Hashem Almakrami

Lightweight Models & Cost-Effective Scalability …“Much more can be done for less”;
Web 2.0 application implements a model that is able to scale cost effective process, strategy and faster time to market. So, much more can be done for less. Online businesses are different than old traditional businesses, which require a large sum of capital with high risk and development process.
EBay will be my example to explain the concept of “Lightweight Models & cost-Effective Scalability”.

Ebay.com is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to shopping online and establish online business. It is one of the pioneers of the online platform of goods and services. It is launched in 1995 as a place to trade collectables and hard-to-find items. Today eBay is a global marketplace where businesses and individuals can buy and sell practically anything. It serves hundreds of millions of users worldwide, over two billion page views a day, and petabytes of data in our systems. Actually, making money on eBay is simple. Millions of people use eBay to sell various things they have to make some extra money or start their won business.
EBay has established localized websites in thirty other countries, which make it possible for eBay to cope with evolving demand of its users. EBay segments different functions into separate application pools. Selling functionality is served by one set of application servers, bidding by another, search by yet another. In total, we organize our roughly 16,000 application servers into 220 different pools. The same approach made for its database, there is no single monolithic database at eBay. Instead there is a set of database hosts for user data. With 1000 logical databases in all, on 400 physical hosts, it is a very cost and resource effective approach to scaling the eBay servers.

In addition, eBay helps its partner and others API to build their own affiliate store (Ecosystem). The eBay affiliate program is one of, if not the most under-utilized opportunity for making money that currently exists online. With the eBay API, you communicate directly with the eBay database in XML format. By using the API, your application can provide a custom interface, functionality and specialized operations not otherwise afforded by the eBay interface. Ebay’s main revenue model is getting a listing fee and a percentage of the total sale of an item. Advertising on the site is carried out through eBay itself, as the adds are targeted towards its users.
Moreover, the eBay platform allows building a new eBay business or expanding your current business, reaching new customers, and creating a potential new stream of revenue. Leverage the resources of the eBay Developers Program to tap into eBay’s marketplace of over 200 million users with tools and services that meet the diverse needs of buyers and sellers on eBay. The eBay Developers Program was founded in 2000 and third party software applications already accounts for over 25% of eBay.com listings.

Making Money With Ebay

References:
eBay.com (2010) eBay Explained
eBay Company, (2007), The eBay Marketplace
Randy, (2008), Scalability Best Practices: Lessons from eBay
Collier , (2006) Build Your Own Ebay Affiliate Store
Mathew, (2009), Ebay cost -effective

Leveraging long tail theory is the expression transforming mass markets into millions of small niche markets (Anderson, n.d.). This theory first appeared in Wired in October 2004 and was such a phenomenon that Anderson went on to write a book about it. Anderson explained in his theory how our culture and economy are increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” markets to a large number of “niches” markets.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is web 2.0 applications that leveraging the long tail and digital markets concept which greater success than traditional market. IAB combines a small and various niche markets for more than 375 leading media and technology companies who are responsible for selling 86% of online advertising in the United States (IBA, 2010).

On behalf of its members, the IAB is dedicated to the growth of the interactive advertising marketplace, of interactive share of total marketing spend, and of its members’ share of total marketing spend. The IAB educates marketers, agencies, media companies and the wider business community about the value of interactive advertising.

IBA distribution and inventory costs are low, selling less popular goods over longer periods of time. With using the internet as a distribution method for IBA has leveraged the low cost and allowed many small niche markets formats and increasing the supply. One more thing is IBA distribute its contents through podcasting, which is the process of creating an audio show of some sort available in MP3 format via an RSS 2.0 feed that supports enclosures (podcasting tools, 2010).

They have also utilized services like twitter, Facebook, YouTube and others to promote any specials and new releases to those who are following them. IAB can easily contribute from all over the word who is interested to its content and like to share the same interest.

To conclude this topic, I invite you to visit the IAB website and create your account with them. Then please let me know your opinion about the vision as Long Tail business.

References:
Anderson, C. (2004). The Long Tail.
Wikipedia, (2020) Chris Anderson (writer)
Answer.com (2007), What is traditional market and digital market?
IAB (2010) , About the IAB

What is “beata” Mean?
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a beta is “a nearly complete prototype of a product.”, on the other words, the product not finished yet.

The perpetual beta is one of a web 2.0 applications feature. It is defined by O’Reilly (2005) as “Engage your users as real-time testers, and instrument the service so that you know how people use the new features”. He also stated that “the product is developed in the open, with new features slipstreamed in on a monthly, weekly or even daily basis”
With perpetual beta applications nothing is ever finished, and getting a pretty good out the door. Developer should consistently release new features which might not be fully tested to be sure we are still in the top of the market.
Google is web 2.0 application that always delivers it software as perpetual beta, and constantly being updates to provide additional functionality and enhancement.
Gmail, Google Docs and Google Finance are the most famous Google application and they are still in beta statues. Google spokesman (2007) said “ There’s no final version. Nothing is static, everything is changing. With every new iteration, small changes make you realize the creature is alive”

In fact, Google changed the meaning of “beta software” , it launch the applications in early stages and forgetting to remove the word “beta” even after years of testing. Google has decided to leave its product in beta rather than issuing updates in the familiar system of numbered software versions—1.0, 2.0, and so on. Google mail “Gmail” has been launched in 2004 and still as beta version for more than seven years of development and enhancement.

Google relies on adaption of the beta perpetual development, its user become as co-developer, they use they software comment on it and give their feedback. The users always assess the new features via their usual usage, also Google use some statistic and controlled experiment to make the decision about its products.

Also, Google incrementally create new products, it evolve the existing products via the user feedback and rapid release.

The Google Maps beta was release in 2005 as beta for more than eight months, during that time the software is running, the feedback collected from the user, and incrementally new feature and enhancement added to it.

References:
Henry, A. (2007, August 23). Is The BETA Invite System Flawed? Retrieved April 2010, from Mapping the Web

Wikipedia. (2009, October 26). Perpetual Beta. Retrieved April 2010, from Wikipedia

Merriam-Webster Dictionary:merriam-webster dictionary, 2010

Today, computer is not the only the access device for the internet application. There are many new media devices supports that, such as mobiles and other handheld devices.
Actually, the world is going mobile and content is king. The worlds of the Internet and mobility are merging, to provide more usability and accessibility world.
Web 2.0 applications are no longer limited to the PC platform. It is transparent and accessible across any device. That make these kinds of applications are more valuable than others who limited to a single device connected.

Amazon.com and Amazon Kindle is a good example to describe more “Software above the level of a single device”principle. Amazon kindle is a software and hardware developed by amazon.com as an electronic book reader to make reading very comfortable and easily. It allows for reading and browsing e-books and other digital media. Its hardware is using an E lnk brand of electronic paper and can download content with the use of Amazon Whispernet. Its software application support Windows, iPhone OS, BlackBerry and Mac OS X.

Kindle is not support only books from Amazon, it also able to read Mobipocket text formats, HTML, word document and audio books from Audio.com. Digital books or e-books that are read on computer screens and, more recently, on dedicated reading devices like the Kindle. Hundreds of thousands of e-books are already available, representing a fast-growing segment of the publishing market. With this device reading paper books are faster reading books about current issues and events is allowable. It is updatable for correcting errors and adding information. It is also searchable device with it you can search books and find your target easily.

Amazon Kindle is more than just a software and hardware platform for reading e-books. It is provides wireless access to the Internet so the readers can read various website such as newspapers, magazines form anywhere and anytime. Since it is handy, it also can be used as mobile phone that is cellular and can be connected to full telecom amenities by by using Whispernet which is sold as a package. Amazon (2009) states that “Whispernet utilizes Amazon’s optimized technology plus Sprint’s national high-speed (3G) data network to enable users to wirelessly search, discover, and download content on the go.” E-books, newspapers, magazines, and blogs are delivered via Whispernet.

References:
Amazon. (2009). Kindle 2: Amazon’s new wireless reading device (latest generation). Retrieved 17, 2009
Amazon Grows A Startup In Cupertino (2007)
Amazon Kindle (2009)
30 benefits of e-books (2008)

Rich user experience web based refers to a design that is high responsive interface, easy to use, accessible from all form of media, fluent, and productive. Also it should be rich functionally, free applications, and allowing people to actively participate and controlling the contents

Web 2.0 technology has increased the user expectations about rich user interfaces (RUE). It uses Flash, DHTML and AJAX interface collection to create web base software that support and increase the rich user experience.

Google email “Gmail” is an excellent example to define the rich user experience, and how Gmail as web 2.0 application enhance that.

Gmail is easy to use, pleasure for both new use and expert, direct response, have large space, accessible from anywhere, and strong searchable database. It is Multimedia program that the users have multiple choices of media to communicate with others.

Gmail is rich user experience; the users can do many online functions effectively and easily. They can send and receive messages, have conversation with multiple friends in the same time, text chatting, video chatting, sharing photos with friends and family, and commenting on news happening around them. It also allows the user to use other Google programs such as document, group, calendar, reader, bookmarks etc.

Gmail: Behind the Scenes – Collaborative Video

Gmail describes as Google social network. The Google company last a few months had integrated a new networking element called Google Buzz to Gmail. According to Edward Ho (February 09, 2010 ) Google Buzz is a new way to start conversation with friend text or voice, share photos, and videos. In addition, the users can connect other sites they use such as Picasa, Flicker, Google Reader, and Twitter, so the users can keep up with what they are doing around the web all on one place.

Gmail also has direct access to Google translation. People can communicate more easily and come over the language barriers and get immediate translation when the need. That is a great example of how Web 2.0 mashups and bring together a useful services to create a solution for the Gmail chatting and Google translator.

Moreover, Gmail has a big attachment size. It has 20 MB allowable attachment size, so the users can do more communication and have more room to spare. Also, it has dynamic spell-checker and auto-save.
Gmail also has more than 40 different language interface that will help in increasing people experience. It also Support grouping of emails, and creating discussion thread, and collaboration.
Gmail is successful rich user experience software. It is one of the best ways for people to communicate easily. I personally use Gmail as my official electronic mail, it is updated and rich user experience.

References:

Edward Ho (February 09, 2010). Google Buzz In Gmail
From http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/google-buzz-in-gmail.html
http://blog.opensocial.org/2009/02/gmail-labs-gadgets-now-support.html
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/
http://www.tstiles.com/dms/web20/richuser.html
http://www.roseindia.net/ajax/ajax-user-interface.shtml

According to O’Reilly “innovation in assembly of systems and sites composed by pulling together features from distributed, independent developers, a kind of open source development”.

Basically with innovation in assembly no needs to produce the exact required platform output, just create the platform and let the users decide latter on which they want.
Innovation in assembly is also known as Enterprise mashups, which refers to a web page or application that uses content “data or functions” from more than one sources to create a new service.

The webs 2.0 are reusable technology which allow using other sources functions and data to create innovation in assembly aspect.
There are many web 2.0 applications rely on innovation in assembly to provide their services, one of them is Zillow.com application. I will take this application as my case study to explain more about the innovation in assembly.

Zillow.com is a leading online real estate marketplace to help homeowners, buyers, sellers, renters, real estate agents to make a right decision about their homes. It is one of most popular web 2.0, and social networking “mushup”. It is a great innovative service that provides residential property estimations for houses across the United States (Zestimate). It provides them with new and updated information related to their issues.

Zillow.com presentation

Zillow is working to connect its real estate information with the citizen journalism movement, pushing people who live in select neighborhoods to upload and share photos, texts, news, videos and other information. Zillow APIs is free networks and open, it allows the third party web developers to incorporate their data and add more functions and values on their domain. Zillow is helpful application, and web 2.0 technologies made it more useful and popular.

Top 10 Real Estate Web 2.0 Sites

New Zillow collaborative features

References:

O’Reilly (Sep 24 2007). Entries matching “innovation in assembly ”
From http://blogs.oreilly.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi
http://www.zillow.com
http://www.zillow.com/howto/api/APIOverview.htm
http://www.zillow.com/blog/zillows-open-api/2006/07/
http://blog.sforce.com/sforce/2008/08/a-salesforce-zi.html

Today, internet applications strongly rely on data to achieve their success, not as before relying on the functions that they provide. Having valuable data within the system actually is more important, it is the real asset. Therefore the company which has control over a unique source of data has a great chance to attract monopoly rents from the use of that data, and that is the exact meaning for “Data is next Intel Inside”.

Increasingly web 2.0 become a data-driven, it embeds a limited functions with a huge number of information and knowledge. The era of web 2.0 is as a race to obtain and control data asset. Successful web 2.0 application whose been backed by SQL database query, such as Google’s search database, you tube, yahoo, eBay, Napster, Metacafe…etc.

A Metacafe is a good example to be considered as “Data is the Next Intel Inside. It is a large video community based on global traffic, page views and video sharing. It is one of the largest video sites, where user can uploads, views and shares the short films and independent videos. It has a huge number of audiences, significant reword for procedure and a community panel to ensure the best videos get noticed.

According to Metacafe CEO Erick (March 5, 2007 ), “Metacafe has built a tremendous reputation among viewers and producers as the best place to watch and distribute video content on the Web, We are pleased that Business 2.0 highlighted Metacafe as a company to watch in 2007, and we will continue to focus on partnering with producers to find the best video content on the Web.”

Metacafe creating is mass of collaborative platform. It collects wisdom of its audience to filter and surface the most entertaining videos and make it the best place with high quality and entertaining contents.

Metacafe always concerns about it is content, how to make it valuable and unique. It launched a fascinating new experiment it’s calling WikiCafe, to give the ability for any registered user to edit, enhance, and even translate video tags, descriptions, and other types of metadata. That will help the users create a wealth of accurate or meaningful information about the videos on the site, and find their target videos easily.

According to Boulton (2008-08-26) that “Metacafe is allowing some 80,000 community reviewers around the world who get to look at videos uploaded to the site and the audience decides what appears on Metacafe’s home page”.

Metacafe believes that data is the next intel inside. It always tries to create a unique and valuable database, because it knows that data is the main asset and the best way to attract the audiences.

References:

Metacafe CEO Erick , March 5, 2007, Metacafe Named One of Business 2.0’s Next Net 25
From http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_2007_March_5/ai_n27289115/

O’Reilly (Feb 1 2007). Data is the Intel Inside: One More Small Sign
From http://radar.oreilly.com/2007/02/data-is-the-intel-inside-one-m.html

Boulton (2008-08-26) . Metacafe Flavors Video Search with Wikipedia-Type Perk
From http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Messaging-and-Collaboration/Metacafe-Flavors-Video-Search-With-Wikipediatype-Perk/

According to O’Reilly (Nov 10 2006) harnessing collective intelligence is a basic principle in web 2.0; it is one of its essential elements. It is a highly effective method for creating valuable contents. Users can participate to add values and create architecture of participation that helps in collecting information from participants both implicitly and explicitly.

Web 2.0 provides social network platforms, such as friendship, collaboration, or information exchange, that help users to generate the content in a collaborative fashion. The knowledge created by a huge number of people through mass collaboration is called ‘collective intelligence’. It is also helpful in criticizing the contents and filters the valuable.

Companies that use web 2.0 understand how to harness the collective intelligence to make their systems better. A collective inelegance occurs when many participants connect to the system criticize its contents and filter the valuable.

Amazon is an example of how collective intelligence may be harnessed to gather the information explicitly and implicitly. Explicitly gathering occurs when user can rate he contents, upload images and add comments, and the implicitly comes when the company can use special software to observe and follow the customers and visitors to gain helpful information how they use the website.

Wikipedia is another example that relies on harnessing collective intelligence for creating its contents. It is one of the most popular web 2.0; it is a excellent example of a site that has succeeded in harnessing collective intelligence. It is written collaboratively by volunteers from all around the world. Everyone can add new articles, and these articles are editable, so it is acceptable to add new information or delete as well. It encourages people to collaborate to generate the web contents.

Wikipedia also has a discussions page attached to each article to provide your and get other people reflections. Moreover it has multilingual web-based, that makes it well-internationalized projects. Wikipedia content’ is available in many different languages, so people from different region can get the benefits and share the content creations.

Also, it is open source project, it is online encyclopedia, and it is written, edited and policed by a global group of volunteers. It exploits the user-generated content to offer its information database. According to O’Reilly (Nov 10 2006) when we compare Wikipedia with other web applications like encyclopedia Britannica, “Wikipedia exhibits super intelligent behavior when it is more comprehensive and more up to date than encyclopedia Britannica. Britannica has the brand, but Wikipedia has the Brains on Board. With very minimal software, Wikipedia directs millions of minds to create a new and better kind of encyclopedia. That’s not just user-generated content“. Britannica relies upon experts to create it contents; Wikipedia relies on trust in anonymous users to build the content, it is an adaptation of the open source.

Wikipedia is harnessing collective intelligence; it is user-generated and interactive content. It allows the people to publish their work, connect with each other, and exchange data with other sources, “two – way” of communication reading and writing, that is really harnessing collective intelligence, turning the web into a kind of global brain.

Improve Sales with Collective Intelligence’s Sales Techniques

References:

O’Reilly (Nov 10 2006), Harnessing Collective Intelligence
From http://radar.oreilly.com/2006/11/harnessing-collective-intellig.html

Zepheira (04 Sep 2007), Real Web 2.0: Wikipedia, champion of user-generated content.
From http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-realweb4/index.html
http://sparebutton.net/INB347/?p=5
http://www.kintek.com.au/web-design-blog/harnessing-collective-intelligence-getting-other-people-to-make-your-site-great/