Summary of the experience

It is already the last class! It has been a lot of fun writing those blog entries everyday and I might even continue with the blog after the class is over.

            Firstly, having to write a blog entry every week made me more aware of tech news in general. Every week, I would try to find the latest trend in e-business and would read all the recent tech articles to find the topic I wanted to discuss and that is by itself a great takeaway from this course.

            Secondly, I tried blogging a few times before but always posted a couple articles and never opened the blog again. This time, having it as a class requirement and writing more and more articles made me realize the true value and potential for blogs. Also, having the ability to check the number of sites views, the encouraging comments (even though the blog’s name was so specific that I didn’t really expect anyone to see it besides the professor) made me aware of the impact a blog designed to be read by everyone could have.

            Obviously, I also learned a lot about the topics I discussed every week. My blog was centred around e-business’s influence on shopping with a few exceptions dedicated to cloud computing.

The main takeaways that I will remember after this class is that e-business is targeting three very important trends in consumer behaviour:

·      The search for cheaper products and services: because pure-click businesses do not have high labour costs or rental costs, they offer better deals to consumers. Other business models such as group buying or penny auctions contribute to this trend.

·      The search for discovery: more and more people are looking for new products to try or see what products their friends are using and e-business tends to facilitate that for consumers through social media integration and new business models such as subscription boxes.

·      The search for convenience: people with busy lives need technology to make the most difficult tasks easier and less time-consuming. As a result, we’ve seen the growth of mobile payments, the increase in popularity of shopping walls or the introduction of the Google glass. Cloud-based software and applications are also part of this trend by making data available anywhere and anytime.

To conclude, I believe this class was very useful and taught me what the most important trends in the industry were.

Online pure-play enter the offline market?

The growth of e-business has allowed the development of a number of business models including a large number of online pure-play models.

However in the past year, we’ve noticed a number of originally “online only” players starting to enter the offline market. We’ll try to understand the origins of this trend and give some examples of how online pure-play businesses can use offline channels.

While online shops have caused a lot of brick-and-mortar businesses to close shop, they still lack a few characteristics that customer’s value such as:

•        Tactility
•        Instant delivery
•        Social interaction

By investing in the offline market, online sellers are looking for innovative ways to bridge the gap and make up for these flaws. Some of the most innovative ways to do so include:

•         E-bay opened a temporary pop-up shop in London during the holiday season where it featured images with QR codes and recommendations driven by social networks.

•         Similarly, Etsy opened a pop-up shop in New York with laptops to show their entire shop catalogs and mobile devices serving as POS terminals via Square and PayPal.

•         Another big trend is the shopping walls developed by Tesco for instance with their giant poster in Korean subways where people could take out their mobiles, scan the products they need and have them delivered to their houses, saving a significant amount of time. Now, its virtual stores are also found in bus shelters and have produced 130% increase in online sales and 76% new registrations for Tesco online.

This innovation was further developed using a similar technology and the XBOX kinect to allow customers to literally reach out and grab the products they want from their TV

Using pop-up shops and other offline channels allow online sellers to:

•         Make efficient use of retail space, with lower inventory

•         Measure engagement and conversion rates

•         Attract new customers

•         Support real-time social electronic shopping 

Subscription boxes

In the last couple years, the concept of subscription boxes has grown exponentially.

How does it work?

You subscribe to one the subscription boxes’ websites, enter your personal information (including skin type for beauty boxes, shoe size for shoe boxes….) and answer a few survey questions to help assess your taste. Then, every month, the merchant chooses a few sample size products, puts them in a box and mails it to you.

Why does it work?

For the customer, it is a great and cheap way to discover and try new products or to send a nice care package to a loved one.

It also taps into an important trend that runs parallel to social media: trying new things. So many consumers today use their favorite social network to ask for suggestions on what to eat for dinner, what show to see, what nail polish to use, which outfit to buy, and so forth, making many decisions based on input from friends and even strangers, which has caused countless people to expand their horizons.

For the retailers, it is an easy and convenient way to make consumers try new products and increase brand awareness.

Additionally, retailers get valuable information about their consumers and can therefore reach out and promote other products and services to them.

Some of the most popular boxes in Canada include: Glossybox, Glymm, Luxebox, JustFab, BarkBox, gourmet spotting, LePetitBallon's ….

The Google Glass revolution and g-commerce

What we currently know about the new device is that it will allow hands free access to information such as weather, stock prices, GPS, e-mail, video calls…It will also allow taking pictures and videos and all that though natural language voice recognition.

With the launch of the Google Glass explorer program, and the approaching public launch of the device, we decided to dedicate this post to the impact the device will have on e-commerce or as some early-birds started calling it G-commerce.

While the true impact and use of Google glass will only be known after the public launch, a lot of people have started predicting potential uses of the Glass. One of the main impacts of the Glass will definitely be the ability to search on the go and as we know the Google mobile search app already allows image capture search. We can therefore imagine walking into a bookstore and looking at/scanning a barcode would bring up information about the book, Google shopping would allow price comparison with other vendors and combined with google maps show the best location to get the book in question. Even more impressive, imagine entering a clothing shop, finding a nice shirt, scanning it and have google shopping find it online, automatically suggest the cheapest vendor including shipping costs and allows you to add it to you shopping cart and buy it online without having to take out your wallet or share your financial information with a third party.

Google Glass could truly revolution the way we shop!

Cloud Gaming

Last week, we spoke about the business applications of cloud computing, this week we will see how the cloud is changing the world of video gaming.

Cloud gaming is the new big trend in video games.

Cloud gaming refers to a game that resides on a company server rather than on the gamer’s computer or device. The gamer enters the game by installing a client program that can access the server where the games are running. The main advantage of cloud gaming is that the company can upgrade the games without having to worry as much about the capabilities of users’ computers.

The idea of cloud gaming was first introduced by G-cluster on Electronic Entertainment Expo, E3. Initially, the idea was to offer cloud gaming service over WiFi to handheld devices. In the 2009 Game Developers conference, OnLive demonstrated cloud gaming by streaming the game Crysis over the Internet from a remote server. It officially turned on its service in the US on June 17, 2010, at an initial monthly service fee of $4.95 but later canceled this subscription fee. A year later, Gaikai, which allows game publishers and others to embed free streaming game trials on their web sites, launched its open beta with games from Electronic Arts including Dead Space 2, Mass Effect 2, and Sims 3. Gaikai’s main strength was that it allowed its games to be embedded directly inside websites, on Facebook, or on mobile devices.  The company grew in popularity over the years until Sony eventually bought it in July 2012 for US$ 380 million. This acquisition allowed Sony to use the cloud gaming technology for the PS4, the company’s newest console introduced about two weeks ago.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/8085937.stm

http://cloud-gaming-the-new-gen-gaming-trend.blogspot.ca/

http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/cloud-gaming/

Cloud computing applications

Last week, we defined cloud computing and the different technologies behind it. This week we will discuss the most popular applications of cloud computing for small to medium businesses. In fact, smaller businesses are the first to benefit from the new cloud-computing trend. It decreases the barriers to entry by eliminating the hassle of having to deploy physical infrastructure like storage systems and e-mail servers, facilitates collaboration between business partners and gives access to sophisticated technology at a low cost.

Some of the most useful applications of cloud computing include:

·      Productivity: a number of software targets the improvement of productivity. Examples include SageOne which offers invoicing, project tracking and expense management or Adobe FormsCentral which provides a good and easy way to create some fairly user-interactive forms for your business website or social media pages and analyze the data gathered through this forms. Gliffy is another service on the cloud that allows drawing diagrams such as databases or organizational charts in collaboration with other members of the organization, improving productivity.

·      Project management: Software such as Mindomo 5 enables you to easily visualize projects through mind maps, embed media, hyperlinks, and attachments, and begin planning projects by assigning priorities, completion statuses, and resources. 

·      CRM: Salesforce.com can track contacts, customer interactions, tasks, and hook into Outlook and Google Apps, while also offering document sharing and mobile access. Depending on the edition, it can also allow tracking sales opportunities and offer full reporting and analytics, custom dashboards, e-mail marketing, sales forecasts, granular permissions, real-time data sharing, and basic customer service tools.

·      File syncing: Dropbox, Box, Google Drive are all cloud-based services that allow you to access and edit the most updated version of a document online.

·      Finance: Bookkeeping software such as FreshBooks and and QuickBooks are all moving on the cloud to facilitate usage…

·      IT management: software such as PureCloud provides small and mid-sized businesses with a risk management tool that gives administrators an easy-to-use and comprehensive list of security issues in the network as well as detailed steps to proactively remediate the problems. 

Cloud computing

Everyone has stored a document on dropbox or google doc, streamed movies from Netflix or used social networking sites.

In a few years, “cloud computing” has moved from being a crazy idea that tech geeks talk about to a tangible reality that is now indispensable.

Cloud computing refers to the delivery of computing resources over the Internet. Instead of keeping data on your own hard drive or updating applications for your needs, you use a service over the Internet to store your information or use its applications.

Cloud computing can be used by companies following different business models:

·      Software as a Service (SaaS) is model where the consumer buys the ability to access and use an application or service that is hosted in the cloud. The best examples for this service model are salesforce.com and google apps.

·      Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a model where consumers buy access to the platforms, allowing them to use their own software and applications in the cloud. Examples include Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)

·      Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a model where consumers control and manage the systems in terms of the operating systems, applications, storage, and network connectivity, but rent the underlying infrastructure, as a service.  An example is Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2).

The main benefits of cloud computing include cost savings as companies can reduce their capital expenditures, lowering barriers to entry. Another major advantage is scalability and flexibility as companies can increase their deployment rapidly and adjust their resources to satisfy consumer demands. Also, cloud computing allow workers to access applications from anywhere increasing productivity. However cloud computing has also raised many concerns mainly with regards to security and data protection.

In the next few posts, we will discuss the impact that cloud computing has had on business models and take a closer look at the major players in the field.