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.