Business Models

Question 1

Describe the features of each of these business models giving an example of each.

Brokerage: A "brokerage" or a "brokerage firm" is a business that acts as a broker. A broker is a party that mediates between a buyer and a seller. A broker who also acts as a seller or as a buyer becomes a principal party to the deal. A brokerage firm is a business that specializes in trading stocks. Examples include Ebay and Paypal.

Advertising: Advertising is a form of communication that typically attempts to persuade potential customers to purchase or to consume more of a particular brand of product or service. Eg. Television commercials.

Infomediary: An infomediary works as a personal agent on behalf of consumers to help them take control over information gathered about them for use by marketers and advertisers. The infomediary business model recognizes that there is value in this personal data and the infomediary seeks to act as a trusted agent, providing the opportunity and means for clients to monetize and profit from their own information profiles. Eg. Amazon

Merchant: Merchants function as professionals who deal with trade, dealing in commodities that they do not produce themselves, in order to produce profit. Eg. Shop owner.

Manufacturer: Direct manufacturing is an evolving concept in manufacturing technology. The idea is to obtain the advantages of conventional mass production (such as high output volume, low unit cost, reliable interchangeability and quality control, and minimized need for person - hours of labor) while bypassing its disadvantages (mainly the capital intensity and lead time associated with toolroom work). Eg. Food processing.

Affiliate: An affiliate is a commerical entity with a relationship with a peer or a larger entity. Eg. A ‘blogger’ may be “affiliated” with an e-commerce web site.

Community: A virtual community or online community is a group of people that primarily interact via communication media such as newsletters, telephone, email, internet social network services or instant messages rather than face to face, for social, professional, educational or other purposes. Eg. Facebook.

Subscription: The subscription business model is a business model where a customer must pay a subscription price to have access to the product/service. The model was pioneered by magazines and newspapers, but is now used by many businesses and websites. Rather than selling products individually, a subscription sells periodic (monthly or yearly or seasonal) use or access to a product or service. Eg. Alpha Sports Magazine Subscription.

Utility: In economics, utility is a measure of the relative satisfaction from, or desirability of, consumption of various goods and services.Utility software is computer software designed to help manage and tune the computer hardware, operating system or application software by performing a single task or a small range of tasks. Eg. Anti-virus scans.

SOURCE:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Question 2

1) What is the Mobile phone use/100 population - compare Australia, USA, China and India.

Australia 102.49 USA 83.51 China 41.19 India 19.98

2) What is the Internet use/100 population - compare Australia, USA, China and India.

Australia 54.19 USA 71.94 China 15.81 India 6.93

3) Compare main strengths and weaknesses of Australia or your home country in the survey.

In general, Australia fares fairly well across all aspects of the technology survey, with government readiness, buyer sophistication, telephone call costs and overall usage all ranking high. The few weaknesses that Australia possesses compared to other countries include overall network readiness (went from 44 in 2006/7 to 54 in 2008/9), as well as the lowly ranked rates of Internet access in schools and individual / government Information Technology usage.

4) What does the survey suggest to you about the Information Technology readiness of Australian business compared to Australian consumers?

The Information Technology readiness of Australian businesses ranks at 22 in the world, whereas the I.T. readiness of Australian consumers ranks at 13. It could be said that both are dependant upon each other, and although the rankings may indicate Australia is lacking in this area, the schooling in relation to technology figures (ranked 11) compares well to other developed countries - which probably reflects that Australia is indeed on the road to improving further.

SOURCE:http://www.weforum.org/en/index.htm

Google Analytics Page

1) Looking at the site useage, what does the terms visits, page views and pages/visit mean? What does the bounce rate mean and does it vary much from day to day?

Visits means how many people visited the website, page views means how many pages were viewed and pages/visits means the amount of page views viewed when people visited the site. Bounce Rate means the average percentage of initial visitors who go to a different site rather than to visit different pages on the same site. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounce_Rate

2) Now look at the traffic sources report. What are the three sources of traffic and where has most of the traffic come from?
The 3 sources of traffic are search engines, direct traffic and referring sites with 80% of traffic coming from search engines, 16% from direct traffic and 4% from referring sites. Most of the traffic has come from search engines with Google being the most popular.

3) What was the most popular web browser used to access the site?
Internet Explorer was the most popular web browser used to access the site with over 70% of users accessing the site using Internet Explorer.

4) How many countries did visitors to OZRURAL come from and what were the top three countries?
They came from 14 countries with America, Great Britain and countries where English is the most popular language such as Australia being the top 3.

5) Having clicked every possible link on my analytics, make a few comments on
(a) What you can track: You can track things such as visitor loyalty, trends of visitors, what country people are accessing the site from, what browsers they are using and many other things.
(b) What you can track over time: Over time you can track how often people visit your site, how loyal they are to your business and how they access your site.

(c) What you can’t track: You can’t track how much they are spending on your site.

6) What do the following terms mean?

High bounce rate: A bounce occurs when a web site visitor leaves a page or a site without visiting any other pages.

Key words: Keywords are the words that are used to reveal the internal structure of an author's reasoning.

Average Page Depth: It is the average number of pages on a site that visitors view during a single sessionclick through rate:

Click-through rate or CTR is a way of measuring the success of an online advertising campaign.

Click: Click is when u press the mouse on a web page to view something else.

Cookie: Cookie’s are parcels of text sent by a server to a Web client and then sent back unchanged by client each time it accesses that server.

Impression: What a person thinks of your website when they first visit it.

Hyperlink: This directs a user to another website or document by just getting them to click on a word which is generally coloured blue.

Navigation: Navigation is the process of finding your way around a website.

Pageview: A page view is a request to load a single page of an Internet site.

Session: Session is the amount of time spent viewing a website.

Unique Visitors: A unique visitor is a statistic describing a unit of traffic to a Web site, counting each visitor only once in the time frame of the report.

URL: A URL (Uniform Resource Locator) specifies where an identified resource is available and the mechanism for retrieving it

Visitor: When a person visits your website.

Comparison shopping: The act of comparing prices of something in advance before shopping for the best bargain

http://www.wikipedia.org/

Digital Design

1. In two paragraphs explain why a customer centric Web site design is so important, yet so difficult to accomplish?

A customer centric website is so important because making the website easier to navigate and purchase products increases your sales immensly as so many people are now purchasing products online. This is considered to be difficult to accomplish because companies are always refining their website and always trying to make it more user friendly.

According to Jodie Dalgleish, she talks about a few things that people should consider when their developing a website. One is to evaluate a competitors wesbite. Secondly, she believes that the creaters of the website should do a transaction and see if it worked and made sense to them. Thirdly, they should add a help section to the website because often after customers purchase a product they have questions about it. And the fourth item is feedback to ensure the creaters of the website know what the customers think of their design or what they could improve on. Also customers should be kept informed of product updates or services to enhance their customer experience. All these things need to be considered which makes it hard to accomplish a customer centric website because customers will often want things upgraded and may want things set out differently compared to other customers. (http://digitalenterprise.org/transcripts/design_tr.html)

2. Define the term 'presence'. Write an additional paragraph that describes why firms that do business on the Web should be more concerned about presence than firms that operate in the physical world.

Presence can be defined as being present with others or occupying a place.

Firms should be more worried about having a presence on the Internet than firms that operate in the physical world because in the physcial world you can actually find the business that your after. You can ask someone where it is, ring them up or just stroll through a shopping centre looking for them. Often there is signs around that points you in the right direction as well. You will often see these on your day to day travels. However people won't know your online unless you advertise yourself or get yourself put at the top of google searches. The Internet is a massive world and your website is just a tiny fraction of this. However it can create enormous revenue for your company but people need to be able to locate it. If you have a strong presence then you may pick up new customers who prefer online shopping as well as retain older customers who might want to save time by purchasing online. If you make your website easily accessible, people will use it and will help your business

3. Write three paragraphs to briefly describe the things that Real Estate Agents can best accomplish through (1) their web sites (2) Mass media advertising (3) Personal contact?

1. Through their websites, real estate agents can advertise houses their trying to sell to people all over the world. However, newspaper ads will only be able to advertise to the small amount of people that read them but the Internet will allow prospective buyers to search for houses if they are moving from over seas or interstate.

2. Through mass media advertising, real estate agents can reach very large organisations such as a state or country. This allows them to not only reach their target markets but potential new customers who customers who may usually associate with a different real estate agent.

3. Through personal contact real estate agents will be able to out their tarde into practice by showing off a house and making a potential buyer realise how good a certain house may be. The real estate agent will also be able to explain certaint things to customers that internet sites or mass medid advertising can't explain such as the neighbourhood their in.

Navigating the Web!

a) What are the four (4) main points Michael Rappa makes about search?

1) Information is now found easier than years before hand because vast amounts of information is available to us.

2) Finding information may have become easier but finding meaningful information isn't as easy. People need to know how to use key words to search to find specifically what they are after.

3) The world of search has changed. Today we are swamped with a "digital tsunami" of information. Information is no longer scarce and in little more than a half-decade we have gone from information scarcity to an overabundance, and that fact alone has changed the way many of us go about our lives. (http://digitalenterprise.org/navigation/nav.html)

4) Search Engines and Web Dictionaries have been created for the public to find information easier with some including yahoo, google and alta vista. These search engines make money through companies advertising on the search engines and this is a multi-billion dollar business. This is called Paid Placement Search with companies paying more to get there link put higher when keywords are entered.

References

Rappa, M. (2005). Navigating the Web. Retrieved March 10, 2009, from

http://digitalenterprise.org/navigation/nav.html

Marissa Mayer Interview!

b) Watch or read the Marissa Mayer interview. Write a paragraph or two, on four points made by Marissa Mayer, that you think were the most interesting or significant for business. There are no right or wrong answers here, I just want your opinion.

• She said that searching information is a big and growing problem with their being over a trillion URLs which means that information is sometimes hard to find. For business this means that their advertising is crucial and that they need to spend their dollars wisely to ensure that their businesses website can be found and accessed by customers otherwise they may lose money.
• When asked why google has been so successful she replied by saying that different elements of its culture have been innovative such as working in really small teams. She said that they have 3 or 4 people in each office and they can speak to each other about specific ideas rather than having to have team meetings and so on. She believed Google has become more efficient by working in small teams.

• She also believed that competetion is vital for business. She said that the competetion between Yahoo and Google was good because people were always developing new products and everyone was asking what is going to be built next. Competetion also makes quality of products better.

• When asked about where the ideas for google come from she said they get nearly most of them from staff within the company which shows that in business you don't always have to look outside your business to come up with new ideas or people to perform Managing Jobs. People from within the company can be promoted and this creates a good culture because people know that if they work hard they have a chance of being promoted. Whereas if a company continiously gets people from outside the company, morale might drop because people believe their going to be stuck in the same job.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/06/marissa-mayer-on-charlie-rose-the-future-of-google/

• 1. The Near Web: This is the Internet that you see when you lean over a screen - like a laptop.
• 2. The Here Web. This is the Internet that is always with you because you accesses it through a device you always carry - like a cell phone.
• 3. The Far Web. Sitting on a couch at home watching the television from a distance.
• 4. The Weird Web. Voice recognition when you’re driving and using Bluetooth head sets whilst your driving. This web doesn't fully exist yet.
• 5. B2B. Business Machines being able to talk to other business machines.
• 6. D2D. Devices that can communicate to each other without humans needing to control them.
• http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/pontin/14964/

b) Could there be more?

I believe their could be more because technology is an ever changing process and people are bound to invent new things but when that would happen I am unsure.

c) What does it mean for business?

It means that businesses will be able to rely more on computers to do work which will reduce their costs as they only have a start up cost and they don't have to pay wages to staff. However this will reduce the number of jobs for people in the community.

Introduction to eBusiness and Getting Started Online

Use the Powerpoint presentation but also look for further and deeper insight by using online resources to research your answers.
1) Internet risks – give examples of four things that can go wrong with a transactional site?

1. Your security could be comprimised because the transactional site you gave your credit card details or other details to may misuse them which intrudes on your privacy or costs you money.

2. You may pay for an item that is to be delivered to you from overseas, however you may never receive that item as the transactional site you used may have been a fake one.

3. You could be linked in illegal activities if your credit card is used to purchase illegal products such as drugs because your credit card details could have been stolen.

4. You could be overcharged for a product you purchased and it may be hard to get a refund onto your card especially if the transactional site you used isn't completely safe.

http://moodle.ballarat.edu.au/file.php/24/Topic1/Topic_1_Introduction_to_eBusiness.ppt

2) Write down a definition for each:
a) E-commerce: E-commerce occurs when a customer purchases a product electronically rather than just face to face cash in hand. Without E-business you wouldn't have E-commerce because you need a business and products to be able to sell products electronically.

b) E-business: E-business is when a company or person advertises their business electronically and allows users to get details of their business from the comfort of their home or in some cases browse for items online.

http://moodle.ballarat.edu.au/file.php/24/Topic1/Topic_1_Introduction_to_eBusiness.ppt

3) What is the difference between buy side and sell side eCommerce?

Buy side E-commerce is when suppliers purchase products from a large company and then forward sell these products to their customers who inturn supply the public with goods. Sell side E-commerce is when a supplier sells their product to their customers (who may be a retailer) who inturn make money by re-selling the product to the public.

http://moodle.ballarat.edu.au/file.php/24/Topic1/Topic_1_Introduction_to_eBusiness.ppt

4) Describe the different types of eBusiness

C2C: Consumer to Consmer such as eBay.
C2B: Consumer to Business such as any retail store like Priceline
C2G: Consumer to Government such as people providing feedback to the government
B2C: Business to Consumer such as a transaction occuring on amazon.com
B2B: Business to Business such as Media owned Emap business publications
B2G: Business to Government such as businesses providing feedback to government businesses and non-governmental organisations
G2C: Government to Consumer such as Local Government Services and National Government Information
G2B: Government to Business such as Government services and transactions
G2G: Government to Government such as exchanging information

http://moodle.ballarat.edu.au/file.php/24/Topic1/Topic_1_Introduction_to_eBusiness.ppt

5) Which digital technology has the highest penetration rate? Explain and source your answer.

Mobile Phones have the greatest penetration rate with an estimated 90% of Great Britain people aged 16+ personally using one whereas 68% of Great Britain people aged 16+ personally use the Internet and 77% personally use digital or multi-channel TV.

Source: MORI Technology Tracker, January 2009. See http://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchspecialisms/loyalty/outlook-reports-february-2009/technology-tracker.ashx

6) List::Four drivers to adoption of sell-side e-commerce by business.

1) You avoid losing your share of the market to businesses already using e-commerce.

2) You still get sales but don't have to pay a staff member to assist the customer because their using the Internet.

3) Your business will be prepared for the future because the world is becoming a more digital world and having a presence on the Internet will allow your business to be prepared.

4) You will attract a new audience who may have never been customers at your business but since you've been on the Internet are regular customers. They may live overseas but have started to shop with your business because it's on the Internet.

http://moodle.ballarat.edu.au/file.php/24/Topic1/Topic_1_Introduction_to_eBusiness.ppt

7) Four barriers to adoption of sell-side e-commerce by business.

1) Their may be a sizeable start up cost for your business and if your not a big business you may see the move as a risky one.

2) Your staff might not be as skilled because your business is online and their getting less face to face sales.

3) The running cost of being on the Internet may seem large and might be greater than the sales your doing on-line

4) You may believe that confusion may occur with sales over the Internet and that some customers won't receive what they have payed for meaning your reputation as a business could be at stake.

http://moodle.ballarat.edu.au/file.php/24/Topic1/Topic_1_Introduction_to_eBusiness.ppt

8) How might a restaurant in Sturt Street Ballarat benefit from an online presence?

They would benefit because many people look for restaurants online because it saves having to search through the phone book looking for the name of a particular restaurant espeically if you don't know the exact name of the restaurant. Whereas if the restaurant was online, potential customers could use search engines to locate restaurants in Ballarat and they could view menu's or perhaps even read reviews to find where the best Chinese for example is in town. As well as this having an online presence doesn't require a staff member answering a phone and using their time trying to explain certain dishes available because the customer is able to visually see dishes if a menu is available on the website. Having a phone number on the website also allows customers to ring and perhaps make a booking which they wouldn't have been able to do without the aid of the Internet.

http://moodle.ballarat.edu.au/file.php/24/Topic1/Topic_1_Introduction_to_eBusiness.ppt

9) What are some examples of Digital information??

Examples of digital information include the Internet, mobile phones especially ones that access the Internet which is becoming more and more common and digital television,

http://moodle.ballarat.edu.au/file.php/24/Topic1/Topic_1_Introduction_to_eBusiness.ppt

http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Digital_information_literacy

10) What is the semantic web? Are we there yet?

The Semantic Web is information that is understandable by computers so that they can perform little tasks such as finding information located on the Web. We're on our way there but there is still a vast amount of improvement that can be done but through technology such as Robotics, Robots are being able to do labour intensive jobs. (Manufacturing Cars at a car plant)

http://moodle.ballarat.edu.au/file.php/24/Topic1/Topic_1_Introduction_to_eBusiness.ppt

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

References

http://digitalenterprise.org/

http://moodle.ballarat.edu.au/file.php/24/Topic1/Topic_1_Introduction_to_eBusiness.ppt

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

http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Digital_information_literacy