Thursday, August 27, 2009

E-Commerce in Canada

Statistics Canada periodically reports on the state of e-commerce in Canada, with its last report issued in April, 2008 presenting stats on 2007. That report shows that e-commerce has continued to grow at double digit rates since the surveys began in 2003. It also shows that e-commerce is still a relatively small part of overall economic activity. The growth, however, will have its eventual impact. There is no question that e-commerce is a critical part of the activities of many, perhaps most, companies. Even if their core business is not internet based, their internet presence is often important. In fact, its a fair bet that the statistics issued by Statscan actually understate the situation. They take into account transactions consummated over the internet, but do not cover transactions started by the internet, through the use of websites for shopping and pre-buying research. That is an important aspect of e-commerce too. The Statscan reports can be found on Statscan's website.

Monday, August 24, 2009

Facebook Remodels its Business Model

Ever since the advent of the internet and the consequent growth of eBusiness, business models have been built, re-worked, scrapped and shaken up. Some internet startups began without a viable business model, forgetting that the old rules of bringing in more money than you spend still apply to internet based business.

Amazon is the major example of a company that has shaped and reshaped its business model with considerable success.

Now, Facebook is at it. Using its established Gift Shop, Facebook is expanding the range of goods available in its gift shop to the point of including real world gifts as well as the virtual gifts, like electronic logos and decals, it has handled all along. It has taken to selling its virtual gifts - icons - by having them sponsoered by celebrities, in this case Britney Spears.

Facebook also has its own currency, Facebook Credits, which can be used to buy gifts. The company is also going into the "banking" business, by encouraging the use of its "currency" to buy goods on other sites. It is expected that the new remodelled gift shop will generate an additional half million this year. Not a bad start.

Read more in this report on the new Facebook.

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Television - A Dying Medium

A recent survey has found that online viewing of videos has doubled in the last three years, outstriping the growth in social media usage and reflecting the growth in availability of broadband internet in homes.

There is a trend, mentioned in the report on this survey, that people are starting to watch television programs online more often. While online availablility of programs is not yet to the point that TV can be replaced among the general population, nevertheless, it is a trend that is not going away. And will be a reality sooner rather than later.

Already some people have cancelled their cable subscriptions (I know this anecdotally but haven't seen a study on it yet)and are using their computers to view their favourite programming. Many of the networks are archiving their programs and of course they can be viewed at any time. CBC, for example, archives The National, and various of its other programs. National Geographic and Discovery channels, as examples, contain a lot of archived material. Archiving sonds like real old stuff, but in reality the archiving is often done the next day, and sometimes even in real time.

Numerous websites are popping up that offer TV viewing, such as Hulu and TV Anywhere. These are backed by TV Networks, meaning the networks see the writing on the wall.

Since the beginning of the internet revolution, we have been predicting a convergence of technologies. Convergence of TV and the internet is the next big step. IT's interesting to speculate whether what comes out the other end will look more like TVs or computers. The survey is reported on in Internetnews.com.

Monday, August 17, 2009

Pointless Babble on Twitter

A recent study carried out on Twitter tweets carried out by Pear Analytics, reports that 40% of the tweets on Twitter are pointless babble, where they tell people illuminations such as "I'm eating a sandwich now" Only 9% of the tweets were categorized as having pass-along value.

Hear! Hear!

Twitter can be a valuable source of information, but it can be difficult to wade through all the babble to find it. Hopefully this evolves. Here's a good report on the Study.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Why SOA Projects Fail

There have been a number of SOA projects that have run into implementation issues. Recent research seems to indicate that the main issues are around people. This is no surprise. The main stumbling block for all major types of IT project over the years has been people. The problems that companies ran into with ERP implementations have mostly all involved people problems - lack of involvement at the outset, lack of proper training, resistance to change, poor management buy-in or control, fear of job losses. All of those are factors being mentioned with SOA projects. No surprise there. See this article in IT World.

Monday, August 10, 2009

The Aging Facebook Community

If anyone ever doubted that older people (55+) - lets call them the boomers - are becoming a greater part of the Facebook community, the latest statistics from IStrategyLabs should remove that doubt. While there are questions about the numbers and some issues around the data,(for example, missing data if it is left out by the users)nevertheless, it confirms a growth in the 55+ group. An increase of 24.9 % among US Facebook users during the past month alone. Previous surveys have also shown notable increases. This trend, if sustained, will have a major impact on the nature of Facebook. Will it scare the young ones away? Time will tell. See the survey at the Businessweek site.

Friday, August 07, 2009

Denial of Service Attacks

Recently, Twitter experienced a denial of service attack that seriously impeded its service. DofS attackes have been one of the most common malicious attacks by hackers for years. For a brief bu cogent description of what they are and how they work, see this article in Technology Review. Also, it's useful to check out this article in Wikipedia.

Wednesday, August 05, 2009

Canadian Copyright Law
by Gerald Trites

The Copyright Act, last amended in 1997, is hopelessly out of debate. The world has changed since then, and has especially changed with regard to the way information is handled and, more importantly, the way people view it. A saying that came out of the information revolution says that "Information wants to be free". Many people, especially those of the younger generation, feel strongly about this. And yet we have new companies, like Google, making billions of dollars on selling information or otherwise building business models that profit from it.

Many traditional industries have been fighting for their lives, notably the music industry and latterly the Movie video industry. The book industry is heading into a revolution of its own, not to mention the newspaper industry. All of these industries need to change their business models to adapt to these new social attitudes about information and still stay in business. Indeed, without some kind of copyright protection, some and perhaps a good deal of, the information products these industries produce would disappear because there would be no profit motive for the preparers, like the artists, musicians and writers.

Reforming the copyright will not be an easy job. Some of the new attidutes are legitimate and endowed with the force of new technologies. Others are not. But is is a job that needs to be done. An article in the Globe and Mail points to some of the issues.