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.

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