstly, electronic markets reduce the cost of searching for information. This enables customers to rapidly compare prices.
Secondly, the marketspace allows for differentiation and personalization.
In marketspace, information replaces physical goods as the content of the transaction. The context of marketplace transaction, face-to-face meeting, is replaced by on-screen communications and the infrastructure of marketspace consists of computers and networks instead of buildings and documents.
The traditional marketplace interaction between physical seller and physical buyer has been eliminated. Infact, everything about this new kind of ytransaction what we call a marketspace transaction is different from what happens in the marketplace.
The content of the transaction is different: information about the products replaces the products themselves.
The context: in which the transaction is different. An electronic, on screen auction replaces a face to face transaction.
The infrastructure that enables the transaction to occur is different: computers and communication lines replace retailers.
Eg: AUCNET.com
Customer Relationship Management
It enables a company to provide customer service in real time by focusing on relationship development with each individual customer through the effective use of individual account information. A better understanding of customer behaviour patterns can enhance the long term profitability of the lifetime value of a customer’s relationship with the company because it will lead to more sales, better service and higher customer retention rates. Shift from product-focus to customer-focus.
Successful CRM is defined as an integrated sales, marketing and services strategy that depends on coordinated actions by all departments within a company rather than being driven or managed by one single, functional department. The goal is to achieve long running customer dialogue across all customer access points to provide more effective cross-sell and up-sell to increase customer retention and loyalty to increase customer profitability, to achieve higher responses to marketing campaignsand to provide extraordinary service and support.
CRM is defined as an all-embracing approach, which seamlessly integrates sales, customer service, marketing, field support and other functions that touch customers. When using this approach, by integrating people, process and technologies and leveraging the Internet, the relationships with all the customers including e-customers, distribution channel members, internal customers and suppliers are maximized. Basically, CRM is a notion regarding how an organization can keep their most profitable customers and at the same time reduce the costs; increase the values of interaction to consequently maximize the profits
CRM is a multi-dimensional construct consisting of four broad behavioral components: key customer focus, CRM organization, knowledge management, and technology-based CRM. From a marketing perspective, it identifies and targets best customers based on frequency and monetary scoring. It helps manage marketing campaigns with clear goals and quantifiable objectives.
From sales perspectives, CRM solutions improve telesales, field sales and sales management through real time information sharing among multiple employees.
From the field service perspective, customer satisfaction and retention are ensured by solving customer problems quickly. The management of people and materials within the service organization are smoothly integrated.
From the perspective of customer support, shared relationships with individualized customer care based on specific customer history and preferences are strengthened
Datawarehousing/Datamining:
A data warehouse is a subject oriented, integrated, time-variant, non-volatile collection of data in support of management decisions.
It can be viewed as an information system with the following attributes:
A database designed for analytical tasks, using data from multiple applications
It supports a relatively small number of users with relatively long interactions
Its usage is read intensive
Its content is periodically updated (mostly additions)
It contains current and historical data to provide a historical perspective of information
It contains a few large tables
Each query frequently results in a large result set and involves infrequent full table scan and multiple table joints.
Data mining:
Data mining is not specific to any industry. It requires intelligent technologies and the willingness to explore the possibility of hidden knowledge that resides in the data. Most organizations engage in data mining to do the following:
Discover knowledge: Goal of knowledge discovery is to determine explicit hidden relationships, patterns, or correlations from data stored in an enterprises’ database
Visualize data: Analysts must make sense out of huge amount of information stored in corporate databases. Prior to any analysis the goal is to humanize the mass data they must deal with and find a clever way to display the data.
Correct data. While consolidating massive databases, many enterprises find that the data is not complete, and invariably contains erroneous and contradictory information. Data mining techniques can help identify and correct problems in the most consistent way possible.
E-Business Infrastructure Model (2005 onward)
Open-source
Open Source requires the source code of computer software to be made available openly for study, modification and improvement in its design through the availability of its source code under an open source license (Wikipedia, 2005). An open source license is certified by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) which is an unincorporated non-profit research and educational association with the mission to own and defend Open Source trademark and advance the cause of Open Source Software (OSS).
Open source does not only mean access to source code. The distribution terms must comply with the following criterion
Free Redistribution ( by constraining the license to require free redistribution, short term gains are eliminated in favour of long term gains)
Source Code ( access code facilitates modification and hence evolution of programs)
Derived Work ( modifications and derived work must be distributed on the same terms as the original work)
Integrity of the Authors Source Code
No Discrimination against People and Groups
No Discrimination against Fields of Endeavour
Distribution of License
License must not be specific to a product
License must not restrict other software
License must be technology neutral
(Open source Initiative, 2005)
The open source business model has its focus on creating value. The profits are centered on the service of the products (as opposed to the selling price of the product) with different revenue sources and different pricing strategies. This strategy makes sense if your value proposition is not in the software itself but the service and expertise associated with the software.
Podcasting
Podcasting" is a compound word coined in 2004, that combined two words: "iPod" and "broadcasting."
Podcasting is the method of distributing multimedia files such as audio programs or music videos over the internet using formats suitable for playback on mobile devices and personal compueters. The host of a podcast is called podcaster. A podcasters website may often offer direct download or streaming of files.
Benefits:
· Allows listeners to time-shift and place-shift media consumption
· 100% efficiency, since episodes are only downloaded by listeners on an opt-in basis
· Easily accessible to a global audience that is not defined by geographic boundaries
· Access to an educated, influential audience with a high disposable income
· Ability to leverage electronic programming without an outside news media filter
· Most cost effective electronic media distribution channel available
Shortcomings:
Advertising content must be relevant and meet the needs of the podcast audience. As audience have full control over what they want to hear and see.
Difficult to measure advertising return on investment.
Grid Computing
Grid computing is an emerging computing model that provides the ability to perform higher throughput computing by taking advantage of many networked computers to model a virtual computer architecture that is able to distribute process execution across a parallel infrastructure. Grids use the resources of many separate computers connected by a network (usually the Internet) to solve large-scale computation problems. Grids provide the ability to perform computations on large data sets, by breaking them down into many smaller ones, or provide the ability to perform many more computations at once than would be possible on a single computer, by modeling a parallel division of labour between processes
One well-known example of grid computing -- sometimes called distributed or clustered computing -- is the ongoing SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project, in which thousands of users are sharing their unused processor cycles to help search for signs of "rational" signals from outer space.
Benefits
Improved productivity and collaboration/More flexible, resilient operational infrastructures
Allowing widely dispersed departments and businesses to create virtual organizations to share data and resources
Instantaneous access to compute and data resources to "sense and respond" to needs
Leveraging existing capital investments, which helps to ensure optimal utilization of computing capabilities
Avoiding common pitfalls of over-provisioning and incurring excess costs
Viral marketing
Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that seek to exploit pre-existing social networks to produce exponential increases in brand awareness, through viral processes similar to the spread of an epidemic. It is word-of-mouth delivered and enhanced online; it harnesses the network effect of the Internet and can be very useful in reaching a large number of people rapidly.
Viral marketing is sometimes used to describe some sorts of Internet-based stealth marketing campaigns, including the use of blogs, seemingly amateur web sites, and other forms of astroturfing to create word of mouth for a new product or service. Often the ultimate goal of viral marketing campaigns is to generate media coverage via "offbeat" stories worth many times more than the campaigning company's advertising budget.
Egs.
· Hotmail, promoted largely by links at the bottoms of emails sent by its users, is the classic viral marketing example
· Tupperware parties
· Gmail – invitation only email.
3G Mobile services
3G is short for third-generation technology that provide high speed bandwidth to mobiles. The services associated with 3G provide the ability to transfer both voice data (a telephone call) and non-voice data (such as downloading information, exchanging email, and instant messaging).
Music downloading and Video telephony on mobile has often been used as the killer application for 3G, which led to huge spectrum-licensing fees in many countries.
These networks must be able to transmit wireless data at 144 kilobits per second at mobile user speeds, 384 KBPS at pedestrian user speeds and 2 megabits per second in fixed locations
For example,
The successful 3G introduction in Japan shows that music downloading and peer 2 peer connecting are strongly demanded.
Adoption from 2.5g or 2g to 3g by 40% of the japan market.
VOIP
Voice over Internet Protocol. The technology used to transmit voice conversations over a data network using the Internet Protocol. Such data network may be the Internet or a corporate Intranet
VoIP is free or costs less than equivalent service from traditional sources
Skype, for example, offers international phone calls from anywhere to anywhere for an average cots of just 2.1 cents per minute.
In the Skype business teleconference tab, users can call contacts by just clicking them and the Skype presence feature shows if they are online or not. It has added features like language interpreting and messages recorded in writing for later recall.
In short – it increases productivity at the same time as it saves company money.
Digital Television
Digital television (DTV) is a telecommunication system for broadcasting and receiving moving pictures and sound by means of digital signals, in contrast to analog signals in analog (traditional) tv. It uses digital modulation and data digitally compressed which is decoded by specially designed television sets.
Tivo is a popular brand of digital video recorder.
It allows users to capture tv programme into their internal hard disk storage for later viewing.
Online scheduling: Schedule recordings from the Internet
Download shows to laptop or easily burn to DVD
Online services: Yahoo! weather, traffic & digital photos, Internet Radio from LiveFM, Podcasts, & movie tickets.
Customers benefits from having more control on when and what they want to watch, having choices and personalisation, and more interactive functions.
For Marketers, in order to reach audience, they have to be creative – interactive ads, pop up ads, brand funded content, brand integrated sponsorship.
Search Engine Marketing
SEM is a set of marketing methods to increase the visibility of a website in search engine results pages. The three main methods are:
Search engine optimization, or improving rankings for relevant keywords in search results by rectifying the website structure, and content such that they could be easily read and understood by the search engine's software programs.
Search engine advertising, or paying the search engine company for a guaranteed high ranking or an ad displayed aside the results (commonly known as pay per click advertising).
Paid inclusion, or paying the search engine company for a guarantee that the website is included in their natural search index.
For example, Google offers a service called AdWords, which allows companies, for a set structured fee, to have a link to their website featured when a user searches a specific keyword.
Web Services:
A collection of Web and object oriented technologies for linking Web-based applications running on different hardware, software, database, or network platforms. For example, Web services could link key business functions within the applications a business shares with its customers, suppliers, and business partners.
Web services are characterized by their great interoperability and extensibility, as well as their machine-processable descriptions using extensible markup language (XML).
Web services are a powerful business tool, allowing unprecedented customer integration and partnering opportunities.
Coles use the web services to connect between their inventory system, warehouse mgt system, customer ordering system, supplier ordering systems, and logistic system with XML.
Web services allow each of these systems to share information via the Internet, regardless of back-end software that the application is using. When a customer brought something, the implications for Coles inventory, cashflow and every stock on the shelves can be tracked in one step.
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.
Web services aim to bring requesters, providers and brokers together, as they are advertised (in a service repository) by service providers and used by service requesters, thereby promoting match making among the stakeholders.
Web service components represent business modules with generic templates of services that aim to provide the desired functionality such as, service discovery, negotiation and delivery of the service.
The dynamic nature of the Web services architecture on the Internet presents new opportunities for technology trust building.
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 and
• reduce risk on the reliance on external application providers to offer the latest technologies.
2. World-Wide Web. 3
3. Marketspace. 4
4. Customer Relationship Management 5
5. Datawarehousing/Datamining: 6
6. E-Business Infrastructure Model (2005 onward) 7
7. Open-source. 7
8. Podcasting. 8
9. Grid Computing. 8
10. Viral marketing. 9
11. 3G Mobile services. 10
12. VOIP. 10
13. Digital Television. 10
14. Search Engine Marketing. 11
15. Web Services: 11
E-Business and E-Marketing
Electronic business, or "e-business", may be defined broadly as any business process that relies on an automated information system. The term "e-business" was coined by Lou Gerstner, CEO of IBM
E-business is more than e-commerce. IT involves business processes spanning the entire value chain. Electronic purchasing and supply chain management, processing orders electronically, handling customer service and cooperating with business partners. Special technical standards for e-business facilitate the exchange of data between companies. E-business can be conducted using the Web, the Internet, intranets, extranets, or some combination of these.
Ebusiness includes:
Internal business systems
Enterprise communication and collaboration
Electronic commerce.
Electronic Commerce has changed over a period of time. Originally electronic commerce referred to facilitation of commercial transactions electronically, using technology like Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) which was introduced in the late 70’s to send commercial documents like purchase orders or invoices electronically.
The electronic or e in ecommerce or ebusiness refers to technology/systems; “commerce” refers to traditional business model.
Few years later activities precisely termed as “web commerce”, which was the purchase of goods and services over World wide web via secure servers with shopping carts and electronic pay services like credit cards, e-cash, etc.
Ecommerce according to Wikipedia, consists “primararily of distributing, buying, selling, marketing and servicing of products or services via electronic systems such as the internet or other computer networks”
According to Rayport and Jaworski, “ecommerce is technology-mediated exchanges between parties as well as electronically based intro or interorganizational activities that facilitate such exchanges.
The essence of e-commerce is characterized by several attributes:
It is about exchange of digitized information between parties
It is technology enabled
It is technology mediated.
It includes intra and interorganizational activities that support the exchange.
Ecommerce consists of four categories:
B2B – DELL, GE etc
B2C – Amazon, Yahoo, etc
C2C – ICQ, Monster.com
C2B – Speakout.com.
According to Wikipedia, E-marketing is a type of marketing that can be defined as achieving objectives through the use of electronic communications technology such as Internet, e-mail, Ebooks, database, and mobile phone. It is a more general term than online marketing which is limited to the use of internet technology to attain marketing objectives.
World-Wide Web
A hypermedia-based system for browsing Internet sites. It is named the Web because it is made of many sites linked together; users can travel from one site to another by clicking on hyperlinks. Or "The World Wide Web is the universe of network-accessible information, an embodiment of human knowledge." - Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.
On the World Wide Web, a client program called a web browser retrieves information resources, such as web pages and other computer files, from web servers using their URLs and displays them, typically on a computer monitor. One can then follow hyperlinks in each page to other resources on the World Wide Web whose location is provided by these hyperlinks. It is also possible, for example by filling in and submitting web forms, to post information back to a server to interact with it. The act of following hyperlinks is often called "browsing" or "surfing" the Web. Web pages are often arranged in collections of related material called "websites."
At its core, the Web is made up of three standards:
the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), which is a universal system for referencing resources on the Web, such as Web pages;
the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which specifies how the browser and server communicate with each other; and
the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), used to define the structure and content of hypertext documents.
Marketspace
Traditionally, ‘marketplace’ referred to the physical place where buyers and sellers met for transactions. Today, most transactions at the marketplace are managed or mediated not so much through human contact but largely by technology. Hence the term ‘marketspace’ refers to the digital equivalent of a physical world market place. Hence, the success of the business depends on how well screens and machines manage customers and their expectations. The marketspace offering could include a product, service, information or all of the above and the business model decisions need to be based on the forces unfolding in the marketplace. Due to this shift from activities and capabilities in the physical world to a combination of marketplace and marketspace activities, resource systems for many companies are now modified to a combination of the physical and virtual asset bases.
Rayport, Jeffry, Sviokla and John (1995b: 75) define the marketspace as "a virtual realm where products and services exist as digital information and can be delivered through information based channels". It is also defined by Bloch and Segev (1996) as the buying and selling of information, products, and services via computer networks. Markets are primarily Internet-based, and all business is done with Electronic Commerce (EC), from gathering, selecting and synthesizing information, to finally distributing the information. The marketspace has resulted in changed processes used in trading and supply chains. Additionally, the marketspace has increased effectiveness due to the speed of transactions, lower transaction and distribution costs, and markets are more efficient. (Turban et al 2002)
In the marketspace, members of the value chain are able to manage their relationships more directly and the following activities, identified by Turban et al, (2002) can take place:
Consumers can search for detailed information in a matter of seconds, at any time of the day. They can easily compare products, for example, if one supplier is out of stock or is too expensive, there is no need to drive miles to a competitor, they are just a “mouse-click away”. Consumers are additionally able to bid or negotiate prices online.
Sellers can use websites as marketplaces to provide, update, sell and receive information. Service sellers can sell direct from their Web site or from electronic markets.
Intermediaries, on the other hand, can create and manage online markets, match buyers and sellers, provide infrastructure services and aid transactions.
Infrastructure companies generally provide hardware, software and EC support.
Content creators create and maintain websites, which are used as marketing tools by the sellers.
Business partners collaborate on the Internet along the supply chain
Competition in the marketspace differs from that in the traditional marketplace: it is far more intense for the following reasons.
Firstly, electronic markets reduce the cost of searching for information. This enables customers to rapidly compare prices.
Secondly, the marketspace allows for differentiation and personalization.
In marketspace, information replaces physical goods as the content of the transaction. The context of marketplace transaction, face-to-face meeting, is replaced by on-screen communications and the infrastructure of marketspace consists of computers and networks instead of buildings and documents.
The traditional marketplace interaction between physical seller and physical buyer has been eliminated. Infact, everything about this new kind of ytransaction what we call a marketspace transaction is different from what happens in the marketplace.
The content of the transaction is different: information about the products replaces the products themselves.
The context: in which the transaction is different. An electronic, on screen auction replaces a face to face transaction.
The infrastructure that enables the transaction to occur is different: computers and communication lines replace retailers.
Eg: AUCNET.com
Customer Relationship Management
It enables a company to provide customer service in real time by focusing on relationship development with each individual customer through the effective use of individual account information. A better understanding of customer behaviour patterns can enhance the long term profitability of the lifetime value of a customer’s relationship with the company because it will lead to more sales, better service and higher customer retention rates. Shift from product-focus to customer-focus.
Successful CRM is defined as an integrated sales, marketing and services strategy that depends on coordinated actions by all departments within a company rather than being driven or managed by one single, functional department. The goal is to achieve long running customer dialogue across all customer access points to provide more effective cross-sell and up-sell to increase customer retention and loyalty to increase customer profitability, to achieve higher responses to marketing campaignsand to provide extraordinary service and support.
CRM is defined as an all-embracing approach, which seamlessly integrates sales, customer service, marketing, field support and other functions that touch customers. When using this approach, by integrating people, process and technologies and leveraging the Internet, the relationships with all the customers including e-customers, distribution channel members, internal customers and suppliers are maximized. Basically, CRM is a notion regarding how an organization can keep their most profitable customers and at the same time reduce the costs; increase the values of interaction to consequently maximize the profits
CRM is a multi-dimensional construct consisting of four broad behavioral components: key customer focus, CRM organization, knowledge management, and technology-based CRM. From a marketing perspective, it identifies and targets best customers based on frequency and monetary scoring. It helps manage marketing campaigns with clear goals and quantifiable objectives.
From sales perspectives, CRM solutions improve telesales, field sales and sales management through real time information sharing among multiple employees.
From the field service perspective, customer satisfaction and retention are ensured by solving customer problems quickly. The management of people and materials within the service organization are smoothly integrated.
From the perspective of customer support, shared relationships with individualized customer care based on specific customer history and preferences are strengthened
Datawarehousing/Datamining:
A data warehouse is a subject oriented, integrated, time-variant, non-volatile collection of data in support of management decisions.
It can be viewed as an information system with the following attributes:
A database designed for analytical tasks, using data from multiple applications
It supports a relatively small number of users with relatively long interactions
Its usage is read intensive
Its content is periodically updated (mostly additions)
It contains current and historical data to provide a historical perspective of information
It contains a few large tables
Each query frequently results in a large result set and involves infrequent full table scan and multiple table joints.
Data mining:
Data mining is not specific to any industry. It requires intelligent technologies and the willingness to explore the possibility of hidden knowledge that resides in the data. Most organizations engage in data mining to do the following:
Discover knowledge: Goal of knowledge discovery is to determine explicit hidden relationships, patterns, or correlations from data stored in an enterprises’ database
Visualize data: Analysts must make sense out of huge amount of information stored in corporate databases. Prior to any analysis the goal is to humanize the mass data they must deal with and find a clever way to display the data.
Correct data. While consolidating massive databases, many enterprises find that the data is not complete, and invariably contains erroneous and contradictory information. Data mining techniques can help identify and correct problems in the most consistent way possible.
E-Business Infrastructure Model (2005 onward)
Open-source
Open Source requires the source code of computer software to be made available openly for study, modification and improvement in its design through the availability of its source code under an open source license (Wikipedia, 2005). An open source license is certified by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) which is an unincorporated non-profit research and educational association with the mission to own and defend Open Source trademark and advance the cause of Open Source Software (OSS).
Open source does not only mean access to source code. The distribution terms must comply with the following criterion
Free Redistribution ( by constraining the license to require free redistribution, short term gains are eliminated in favour of long term gains)
Source Code ( access code facilitates modification and hence evolution of programs)
Derived Work ( modifications and derived work must be distributed on the same terms as the original work)
Integrity of the Authors Source Code
No Discrimination against People and Groups
No Discrimination against Fields of Endeavour
Distribution of License
License must not be specific to a product
License must not restrict other software
License must be technology neutral
(Open source Initiative, 2005)
The open source business model has its focus on creating value. The profits are centered on the service of the products (as opposed to the selling price of the product) with different revenue sources and different pricing strategies. This strategy makes sense if your value proposition is not in the software itself but the service and expertise associated with the software.
Podcasting
Podcasting" is a compound word coined in 2004, that combined two words: "iPod" and "broadcasting."
Podcasting is the method of distributing multimedia files such as audio programs or music videos over the internet using formats suitable for playback on mobile devices and personal compueters. The host of a podcast is called podcaster. A podcasters website may often offer direct download or streaming of files.
Benefits:
· Allows listeners to time-shift and place-shift media consumption
· 100% efficiency, since episodes are only downloaded by listeners on an opt-in basis
· Easily accessible to a global audience that is not defined by geographic boundaries
· Access to an educated, influential audience with a high disposable income
· Ability to leverage electronic programming without an outside news media filter
· Most cost effective electronic media distribution channel available
Shortcomings:
Advertising content must be relevant and meet the needs of the podcast audience. As audience have full control over what they want to hear and see.
Difficult to measure advertising return on investment.
Grid Computing
Grid computing is an emerging computing model that provides the ability to perform higher throughput computing by taking advantage of many networked computers to model a virtual computer architecture that is able to distribute process execution across a parallel infrastructure. Grids use the resources of many separate computers connected by a network (usually the Internet) to solve large-scale computation problems. Grids provide the ability to perform computations on large data sets, by breaking them down into many smaller ones, or provide the ability to perform many more computations at once than would be possible on a single computer, by modeling a parallel division of labour between processes
One well-known example of grid computing -- sometimes called distributed or clustered computing -- is the ongoing SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project, in which thousands of users are sharing their unused processor cycles to help search for signs of "rational" signals from outer space.
Benefits
Improved productivity and collaboration/More flexible, resilient operational infrastructures
Allowing widely dispersed departments and businesses to create virtual organizations to share data and resources
Instantaneous access to compute and data resources to "sense and respond" to needs
Leveraging existing capital investments, which helps to ensure optimal utilization of computing capabilities
Avoiding common pitfalls of over-provisioning and incurring excess costs
Viral marketing
Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that seek to exploit pre-existing social networks to produce exponential increases in brand awareness, through viral processes similar to the spread of an epidemic. It is word-of-mouth delivered and enhanced online; it harnesses the network effect of the Internet and can be very useful in reaching a large number of people rapidly.
Viral marketing is sometimes used to describe some sorts of Internet-based stealth marketing campaigns, including the use of blogs, seemingly amateur web sites, and other forms of astroturfing to create word of mouth for a new product or service. Often the ultimate goal of viral marketing campaigns is to generate media coverage via "offbeat" stories worth many times more than the campaigning company's advertising budget.
Egs.
· Hotmail, promoted largely by links at the bottoms of emails sent by its users, is the classic viral marketing example
· Tupperware parties
· Gmail – invitation only email.
3G Mobile services
3G is short for third-generation technology that provide high speed bandwidth to mobiles. The services associated with 3G provide the ability to transfer both voice data (a telephone call) and non-voice data (such as downloading information, exchanging email, and instant messaging).
Music downloading and Video telephony on mobile has often been used as the killer application for 3G, which led to huge spectrum-licensing fees in many countries.
These networks must be able to transmit wireless data at 144 kilobits per second at mobile user speeds, 384 KBPS at pedestrian user speeds and 2 megabits per second in fixed locations
For example,
The successful 3G introduction in Japan shows that music downloading and peer 2 peer connecting are strongly demanded.
Adoption from 2.5g or 2g to 3g by 40% of the japan market.
VOIP
Voice over Internet Protocol. The technology used to transmit voice conversations over a data network using the Internet Protocol. Such data network may be the Internet or a corporate Intranet
VoIP is free or costs less than equivalent service from traditional sources
Skype, for example, offers international phone calls from anywhere to anywhere for an average cots of just 2.1 cents per minute.
In the Skype business teleconference tab, users can call contacts by just clicking them and the Skype presence feature shows if they are online or not. It has added features like language interpreting and messages recorded in writing for later recall.
In short – it increases productivity at the same time as it saves company money.
Digital Television
Digital television (DTV) is a telecommunication system for broadcasting and receiving moving pictures and sound by means of digital signals, in contrast to analog signals in analog (traditional) tv. It uses digital modulation and data digitally compressed which is decoded by specially designed television sets.
Tivo is a popular brand of digital video recorder.
It allows users to capture tv programme into their internal hard disk storage for later viewing.
Online scheduling: Schedule recordings from the Internet
Download shows to laptop or easily burn to DVD
Online services: Yahoo! weather, traffic & digital photos, Internet Radio from LiveFM, Podcasts, & movie tickets.
Customers benefits from having more control on when and what they want to watch, having choices and personalisation, and more interactive functions.
For Marketers, in order to reach audience, they have to be creative – interactive ads, pop up ads, brand funded content, brand integrated sponsorship.
Search Engine Marketing
SEM is a set of marketing methods to increase the visibility of a website in search engine results pages. The three main methods are:
Search engine optimization, or improving rankings for relevant keywords in search results by rectifying the website structure, and content such that they could be easily read and understood by the search engine's software programs.
Search engine advertising, or paying the search engine company for a guaranteed high ranking or an ad displayed aside the results (commonly known as pay per click advertising).
Paid inclusion, or paying the search engine company for a guarantee that the website is included in their natural search index.
For example, Google offers a service called AdWords, which allows companies, for a set structured fee, to have a link to their website featured when a user searches a specific keyword.
Web Services:
A collection of Web and object oriented technologies for linking Web-based applications running on different hardware, software, database, or network platforms. For example, Web services could link key business functions within the applications a business shares with its customers, suppliers, and business partners.
Web services are characterized by their great interoperability and extensibility, as well as their machine-processable descriptions using extensible markup language (XML).
Web services are a powerful business tool, allowing unprecedented customer integration and partnering opportunities.
Coles use the web services to connect between their inventory system, warehouse mgt system, customer ordering system, supplier ordering systems, and logistic system with XML.
Web services allow each of these systems to share information via the Internet, regardless of back-end software that the application is using. When a customer brought something, the implications for Coles inventory, cashflow and every stock on the shelves can be tracked in one step.
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.
Web services aim to bring requesters, providers and brokers together, as they are advertised (in a service repository) by service providers and used by service requesters, thereby promoting match making among the stakeholders.
Web service components represent business modules with generic templates of services that aim to provide the desired functionality such as, service discovery, negotiation and delivery of the service.
The dynamic nature of the Web services architecture on the Internet presents new opportunities for technology trust building.
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 and
• reduce risk on the reliance on external application providers to offer the latest technologies.
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