Verecom Web Design Blog

continued from Web Business Model part 1

Designed to meet the demand
Google is a good example. In addition to operating the world’s largest search engine, in recent years has also committed to providing e-mail, video sharing, word processing, maps, translation and community services and other products, and most of the services are free of charge. After the success of the Internet service, Google began to expand to Chrome browser, Android mobile platform and Google Apps and many other different areas.

With the search engine to collect the world users information, Google understands what users want, and it is generous to provide a variety of information services for them and make users become fans and trust it, and that is a google’s intangible asset. Google never force users to make payment while enjoy the convenience of its services, unless users are willing to use its keyword ads. Or they need bigger Gmail space which is free for 7 Gb space, and can purchase bigger space for only 5 US dollars.

Is to be different
For a good business model, it is not necessarily to use a big market that already exists, but should use logical method to predict its potential of growth, Google’s keyword ads and iPhone applications store are the examples. Therefore an attractive business model, instead to improve original services, but to make completely different ones (Different, not better). When you really make something different, it will attract a number of potential loyal supporters.

Amazon, for a example, as a online bookstores at beginning, then upgrade to a comprehensive shopping mall, and open up business platform to become IT service provider network. It also did not forget its book sell business, and recently been actively expand business to writer brokers and hardware reader to open a new era of digital reading.

Whether Google and Amazon these existing large Internet companies, or Zynga, Twitter, and Wolfram Alpha this emerging forces, the most prominent feature of these enterprises is they are not only information technology innovation, but also their business model are more mature than their predecessors in Internet bubble period, and they are also good at using the power from the users.

Use the power of the masses
For example Facebook invites volunteers to help with language translation. Game development company Zynga, develop a “take three minutes to get started, five minutes to play” online games, Which is different from traditional online game that require users to spend long time to get start. And for only two years, Zynga earned 100 million U.S. dollars.

Some successful business model may be difficult to imitate, but to analyse these companies to how to find right model and consider and implement the market demand, will help to find competitive advantage.

Edited By Henry Lu

It’s all about long term, World’s largest e-commerce company Amazon founder Jeff Bezos says. Ten years ago, when the stock crash of U.S. NASDAQ, the Internet companies have experienced tremendous turbulence baptism, “God opened the new web economy is a joke?” Many people doubt it, but there are many people persist in the conviction that the great potential of online business is coming, Bezos is one, and he is right!

Amazon, overcome the internet bubble slump, had 3.9 billion US dollars revenues in 2002, and 24 billion US dollars revenues in 2009 which grew more than 5 times within 6 years. “People who are always trying new direction will be too concerned about failure. But if the failure can bring success in the future, that the cost of failure are very slim,” Bezos said.

During IT stock market crash, the management guru Peter Drucker commented: “A new type of economy won’t shape without decades ” Decade, the enthusiasm of entrepreneurs in fact did not subside, compare them in ten years ago, they are more pragmatic and use the creativity as a career to manage, but is not like Drucker’s comments, “Many online entrepreneurs are not creating a business, but in playing a stock market gamble.”

During the hindsight, many people think that the Internet bubble is due to the ignorance and crazy, But in fact, the distance of success from these companies are not far, even the previous Internet businesses founder during that year has changed the face of business. Unfortunately some of the company’s business model is not sufficiently comprehensive, or just pure bad luck.

Study after the failure
Many later proved feasibility of product strategy at that time failed due to the environmental and technological immature factors. Services such as PointCast launched in 1996, won many praise with its free services and rich content, however the rapid accumulation of the number of users, the computer processor speed was too slow, excessive bandwidth consumption, and without much commercial interests to find. Which made the PointCast disappeared in the internet sea.

If PointCast or any similar service launched today which has convenient mobile internet and accurate geo-location system, it will be great opportunity to get business from many manufacturer, and then open up a wide internet market potential.

This is a learning, growing, and dynamic society which doesn’t look backward, but should be in line to the successful model. Now no one doubts about web economy, and more and more people keep finding new ways to make money from it. Have a good business idea is not surprising, because lots of people have the same idea, even people move more quickly to make idea come true! Hence we create a viable business model, and it is a ticket to success.

Business model is important not only because it involves a source of profit, but also for company need to consider the marketing, business, research and development, customer service and management factors into account, and put himself to meet the needs of customers and design the most business value chain .

Web business model Part 2

Edited By Henry Lu

Speaking of social networking website, many people will immediately think of Facebook or MySpace. But in fact In addition to these friend making, entertainment social networking website, there are more professional or commercial orientation websites, which Among them, LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) is the outstanding one.

Founded in May 2003, LinkedIn is growing rapidly since past few years, and becomes a favourite website for white-collar and business people to connect and make industry friends with similar business background. TechCrunch reported that according to science and technology media, LinkedIn’s rapidly growing number of members and recently has more than 60 million members registered.

As the Business Social is more important for many professional people, including hiring, cooperation and other business acts require a social networking platform for the coordination of inter-personal, hence make LinkedIn becomes popular. In December last year, the number of members is 55 million, but there are 5 million new members registered during January this year, which shows a strong potential in this site!

LinkedIn actively expand its global market, recently it set up two offices in India and Netherlands, and that it will soon expand the business to the world’s major countries.

Edited By Henry Lu

At start, Facebook is the network address book for U.S. College students, students must provide true information to register. Since its beginning in 2004, it quickly became a popular platform for college students to exchange information. From 2006, Facebook opens registration for all users around the world. Based on the characteristics of the real personal information, hence now Facebook becomes great tool to look for lost friends.

This is the answer of Mark Zuckerburg, Facebook founder, was repeatedly stressed that the spirit of Facebook: Facebook is not only a tool to make friend, but also give an extension of the real interpersonal relationship to the internet. Facebook’s strength lies on the ability to help users to find friend they already know in real life in the internet world.

First of all, Facebook provides search engine to find friends. When users register Facebook account, they need to provide birthday, gender and background information which may includes the location of high school, universities, research institutes or career background. Then Facebook can use this information to find persons with similar background as reference for users to add in the contact list.

Simpler way is that Facebook can search user’s email address book to find out any person who already in his contact list. This ensures that in future, if any people you know join Facebook, he will find you immediately.

Also Facebook can check your friend list, if you and other user both have same friend list, Facebook will put this user in the “You may know” list, which let you expand friends circle easily. Because these convenient tools, Facebook users can build their friend circles much faster than other social network sites and users increase the friends list easier.

In addition, Facebook offers great variety of applications and games for users. Users can add new game every day, or shared popular games with friends. When Facebook offers more interactive games, it forms a special social model, and through these activities, you can keep in touch with friends and even with someone you are not familiar.

Tracing mechanism with social games, Facebook provides pleasant time, even if you online for long time, it will not be bored.

Edited By Henry Lu

As the founder of Digg, Kevin Pose has been known for his great passion towards micro-blog. Before Twitter, which has millions followers in the web world, he also used to be founder of Pownce, a website which has very similar function as Digg. Although Powence has closed now, but Kevin’s zeal towards micro-blog didn’t change, recently, he launched Twitter user-generated directory site named Wefollow (http://wefollow.com/).

Do you want to join Wefollow through your Twitter ID? It is simple, you just need to send a message to @wefollow with three self-describe labels (such as blog, music, baseball), your ID will be listed in Wefollow user database immediately. On Wefollow site, you can find the topics you are interested very easily, and you can also find out the Twitter ID which has most followers. It is like a social-media human power database.

Edited By Vicky Yin

The Integration of Local Based Service (LBS) targets the potential of $13 billion dollars market, is expected to bring large sums of revenue to social network website.

ABI Research pointed out that Local Based Service (LBS) market is expected to grow more than 13 billion dollars with 5 years, and Facebook and MySpace these two social network website will be important driving force.

With more and more network functions on the cell phone, mobile social network applications become very popular. Research firm estimates that by 2013, more than 82 million people will connect to the social network website by using mobile devices.

Facebook and MySpace are the two largest social network giants, and both eager to start on the mobile phone market. Facebook’s iPhone applications have already been top downloaded software, while there are 400,000 people downloaded the MySpace’s Blackberry service within one month.

However, both of social network sites have not yet integrate geographic information to mobile applications, which also let some smaller social network website, like Loopt and Brightkite have survive space. But experts believe that soon Facebook and MySpace will develop numbers of LBS, such as the search for a friend, geographical indications (geo-tagging), and the integration of LBS will be a new profit source for social network site.

“Multimedia-oriented GPS mobile phone is the mainstream of industry, but other types of mobile phone is also very important,” ABI Research director Dominique Bonte said in a statement: “The concept of mobile networking through built-in GPS receiver has become practical, for example, The local based information service from GYPSii can support Moblin-based Intel Atom MID. ”

Bonte also said navigation devices will be the best choice for location-based internet service. For example, the navigation from Japanese car maker Nissan’s Carwing car can allow users to share information like car fuel consumption detail.

Edited By Henry Lu

This is a really good question, especially to the web masters. Even you have a good idea, a good team, but the key of succuss is determined by whether web users like your website or not. There are millions of web users over the world, how can the web masters know whether their ideas can find the favour of the web users or not.

Normally before we decide to start the E-business, firstly we will tell the basic ideas and plan to the friends and relatives around us and ask for their opinions. But if the opinions are highly diverse, we might feel even more confused. In this situation, the most secure way is to make a big scale marketing survey. And then make an ideally best service gradually according to the result of this marketing survey. However, the cost of this method may be far beyond what a new company can afford. Maybe we can assume the possible online behaviours according to our past experience. But in Australia, there are millions of web users; it is really a problem that how much the personal experience can reflect the online habits of the whole Australia web users.

Under this dilemma, we have other option. First we use our experience as the foundation and with our new ideas to write the whole program in the shortest time. We do not need to think too much after we complete it, just launch the very original website and let the users start to play with it. And then modify and improve the website services according to their direct responses. At the same time, we also need to the set the measurement for each factor which will determine the success of the website, for example: the drop off rate of the website, average number of pages people browse, register shifting rate and so on. This is really a long improvement processing, because the online behaviours might be very different from what we expect at the beginning. It also happens very often that the reality conflicts with our ideals, but as long as we remember “to change web user’s online habits is far more difficult than just following it” we can always find the method very soon.

During the processing of growth, you will find that it is very interesting and exciting to let the users feel they are growing with the website services. Website is a living body; you don’t need to set too much boundaries at the first place. In the process of gathering the people, let them also feel that the services are keeping moving forwards. Once a web users told me that the greatest fun of using these web 2.0 website to him is not just from the functions the websites have provided but from the growth of the website, the websites always adjust the functions and modify the flow very frequently and very quickly, this makes him always find the surprise whenever he logs in the website.

Just as we mentioned before, “who knows what kind of web service the users like?” You never know and neither do I. The response of each service will be different due to the difference of their target groups. Only when the web masters really put the ideas to website and let the users really used it, play with it, then they will tell the web masters whether this is the thing they want or not.

Do you have good idea? Don’t think too much, quickly put it online! Thousands of web users will give you the sincerest and most instant response and opinions.

Edited By Vicky Yin