E-Tail 2.0

Online; our home away from home. Ads, surveys, demanding our details, why is it ever-present? Why do we now require a pop-up blocker? Why do the websites we serve so loyally abuse us so? Without you or I asking any more questions, let me elaborate.

Let's begin with the solid, hard facts. Sure, we all know that sites such as British Airways and Ticketmaster are reliable to use your credit card on, simply due to the fact of common knowledge, and the size of their companies. Surprisingly, people on Facebook are willing to share their credit card details in order to acquire a digital horse or helicopter for their online game. For a measly 25 cents, you can buy a plum tree in Farmville, a castle in Fishville will set you back $1.40, and dig as deep as $5.95 for a helicopter in MafiaWars. So far, only 1 to 4% of social network users actually buy these things. However, companies Boku and Zong, based in San Francisco and Palo Alto California respectively, are trying to make it easier for people to pay for these digital goodies, via the use of phone credit as a payment method. Up until now, Facebook charged these game development companies very little to use the site, but now, CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants the same dividends that the iPhone apps give, a mere 30%.

This video just proves my overall point, in the fact that companies are making it much easier to use your credit card online, whereas before now the main reason some people don't use their card online is the fear of fraud. This has slowly become the new fashion and with prestigious websites such as Facebook and 2nd life gaining the trust of it's users to use their credit cards, there is a new form of legal tender slowly coming about. This video will explain exactly what I mean:

Overall, what I found from this is that the reason for all this advertising and detail demanding is yet again, the hunger for information, and it is becoming more and more available through the enabling of customer loyalty online. If this change has only begun, and companies like Boku and Zong are only facilitating people with an easier form of payment now, and the use of swipe cards with virtual money becoming used in the real world, then there is a long way to go yet. This shows us that a new era of e-Retail, has truly just begun.

Robert Dineen

Collaboration is the new form of competition

I thought I would touch on the topic of collaboration between businesses today. Competition in our technology-driven society is ever becoming more ferocious. What drives this competition? Who will win the titanic virtual battle of the 21st century?

In the beginning, there was a marketplace. People shouting over each other to get your attention in order to make the killer sale. Then came supermarkets, and shopping centres. A solitary room or building of goods or services sold by one vendor. These supermarkets grew and grew, until a little thing called the internet reared it's eager head. This became a whole new ballgame. Along the way, business corporations learned that it was vital to integrate with other businesses in order to stay afloat. These relationships can be seen everywhere, from the obvious example of Facebook integrating with Microsoft to mutually benefit, swapping huge money for a small percentage of the social networking company, to quiet, simple collaborations such as Google and Wikipedia. On BusinessWeek.com they spoke that when Wikipedia needed millions of dollars to stay afloat, Google donated 2million. They had done this because they had been quietly benefiting from Wikipedia's huge array of information, that would be top of the list on nearly every search. This in turn would create advertisement revenue for Google, and so the integration was made when they basically saved Wikipedia from going bankrupt.

In this video, I thought it was important to highlight the fact that the result of the same question is pretty much 50/50. I like to think that battle is only beginning.

This form of e-Business will become more apparent in years to come because what these internet giants want is knowledge, and there is so much more they don't know about us. There is one thing that interested me though, where do Apple come into the equation in this bid for "first place", because it seems like Microsoft may be a little preoccupied with Google, and a computer company that build their own hardware and software seem to be a much greater threat. I think this video, highly biased towards Apple of course, can explain what I mean.

After writing about this, and researching about collaboration, I discovered after learning about how businesses benefit from working with each other, that the internet may provide us with high quality information, but to attain somebody's opinions and thoughts is a much more difficult thing to achieve. If this can be correctly used, it could change the world wide web as we know it.

Robert Dineen

Blog Entry 2

What is this Web 2.0 that Tim O' Reilly came up with? Web 1.0 was apparently incapable of social networking, such as "facebook", "youtube", and "eBay". These links are very important because it is correct that these sites were not able to be created back at the beginning of the invention of the personal computer. Back then, the only people who could make websites were clearly very clever in the world of programming, and could only create sites such as personal sites which would take effort and time, and would have to keep up with keeping people who log on to the page informed. I don't think it's fair to call the web 1.0, 2.0, or 3.0, because it evolves everyday, grows and more people join networks, upload videos, and use services online. It isn't fair to just let Tim O' Reilly (even though he's Irish) put a name on the evolution of the internet, because as it grows faster and faster everyday, I think the name will have to change an awful lot in the near future.

I believe the only thing related to the internet that we should put a name on is the improvements made in the transition between dial-up, to broadband, to wireless, and hopefully soon, it will just become free, as it is a vital part of life in our square-eyed lives. I have heard of this new step in internet technology however, the cloudbook; stores data on networks, and can surf the internet, and email, while being much smaller and lighter than a laptop; this video shows exactly what I mean.

So I think I have proved my point, advances on internet connectivity, and advances on general computing technology have grown, and have been renamed, but the only thing that has changed with the internet is people. Society is the driving force behind the growth of the internet, so that's why I don't think the name should be changed.

Blog Entry 1

I recently watched Apple's keynote speech of 2010.

From this keynote speech Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, announced Apple's latest invention, the iPad. The iPad is basically a larger iPod but with more. One such thing that really caught my eye was the iBook. You can read books on the iPad, and flick the pages over as if it were a real book. My concern now though is aimed at the sale of books at Amazon. which has been around for years as the old reliable for book lovers. Apple did not go through Amazon in the slightest to set up their own version of an eBook. Amazon always cornered this market of books by allowing other competitors to sell at their website. Now however, this may become obsolete I fear because there is an iBookstore at Apple.Com.

The iPad at it's cheapest will be 400 dollars, and I believe that many people will purchase this, and never need to purchase another book ever again. I think it's curtains for Amazon.com unfortunately, and i do not see how a single website can compete against an innovative giant such as Apple. I do believe this is a step in the right direction for technology though, however, there are many flaws. There is no flash player, there is no camera, there is surprisingly no USB port, and it can't multitask, to name a few. The competition for thid brand of product is already out there, with the HP Slate, or the mystery that is that is the Dell Mini 5. These also have flaws but there will have to be an outright winner eventually, and I sincerely doubt it will be the iPad. We will just have to wait three to four years to wait until Mr.Jobs decides to release the correct version of the iPad, like he has done with the iPhone, and the iPod before. And don't worry, it will still be unbelievably expensive for 2 years after that, so don't start rushing to the shops quite yet.