A Perfect Market Comes of Age

The Economist, Survey of E-COMMERCE. A Must read for May 13th 2004

E-commerce is coming of age, says Paul Markillie, but not in the way predicted in the bubble years

I expect I'll add more quotes and comments once I get my dirty little hands on the hard copy......

Updated : Lots of good stuff...

the wild predictions made at the height of the boom -namely, that vast chunks of the world economy would move into cyberspace -are, in one way or another, coming true.

the actual value of transactions currently concluded online is dwarfed by the extraordinary influence the internet is exerting over purchases carried out in the offline world. That influence is becoming an integral part of e-commerce.

A company that neglects its website may be committing commercial suicide. A website is increasingly becoming the gateway to a company's brand, products and services?even if the firm does not sell online

consumers are "deconstructing the purchasing process".... They are unbundling product information from the transaction itself

Spending patterns on the internet are also getting closer to those on the high street. For instance, in Britain last year women spent more online than men...Older people, too, are using the internet more to shop.

Amazon's business model is built on five fundamentals which it thinks will not change: low prices; a big selection; availability; convenience; and good information about products.

Amazon employs the Toyota principle - reducing defects and problems in its order process as early as possible. One of Amazon's main quality measurements is contacts per unit ordered. Every time an employee has to intervene in the automatic process, perhaps to redirect something delivered to the wrong address, costs go up. By keeping this measurement as low as possible, Amazon not only reduces its costs but also boosts its customer-satisfaction ratings.

Yet for a general retailer, the transition to the internet is by no means easy.. For a start, inventory systems in hundreds of stores had to be changed so that stock positions could be checked instantly, instead of calculated at the end of the trading day.

Travel makes up the biggest chunk of business-to-consumer e-commerce, accounting for about one-third of online consumer spending.

BY SEVERAL measures, eBay is one of the world's fastest-growing businesses.

Networks are akin to a snowball rolling down a hill, gathering up ever more snow as it gets bigger.

the paid-search business is leading the recovery in advertising expenditure on the internet.

"In 2001 it was unimaginable to think that by 2004 I would not have to leave home any more and, short of needing surgery, could get everything I want from a combination of e-mail and websites," says Marian Salzman, chief strategy officer for Euro RSCG Worldwide, a big advertising agency.

Listen to the interview (8:51)by Paul Markillie, The Economist's Business Correspondent, writing about services (marketing, Advertising etc).
RealAudio
Windows Media Player


To see what everyone else is saying..go to technorati

Marketing on Internet gets a boost

Via Globe and Mail : Marketing on Internet gets a boost

The study recorded growth in all types of marketing. But it found that businesses plan to spend a smaller portion of their marketing budgets on traditional media ads and more on sales promotions, direct marketing and Internet ads.

"In the past year, we've seen companies look for alternatives to more expensive TV and print advertising. There's a lot of experimentation going on with advertising over the Internet, especially direct advertising," Mr. Williamson said.

Very Good News, indeed....

Iron Sunrise and Accelerando

From the Man himself Charles Stross's "Iron Sunrise" the squeal sequel to the very very good "Singularity Sky" is out in the US (and canada?) in early July. But I'm going to wait till July 2005 for "Accelerando" (NO!!!!!)

A Guide to VoIP for Dummies and Telco's

Todays Globe and Mail had a Special Report on VoIP

Tech-savvy firm uses everything it sells

Netcetera, launched in 1999 from Mr. Weeks' basement, now has six full-time staff, including Mr. Weeks, and several contractors. In July, Netcetera will be moving into leased office space to better accommodate its growing range of services. But for the past five years, the company has operated without an office, employing a single telephone number and a VoIP system to route calls to employees at their homes or wherever they were working.

I love the idea of a virtual office ,whether you are big or small, route your calls where you are, always at the same extension.

Phone competition starting to heat up

BabyTel, a division of Montreal-based Voice & Data Systems Inc., is rolling out its service today, while Yak Communications Inc. is targeting Sept. 8. Like their competitors, they are slashing long-distance phone bills for consumers and business....
Toronto-based Primus Telecommunications Canada Inc. was the first to jump into the market in January, followed by other players like Edison, N.J.-based Vonage Holdings Corp. and Vancouver-based Navigata Communications Inc.
..
Toronto-based AOL Canada Inc. has delayed its launch from midyear to later this fall. And FCI Broadband, a division of Futureway Communications Inc. of Markham, Ont., said it will probably wait until the fourth quarter before unveiling a VoIP offering.

Service in its infancy raising questions about rules of the game in U.S.

"I think [VoIP] is going to turn the telephone industry on its head," U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Michael Powell told a recent industry conference.

A non-traditional way to transmit phone calls

Internet about to change the way many Canadians use their phones

"The subversive nature of VoIP will create a very interesting dynamic in the market place," says Don Proctor, vice-president and general manager of the voice technology group at San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco Systems Inc.

And since "ip eats everything" this is just the beginning....

How would you build your (Java-based) web applications today?

Via Segmentation Fault: Core dumped..;-): Anand Sharma's weblog: Individual Archive

I like the sound of #3 and #5, if I could get past #1

3. Springing Struts:Struts 1.1 (MVC Framework) + JSP, JSTL, Struts Tags/EL and Tiles (View Layer) + Spring (Service Layer) + iBATIS/DBCP or Hibernate/DBCP (Persistence) + MySQL/Oracle (Data Layer)

5. Its Springtime fellas:
Spring (MVC + Service Layer) + Velocity/SiteMesh or JSP/Tiles (View Layer) + iBATIS/DBCP or Hibernate/DBCP (Persistence) + MySQL/Oracle (Data Layer)

I love the question!

Firefox Help: Extensions

Firefox Help: Extensions

Hugo-Nominated Fiction: 2004

Hugo-Nominated Fiction: 2004: Including links to works online

The Engine That Drives Success

Via TechDirt comes Don's Tapscott rebuttle to Nicholas Carr's article (and now book) "Does IT Matter?" :
The Engine That Drives Success - best companies have best business models because they have best IT strategies. - CIO Magazine May 1,2004

Tapscott points are :commodifing Hardware does nothing to commodify the Information on it; Non proprietary software based on open standards makes the software more like to be customized and less of a commodity; IT Drives new Business Models.

Myself, I've always thought that Carr missed that IT is so much more variable and flexible than the older elements (like Electricity) he used as examples and how hard it is to use IT to add more than just incremental value. But then just having electricity was never the point, that being how to use to, in the assembly line for example, which took a while to figure out. I also think Carr is not allowing for the effects of Moore's Law (see "The Effects of Moore's Law and Slacking on Large Computations" for an example). So If I was going to refute Carr I would use 2 titles : The Effects of Moore's Law and Slacking on Large Corporations, and The application of IT Does Matter.

Companies that follow Carr's line and implement his recommendations - spend less; follow, don't lead; focus on vulnerabilities, not opportunities - will fail against those that innovate in IT in order to do new and or better things.

Mr Carr has a summary of his argument in the May 2004 Wired under Want to Piss Off a CEO? and the original "Why IT doesn't matter anymore" is re-produced here

Open Sourcing Education continues

Via SlashDot Slashdot : SciTech Library has noted the availability of a Free mite Engineering Text For Download

"The third edition of A Heat Transfer Textbook, written by John H Lienhard V (MIT) and John H Lienhard IV (U Houston), has been made available on the web. The book is an introduction to heat transfer, geared towards engineering students. It may be downloaded free of charge. The authors explain: We are placing a mechanical engineering textbook into an electronic format for worldwide, no-charge distribution. The aim of this effort is to explore the possibilities of placing textbooks online -- effectively giving them away. Two potential benefits should accrue from doing this. First, in electronic format, textbooks can be continually corrected and updated, without the delays inherent in printed books (second and later editions are typically published on a five-year cycle). Second, free textbooks hold the potential for fundamentally altering the economics of higher education, particularly in those environments where money is scarce."

The SlashDot commentary mentioned WikiBooks.org , the free textbook project

I've blogged before about MIT's OpenCourseWare