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.

Price discrimination

In the past few years, the increasing popularity of online shopping has allowed customers to better compare prices between competitors but has also allowed companies to collect a large amount of data on its customers through click-through rates, IP geo-localisation and cookies.

This important quantity of data is sometimes used to better target ads or customize a search but can also be used for price discrimination purposes.

A few years ago, Amazon.com started using information collected on different buyers to charge individual customers different prices for the same DVD titles. One buyer reportedly deleted the cookies on his computer that identified him as a regular Amazon customer and watched the price of a DVD offered to him for sale drop from $26.24 to $22.74. The strategy, as soon as revealed, was the source of strong customer outrage that forced the company to stop this pricing discrimination.

First, it is interesting to know that the practice is not exclusively reserved for the online market. The same product often costs more in a store located in a fancy area than in a store located in poorer one…

Secondly, a recent study revealed that two-thirds of adult Internet users believed that it was illegal for online retailers to charge different people different prices. It might surprise a lot but charging different customers different prices for the same product is actually legal unless the discrimination is based on a "suspect category" such as race, religion, national origin or gender.

Now if you’re wondering how to protect yourself or even take advantage from this discrimination, the answer is pretty simple: the same way you wouldn’t wear your fanciest outfit to a flea market, you should "hide that you have money to spend" by often checking bargain hunter websites, following a few online tips such as booking airline tickets on weekends when big corporations aren’t and finally you should delete the cookies installed on you computer to limit the amount of information accessible about you.

http://www.isr.uci.edu/pep06/papers/PEP06_Spiekermann.pdf

http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/06/24/ramasastry.website.prices/

http://vulkan.worc.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/images/combined-paper.pdf

Mobile payments

It is the new big thing in e-commerce!

With the launch of Passbook compatible apps on IPhones and the introduction of Google and Paypal’s virtual wallets, mobile payment is really starting to take off.

Now, you can pay for your Starbucks coffee by simply scanning a barcode on your phone, you can have a virtual movie ticket that you can just scan at the theatre entrance, avoiding all the lines… Even more revolutionary, Google wallet can store all your debit and credit cards on highly secure Google servers and allows you to pay in any store using Paypass or  GoogleWallet terminals by tapping the back of your phone to an NFC point of sale terminal at checkout.

On February 2011, the mobile payment market was estimated at 300 billion dollars and this number is expected to double by the end of 2013 as more banks, credit card companies, mobile network operators and big firms like Google and PayPal expand their offering and more merchants adopt them.

There are four basic technology models that allow mobile payment:

•     Premium SMS based transactional payments was one of the first mobile payment technologies used and allows a consumer to pay for a service by sending a payment request via text or USSD to a short code. The consumer is then charged through his phone bill or his online wallet.
•        Direct Mobile Billing: The consumer uses a PIN and a one-time password and is charged for the purchase on his mobile account. This was a very popular payment method, particularly in Asia but is now being replaced by WAP and NFC
•     Mobile web payments: the consumer can use the web pages or apps combined with a payment service such as paypal or a credit card to make the purchase. The WAP technology is used to purchase an item the same way it would be on a desktop.
•     Contactless near field communication technology or NFC: the consumer stores credit card and/or debit card information on his phone and make a payment by just waving his phone over the card reader. Some virtual wallets will even allow you to pre-load coupons and customer reward points on your smartphone and will apply them to your total automatically when you check out. This is the technology used by Google Wallet for instance.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/canadian-banks-rushing-to-offer-virtual-wallets/article4404561/

http://www.google.ca/wallet/

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