E-business models

Magic and computering

2008-05-21T11:13:00.016+02:00

Magiksyl
envoyé par degentsyl

Last year when we had our course in E-business with Liz Craig, thanks to her we discovered so many new things. And I am thinking particularly about dailymotion. To be honest, I do not understanding many things about computering and before that course I do not know even how to build a blog. I was using internet only to make some kind of researches and read my emails.

As I already told you during the classroom, I am deeply passionated by conjuring and I remember that in the middle of december 2007, Liz Craig asked me a question: "We had a discuss in class about the concept of dailymotion, so now why don't you create an account and upload some videos on it?"
So I decided to follow her advice and as I had nothing to make some videos I decided to use my webcam and start uploading some magic tricks online. That was absolutly new and incredible for me. I made some screen shot about my dailymotion account that I would like to comment but you can go right on dailymotion to watch what I have done with that link:

http://www.dailymotion.com/illusionmagique

I Would like to show this screen shot because I think it is one of the most relevant about dailymotion. I am doing magic since many years during parties or for all kind of special events, but nobody know me or even heard about me. The industry of magic is very small but there are so many people who love it and try to practice as amateur like me.

So I created my account on December 27th of 2007 and I started uploading my first videos on the same day. It is exactly 147 days from today and you can see on the previous screen shot there are already 9487 persons who had a look on my videos, so it make an average of 65 persons watching my videos daily and it will increase very soon because I am going to put around ten new videos next month.
247 users of dailymotion add my videos as their favorites and 159 of them put some comments on them.
To conclude with that screen shot I would like to underline something interresting, indeed dailymotion permits people who have an account to create their own channel and add on it videos of their choice, therefore 36 dailymotiers have added at least one of my videos on their personal channel that is the reason why I have 36 fans.

I have now 18 videos online. My goal as I am developping a business around magic is to meet a maximum of people sharing my hobbit so that is why I am posting some comments on their videos. I have already post 194 comments. Then I discovered that some of dailymotion's users have already set up some groups dealing with magic, so I am member of 42 of them. Right here I copy a shot of a groups page:

The following screen shot concerns my "virtual" magic friends, I have now more than 200 friends on dailymotion:

I am accepting as fiends only users who have already a small knowledge about magic. What it is interresting with that concept is the fact that we are able to discuss easily about specific techniques or manipulations for exemple.
But the major negative aspect is that it is only a virtual friendship. So I decide to organize two weeks ago a meeting with four of them in my own flat and we spend many hours together and we plan to make that kind of small seminar monthly. Next time we will discuss about the creation of an association to organize biger meetings and make magicians amateurs aware on the fact that they are not alone.

InnoCentive Business

2008-02-07T22:15:00.000+01:00

InnoCentive is an "open innovation" company that takes research and development problems in a broad range of domains such as Engineering, Computer Science, Math, Chemistry, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Business, frames them as "challenge problems", and opens them up for anyone to solve them. It gives cash awards for the best solutions to solvers who meet the challenge criteria.

The idea for InnoCentive came to Alpheus Bingham and Aaron Schacht after they attended a public lecture at the Santa Fe Institute^. The company was launched in 2001 by Jill Panetta and Alpheus Bingham.

In December 2006 the company signed an agreement with the Rockefeller Foundation to add a non-profit area designed to generate science and technology solutions to pressing problems in the developing world

As of early 2007, InnoCentive's web site features an award from the non-profit "Prize 4 Life" foundation for $1 million for finding a biomarker that measures ALS disease progression.

InnoCentive is based in Waltham, Massachusetts.

InnoCentive calls the scientists who attempt the problems "solvers" and the companies these problems come from as "seekers". As of 2005 InnoCentive had 34 of these "seekers" (including Procter & Gamble, Dow AgroSciences and Eli Lilly), which have posted more than 200 "challenges" in 40 scientific disciplines, of which more than 58 had been solved by over 120,000 "solvers".

The problems listed are categorized as biology or chemistry problems, but use a very liberal definition of these disciplines, for example challenges have been posted in the areas of system network theory, manufacturing engineering, design, materials science and nanotechnology.

Solutions have come from US, Europe, Russia, China, India and Argentina; the cash awards for solving challenge problems are typically in the $10,000 to $100,000 range.

InnoCentive provides a consultancy service to enable its clients to make the most of its "solver" network. "Science advisers" and "problem definers" help clients to identify a challenge appropriate for posting on its network. They then estimate an appropriate award fee by determining the complexity of the problem, the resources required find a solution, and the value transferred to the company. InnoCentive reserves the right to reject the award amounts that are deemed too low and its experts provide a solution vetting service to screen out ideas that do not meet the challenge criteria.

InnoCentive forces its "seeker" companies to agree to intellectuel property audits so that once a solution is provided to the company it can guarantee that the intellectual property is not used if the company decides not to award it. The company may also force the "seeker" company to award the solution if it deems that it meets the requirements of the challenge.

InnoCentive also provides a consultancy service to its network of "solvers". Its "science experts" provide feedback to explain the terms of the challenges as well as why submitted solutions may be deficient. It provides the logistic and legal framework for maintaining their control over the intellectual property until its sale to the seeker company. All communication and submitted solutions remain confidential.

Competitors offering similar services include NineSigma, Yet2.com, and YourEncore.

What is a mash-up ?

2008-01-20T11:08:00.000+01:00

It is the capability to mix and match data and applications from multiple sources into one dynamic entity. You put opposite things together= Creates a new product.
The term mash-up comes from the hip-hop music practice of mixing two or more songs.
Timbaland is good in mash ups, mixing different styles of music to rap.

Here's a sampling of mash-up Web sites:
Panoramio: a mash-up of Google Maps and geopositioned photographs of locations
Hiking Outpost: a mash-up of Amazon and online hiking information resources
Flash Earth: a zoomable mash-up of Google Maps and Microsoft's Virtual Earth
Diggdot: a mash-up of Digg, Slashdot and Del.icio.us that integrates and filters content
HousingMaps: a mash-up of Google Maps and Craigslist rental ads that displays geographical information for rental properties.

The freemium concept

2008-01-11T21:16:00.000+01:00

Magic videos wall

2008-01-10T14:50:00.000+01:00

Stelios Haji-Ioannou at Zeitgeist Europe 2007

2008-01-09T01:43:00.001+01:00

Landind with easyJet

2008-01-09T01:32:00.000+01:00

Fun chez Easy-Jet
envoyé par Tango-fox

Easy Group model

2008-01-09T01:23:00.000+01:00

I think that we are discussing about the most important low cost group ever created. During my research about the EasyGroup, I found a lot of words with a strong meaning to describe it as “The Easy Empire”. In fact the EasyGroup is a private investment owned by one man: Stelios Haji-Ioannou. He is a Greek entrepreneur of 40 years old who started the EasyGroup in 1995 by founding the low cost airline company easyJet. But know the easyGroup is very huge and divided in 17 departments: easyJet, easyInternetcafe, easyCar, easyValue, easyMoney, easyCinema, easyBus, easyHotel, easy4men, easyJobs, easyPizza, easyMusic, easyCruise, easyMobile, easyWatch, easyVan, easyOffice.
It is an evidence this group is a huge success. And I will try to indentify for witch reasons:

They built a big identity
they use one color very attractive
They are using simple name for each group
They diversified their products at the maximum

We said that the group started with easyJet at the beginning it was a small company but today with their planes we are able to travel in all the biggest European capitals. With easyJet began a new concept, in fact you have no accommodations on board and only few services. This last point could be consider as a negative aspect but on the other hand with the concept it is “easy” to travel for many people who can not use traditional airline companies with more expensive prices.

Let’s have a look to easyHotel wich is one of the specialized hotel booking on the Internet. Stelios Haji-Ioannou, to create easyHotel studied the Japanese model. Indeed he found that customers are ready to stay in a room smaller than usual for a lower price. He took is inspiration from the “capsule hotels” of huge Japanese city by building very small rooms around 5m² and 9m². This kind of room is perfect for the short stay of periodic travelers like an “etap hotel” but I deeply think that it won’t be comfortable at all for business men who are very often obliged to use their room as a work place like an office. To my mind it is clear that easyGroup is following a way to reach certain goals: they clearly want to eliminate all their competitors by developing a huge branding.

Easy Hotels will benefits of lowest rate guarantee include:

Serves as a great tool to beat the online discounters at their own game
Such guarantees entice more consumers to book online
Rate guarantees are great customer retention instruments
Such guarantees have important psychological and promotional effects for consumers
More and more, the guarantee is an expectation by online consumers
Price guarantees have a great "word of mouth" effect.

There are four essential conditions for revenue management to be applicable:

That there is a fixed amount of resources available for sale.
That the resources sold are perishable. This means that there is a time limit to selling the resources, after which they cease to be of value.
That different customers are willing to pay a different price for using the same amount of resources.
Also is important to have direct access to consumers. The sales through intermediaries or wholesalers makes the process much harder to understand demand and often impossible to control and vary price.

Easy Hotels and Yield Management

Increase revenue by maximizing occupancy and protecting rates when necessary
To have access to accurate statistical reports both future, current and historical
Detailed demand forecasting information to help with sales and marketing initiatives
Competitor analysis on both the internet and GDS to help react to market influences
Group analysis to help evaluate the impact group reservations have on occupancy and therefore revenue
Series analysis which assess the impact a tour series contract will have on your property
Access to reports and real time information on a group wide basis for Head Office personnel

Chris Anderson: long tail videos

2007-12-20T23:26:00.001+01:00

Chris Anderson: Technology's Long Tail

Ajouter à mon profil | Plus de Vidéos

The long tail concept

2007-12-20T23:20:00.001+01:00

I think that today more and more people are able to buy on Internet. The long tail is a powerful new force for our economy: the rise of a niche. Fist of all I would like to give a definition of long tail. According to Chris Anderson, the theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

One example of this is the theory's prediction that demands for products not available in traditional bricks and mortar stores is potentially as big as for those that are. But the same is true for video not available on broadcast TV on any given day, and songs not played on radio.

Everybody knows the economic effects of web retailing: economy on stocks, personnel, great option to monitor all sorts of marketing information, quickly adapt offers to demands; that make it a little bit similar to industrial “just-in-time” techniques - to minimize the expenses of all points of a distribution chain. Customers have immediate access to the whole shop database; they can find much more items with several clicks than while spending hours between bookstore shells.
The immediate great advantage of web retailing is interactiveness. The process of buying and selling becomes an exchange platform as for customers, as well for suppliers and aggregators: exchange of the opinions, products or affiliates services.

To conclude we could say that long tail is really adapted to e-business. Even if it is a new concept I am pretty sure that it will go further because there is still a huge potential in the cultural industry and as an e-business model, long tail seems to be adequate to change the mass consumption strategy.

Useful links to go further in with the long tail comprehension:

http://www.journaldunet.com/0703/070326-net-long-tail-definition-solution-outils-longue-traine.shtml

http://longtail.typepad.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail

More research about zlio.com

2007-12-19T12:54:00.000+01:00

If you remember last time during the course, we had a look on many web sites with different types of e-business models. And to be honest my favorite one was www.zlio.com.

So yesterday just to have a better idea of how to use it and how does it work I created my own shop. You should try it that is great and you feel really free to do what you want. But I am going to share with you what I found interesting with this concept.

To watch my shop: http://illusionmagique.shopinblog.com/

The creation:

When you go on the first page of Zlio.com they tell you that you can set up your personal online store in just five minutes. I was septic but that was true it didn’t take more that few minutes to create the page you have above. And what I found amazing is the fact that they had anticipated all the problems of construction that you could meet and in fact you do not need any computing knowledge to make your shop.

About the products you want to sell:

As we said last time in class, you have to choose thought many products that they propose in their catalogue and I went further and I found that they are allowed you to select your products from a variety of over three million items.

The screen shoot above is interesting because it shows you how zlio try to advise you when you want to add or research some new products for your store. When you add a new product you have to make a small comment on it and put some tags to help the future buyer to find it easily.

Each time you go on this screen, zlio find out for you some products with similar tags so you don’t need to make hard research in fact you just have to click and add them to your shop.

How to make money:

Even if at the beginning we can not earn lot of money, we have to keep in mind that it is totally free of charge. I found four ways to make money with zlio.com:

The first one is when you get some commissions on the products you success to sell. Then the second one is if you have many cyber people visiting your shop but the prices of your products are inexpensive so you can go in the settings of your shop and choose an option that will give you more revenue, in fact you can add links from your store to others and you will be paid for these links on a per-click basis. I find that concept very great because if a visitor clicks through to an offer, you will get the commission even if they don't buy the product (example: 0.08€ per click).

The third way to get money is to help zlio.com to find new people to create new cyber shops. They give you the opportunity to send a message to your contacts through zlio.com to explain them the concept of the site. I tried this option and I don’t like it very much because the message you can send looks like a spam. But on the other hand it is totally benefic for you because you push your contacts to make their own boutique and zio.com will pay you for that, they will give you 10% of their commissions forever and 5% of their friend’s commissions.

The last way to get money I found is to put some advertisements from Google on the boutique. You can see some of them right on the picture below. I used Google Adsense to make it. The first time you want to use it you have to register but once again it 100% free of charge. I really like it because it’s easy and you are able to control what kind of things they are going to put on your page. Indeed Adsense program will scan the content of your shop and suggest you some ads relevant to your audience and your site content.

Musicovery earnings

2007-12-15T20:53:00.000+01:00

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