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.