Facebook Delivers an Outstanding Performance In these days it's trendy to collaborate, share data and information over the Web and the big differentiator of Facebook came when Facebook opened their platform letting information structure emerge instead of imposing structure.

Facebook does not impose any limitations on how services show their value proposition and make money. It's like an operating system, businesses can run full applications on top of Facebook leveraging the social graph or just connect with their customers.

With 7.5% time spent in a community, communities capture a respectable share of user's overall online time. From the OPA:

There is several ways to get orientation, currently Facebook leverages 21.428 additional applications. They can be selected from several categories and sortet according to selected criteria like 'Recently Popular, Most Activity, Most Active Users and Newest' and of course they can be searched.

There is Adonomics™, Facebook Analytics and Developer Service. I'm quoting from their site: 'There are 930,295,450 installs across 21,492 apps on Facebook with over 200,000 developers currently evaluating the platform.' They offer free services like 'Top Applications, Top Companies and Top Developers' and help to grow engage and monetize an application as well as to track application growth, activity, and valuation.

Of course there is also a typical Web 2.0 app rating style called AppRate, a Community-Driven Facebook Applications Reviews and Ratings site with daily reviews and ratings of Facebook applications.

Overall, Facebook and its community provide excellent services, transparency and an outstanding performance with business models for an open Platform and applications like:

• Contextual, displayed, targeted and linked advertising
• RSS advertising
• Sponsoring and donations
• Affiliate programs and merchandising
• Social Commerce (recommendations, reviews etc.)

Hard times for competitors!

• Facebook Sets Trend for Distributed Networks
• Facebook's Open Platform a Serious Trend for Future Marketing
• Facebook as an Open Platform

Labels: bizdev, facebook, networking, web2.0

  ¶ 'Facebook Delivers an Outstanding Performance' posted by eA : 3:38 PM  0 comments links to this post

  Targeting Well-defined Audience Segments

Accessing the Internet at high speeds has several positive effects on Internet usage resulting in higher connectivity and new sorts of services.

Due to better transparency today its possible to reach one's audience when they are searching online, while researching a product or service and when they are spending time online on activities like social networking or watching videos.

I'm expecting more new touch-points in 2008 due to an evolving digital landscape, just thinking of innovative messaging services...

Phantastic capture, taken at Playa Chica, Tarifa, Spain, southernmost point of Europe.

Labels: advertising, bizdev, photos, spain, travel

  ¶ 'Targeting Well-defined Audience Segments' posted by eA : 7:41 PM  0 comments links to this post

  Handling Open Web Application Security As the market dynamics change digital business is quickly becoming the method of choice for any enterprise to offer products and services on-demand to their market applying next-generation information infrastructures with AJAX as an ideal partner to complement modern SOA architectures.

But moving applications to the Web also brings up a lot of questions how to deal with security issues. The OWASP is an open project and a community to help make informed decisions about Web application security risks. In 2007 the most serious web application vulnerabilities (as PDF) were:

1. Cross Site Scripting (XSS)
2. Injection Flaws
3. Malicious File Execution
4. Insecure Direct Object Reference
5. Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
6. Information Leakage and Improper Error Handling
7. Broken Authentication and Session Management
8. Insecure Cryptographic Storage
9. Insecure Communications
10. Failure to Restrict URL Access

For the most prevalent Web application frameworks and especially for open source development, where open source software became the most prominent face of open source the OWASP project represents an excellent ressource to stay informed and make decisions about application security.

The project also provides a comprehensive guide to build secure Web applications and Web services and many recommendations also for projectmanagers, application owners and of course C-level executives.

Labels: ajax, bizdev, security, soa, web2.0

  ¶ 'Handling Open Web Application Security' posted by eA : 12:24 PM  0 comments links to this post

  Next-generation Communications and Collaboration with Google Apps
After Documents and Spreadsheets Google added Presentations to Docs. It's possible now to create and share presentations online with co-workers reducing the amount of friction to interact with each other improving communications and productivity.

• Current and Future eCommerce Challenges
• Into the Enterprise with Google Apps Premier Edition

Labels: bizdev, collaboration, google, productivity

  ¶ 'Next-generation Communications and Collaboration with Google Apps' posted by eA : 12:53 PM  0 comments links to this post

  Chinese Alipay Launched as a Global Payments Option Located in the Asia-Pacific market the world's future Internet super-power China's largest e-commerce company, the Alibaba Group, which also owns Alibaba.com, Taobao, Yahoo! China and Alisoft launched Alipay as a global payments option for Chinese customers including 12 major currencies.

From PRNewswire:

'As of August 20, 2007, Alipay had more than 47 million users in China, growing at a rate of more than 80,000 new registered users each day. Alipay's average daily transaction volume exceeds RMB 150 million, handling an average 780,000 transactions each day.'

'Alipay is the largest online payment service provider in China with a market share of over 50%. '

'Alipay expects to expand its overseas partner list to over 100 retail websites by the end of the year, to cover product providers ranging from cosmetics, fashion, bags and jewelry to household and digital products. The company also predicts the international service will reach monthly transaction volumes of RMB 800 million by the end of 2007.'

'Alipay's first international partner retailers include Sa Sa International Holdings Limited, a leading Asian cosmetics retailing and beauty services group; StrawberryNET, the world's leading provider of discounted designer skin care, make-up, cosmetics, perfume and men's and women's fragrances; and J Shoppers, a subsidiary of Japan's largest listed mail order company Nissen On- line, focusing on mail order sales outside Japan.'

Alternative payment platforms are catching up, become more and more popular and with the progress of eCommerce they represent a big step forward in terms of user friendliness improving one's digital lifestyle and I'm excited how Chinese customers will shop across the world.

Global market leader PayPal got another formidable competitor!

• Welcome to the Payments Club, Amazon FPS Started
• Google's Integrated Checkout Strategy
• More on Checkout

Labels: alipay, AsiaPacific, bizdev, china, payments

  ¶ 'Chinese Alipay Launched as a Global Payments Option' posted by eA : 11:33 AM  0 comments links to this post

  Welcome to the Payments Club, Amazon FPS Started Today Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS) designed as a Web-service tailored to the needs of developers launched on top of Amazon's reliable and scalable payment infrastructure. It claims to be flexible, inexpensive, reliable and secure, supports micro payments, enables 69 mio. active Amazon customers to use FPS and the most important, they have experience -- Amazon processes global payments for more than a decade now.

More than a year ago when I had the idea 'Why not Using Online-Payments to Checkout?' 37% of all US-bills were payed by check. Although it's very traditional in the US to pay by check I'm still convinced that there is a huge consumer demand for new payment technologies, including cash, checks, credit cards, debit cards, stored value cards and Internet banking.

Alternative payment platforms are already catching up among the top 200 e-commerce sites, Bill Me Later commanded 28 percent market share with PayPal and Google Checkout representing 26 percent and 13 percent, as a recent poll showed.

Amazon FPS complements other Amazon Web-services like S3 and EC2, offers code snippets in C#, Java, PHP, and Ruby code and with the progress of eCommerce it is a big step forward in terms leveraging the long tail – I'm excited what kind of services will make use of FPS.

It took Google 9 and 1/2 months after initial launch in the US and 3 weeks after being certified for e-money by the UK-based FSA to launch Google Checkout across Europe of course first in the UK.

I'm wondering when Amazon FPS will come to Europe.

Labels: amazon, bizdev, payments

  ¶ 'Welcome to the Payments Club, Amazon FPS Started' posted by eA : 12:09 PM  0 comments links to this post

  Facebook Sets Trend for Distributed Networks I've written already about Current and Future eCommerce Challenges leveraging social network effects, Web Widgets as a Distribution Channel and of course Facebook's Open Platform as a Serious Trend for Future Marketing.

When Facebook announced at their F8 event a new strategy for further expansion focusing on distribution deals, Facebook as an Open Platform, they set a starting point to letting users build the site from the ground up. Amazing facts from the Facebook Developer Meetup in New York last week via ZDNet:

'Dave Morin, Facebook's director of platform, told the Developer Meetup audience via video conference that more than 40,000 developers have requested to be part of the project, around 1,500 applications have been produced so far, and some of the most popular went from zero to 850,000 users in three days. "This is unprecedented in the history of the Internet," Morin said to the developers.'

"If you think about just how we went about building the site," Zuckerberg said, "the traditional approach would have been to assemble the information and build the directory ourselves"..."Decentralised systems just tend to be more efficient."

Attracting more than 1000 developers a day and one month later it almost seams to be done - with an open platform it's no longer necessary to build all software in house - it even leverages the Long Tail sporting smaller, but very specialized applications far beyond the mainstream offering them an opportunity to capitalize on Facebook's large and loyal user base. I've never seen enhancing a platform in that short time!

• New Strategy: Facebook as an Open Platform
• Facebook's Open Platform a Serious Trend for Future Marketing
• Web Widgets as a Distribution Channel for Advertising

Of course there is also the risky side gambling with its image of being the anti MySpace. Letting things go in an 'unprotected' way and see what's coming out in the end might lead to spam & co and be overwhelming for some users, they might become tired of new apps, but seen overall this kind of strategy applying a strict policy in case has shown that 'no major problems had surfaced yet' according to Zuckerberg. No risk no win!

It reminds me to the success of YouTube, which came up by just letting users do it and finding out what they really want. YouTube holds 45% of the free online video market now - they are currently developing a software to detect and protect copyrighted material and offer online publishing tools and copyright free outlets to remix one's videos and to address a stricter policy.

• Google Developer Day: Going Offline with Google Gears

Labels: bizdev, facebook, networking

  ¶ 'Facebook Sets Trend for Distributed Networks' posted by eA : 2:40 PM  1 comments links to this post

  Current and Future eCommerce Challenges People's behavior in researching buying related information and decision making has changed during the last months. Their favorite methods include researching buying related price comparison sites, RSS-feeds, review sites, blogs and travel sites, while consumer generated content and peer-reviews have a huge impact on their decision making.

• Easy Structure to Strategy 2.0 Evaluation
  

eCommerce is moving "full steam ahead" and is years away from saturation, with double-digit growth expected for several years. However directing the creation of new marketing tools and steering the execution of marketing and technology programs, successfully driving growth in targeted markets through implementation of key projects, building and guiding top-performing teams means to embrace the Web's unique strength, interaction and participation. Web 2.0 features increase brand loyalty and customer retention and easy to use tools have a huge impact on the way people and companies interact in communications, digital media and business. Here some challenges:

• Leveraging network effects (ratings, peer-reviews): Making interaction commercially successful requires users to create wonderful things. An active creator today can enhance brand visibility and credibility, achieve customer intimacy or just simplify the process to find the latest information about new products and services allowing visitors to subscribe via RSS and be notified when posting something new. While traditional media have content embedded making it only consumable at a certain time new media enhance the customer experience unfurling channels, formats and devices. Customers communicating with customers has triggered an unprecedented social networking phenomenon and a resurgence in the Long Tail economy.
• Reducing shopping cart & checkout abandonment (RIAs): Building the case, AJAX Web-applications provide enormous advantages compared to conventional Web-applications, they avoid slow response times and scrolling after the page has reloaded thus improve end-user productivity, lower bandwidth consumption and costs by partial page updates and reduce the time to wait for the next page. Applied to eCommerce systems AJAX even increases revenues making new applications easy and intuitive reducing the amount of friction for end-users.
• Reducing the barriers to purchase across sites (payments): Customers like to buy what they want wherever they are and a single personal checkout like Google Checkout provides an experience that centralizes and stores payment information and purchase history across several merchants for buyers and extends reach and enhances security for sellers and showed that a centralization on behalf of a user simplifies the checkout process, leads to more sales and returns customers thus Google Checkout is a wonderful new thing that really can improve one's digital lifestyle. Incorporating more popular payment methods respecting local payments preferences beyond the credit card would be a good differentiator especially in smaller countries where it's competitor PayPal does not.
• Focusing on core competencies (software as a service): The Web has quickly morphed into a giant global operating system which allows to remix the Web via mash ups resulting in improved social networking technologies fostering creativity and self-expression, service orientation and cinematic user interfaces based on AJAX and Flash complementing modern SOA's and require new ways of thinking and skills, including strategy, creative and technology for a successful approach. It's no longer necessary to build all eCommerce software inhouse.
  
• Productivity (wikis, web-apps): In an enterprise employees usually are organized in different roles around issues and it's always been messy to collaborate on projects created with MS Office products and to share them with co-workers. The better that there is applications like Google Apps Premier Edition with new administration APIs aimed at businesses for the next-generation communication and collaboration. The rapid adoption of broadband has made it possible to move more and more applications to the Web and it's a step further to a Web-based collaboration-suite with drastically reduced maintenance costs with an option to buy further premium services. Blogs and wikis are inevitable requirements for a modern work group.

Labels: bizdev, ecommerce, web2.0

  ¶ 'Current and Future eCommerce Challenges' posted by eA : 9:20 AM  0 comments links to this post

  Facebook's Open Platform a Serious Trend for Future Marketing Since Facebook opened their platform letting information structure emerge instead of imposing structure developers can create their own services on top of Facebook now leveraging trendy and ground-breaking technologies and disciplines setting a serious trend for the future. Combining social networks with vertical applications means

• creating new opportunities for self-expression and collaboration
• complementing and competing in products and services
• leveraging network effects and monetization

Getting in front of potential users such as facebook members and showing them the value proposition is crucial to success of a service.

Both, the social network and the services benefit from a word-of-mouth spreading through social networking resulting in an explosive growth as a recent analysis from Fortune showed:

'The social network has gained another million users and is now up to 25 million.'

'The hottest application on Facebook is from a music social networking company called iLike. That service is now approaching a million users, growing at about 200,000 per day.'

'Now there are already 300 applications' (up from 85 at launch)

'iLike also demonstrates the viral power of Facebook's platform.'

Since Facebook will impose no limitations on how services make money besides selling one's own products and services business models for the open 'Facebook Platform' can involve

• Contextual, displayed, targeted and linked advertising
• RSS advertising
• Sponsoring and donations
• Affiliate programs and merchandising
• Social Commerce

I'm expecting more companies opening up their platform to optimize value, to broaden reach and to attract the attention of niche markets and markets that did not exist before.

• New Strategy: Facebook as an Open Platform

Labels: bizdev, facebook, networking, web2.0

  ¶ 'Facebook's Open Platform a Serious Trend for Future Marketing' posted by eA : 3:34 PM  0 comments links to this post

  Google Developer Day: Going Offline with Google Gears
Just announced on the Google Developer Day in Australia Google Gears (in Beta) can already be experienced via the Google Reader if you use Mozilla Firefox. Just click on the Offline Link in the top right navbar of your Google Reader and follow the installation instructions.

While going offline Gears downloads the latest 2000 posts and synchronizes the Reader while going online again. Fine!

From Google Gears Blog:

'Gears is an incremental improvement to the web as it is today. It adds just enough to AJAX to make current web applications work offline.

Gears today covers what we think is the minimal set of primitives required for offline apps. It is still a bit rough and in need of polish, but we are releasing it early because we think the best way to make Gears really useful is to evolve it into an open standard.'

The next live stream from the London Developer Day takes place today at 12.00 BST (British Summer Time).

Developer Resources:

• Gears Homepage
• Gears API Homepage
• Gears API Blog
• Gears Groups
• MashUp Editor
• Google Web Toolkit

More Google Apps:

• Centralizing Information with new Google Reader
• Into the Enterprise with Google Apps Premier Edition
• Into the Air with AJAX

Labels: apis, bizdev, google, productivity

  ¶ 'Google Developer Day: Going Offline with Google Gears' posted by eA : 11:28 AM  0 comments links to this post

  New Strategy: Facebook as an Open Platform The Web has quickly morphed into a giant global operating system which allows to remix the Web via mash ups resulting in improved social networking technologies fostering creativity and self-expression, service orientation and cinematic user interfaces based on AJAX and Flash complementing modern SOA's.

Being the second largest social networking site on the Web Facebook announced at their F8 event a new strategy for further expansion focusing on distribution deals: Facebook as an Open Platform.

From Fortune:

'"We want to make Facebook into something of an operating system so you can run full applications," Zuckerberg told me. He said Facebook is becoming a "platform," meaning a software environment where others can create their own services...'

People's behavior in researching buying related information and decision making has changed during the last months. Their favorite methods include researching buying related price comparison sites, RSS-feeds, review sites, blogs and travel sites, while consumer generated content and peer-reviews have a huge impact on their decision making.

Currently Facebook is monetized by advertising. Introducing new applications might lead to intensified usage without leaving the site and a richer experience for its users leveraging content and commerce.

'Facebook will impose no limitations on how they make money. Says Zuckerberg: "They can sell sponsorships, they can have ads, they can sell things, they can link off to another site - we are just agnostic."'

It's a step further to better compete against MySpace and since Facebook resisted a $900 mio. acquisition offer from Yahoo! I think they will even resist further mergers and acquisition offers, do it alone and potentially go public one day. While Google is the exclusive provider of text-based advertising and keyword targeted ads for MySpace Facebook's main business partner is Microsoft.

'Last year it contracted to broker banner ads for Facebook, reportedly guaranteeing a minimum of $100 million per year through 2011.'

To take advantage of new business opportunities it's recommended to hook in some of the best community-empowered sites.

Labels: bizdev, ecommerce, facebook, networking, web2.0

  ¶ 'New Strategy: Facebook as an Open Platform' posted by eA : 11:11 AM  2 comments links to this post

  Costa's New Flagship Costa Serena Launches in Second Life Europe's Number One Cruise Line Costa recently launched their new flagship, the Costa Serena, which is 114,000 gross tons, 292 meters in length and features accommodations for up to 3,780 Guests in 1,500 cabins. From PRNewswire:

"Costa is the first company in the world to host a virtual inaugural in "Second Life" simultaneously with the ship's actual inaugural ceremony," said Daniele Mancini, Director of E-Business for Costa Crociere. "This project represents the beginning of a series of new projects in which the user is the center of all communication. Web 2.0 will now allow Costa's satisfied cruise customers to reach beyond friends and family to the entire Internet."

Over the next 10 years many people will spend a lot more time in 3D virtual worlds using them as a platform to meet, communicate and shop, to participate in virtual 3D events and to conduct business on a level of interaction we have never experienced before. Blurring the virtual and physical worlds just makes me think of how many business opportunities and of course challenges will occur...

• Teleport yourself into SecondLife (you need SecondLife)
• Virtual Inaugural Event
• Costa Serena Photo (Reality)
  

Labels: 3D, bizdev, networking, web2.0

  ¶ 'Costa's New Flagship Costa Serena Launches in Second Life' posted by eA : 2:05 PM  0 comments links to this post

  Quick Look into the Online Travel Industry Sramana Mitra recently has written an excellent overview about the state and future of the Online Travel Industry and provides several insights running the travel category against his formula for the future incorporating Yahoo's turnaround formula, the 4C:

Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS), where 3C = Content, Commerce, Community, the 4th C = Context, P = Personalization and VS = Vertical search

New for me was the context, which means gravity in terms of organization, marketers should be able to systematically reach the community in a specific context (contextual advertising).

Management of Products and Services within Digital Markets (own research)

1. Search and Directory

1. Search
2. Vertical Search

2. Content and Community

1. Groupware and Collaboration
2. Information Management
3. Knowledge Management
4. Content Management
5. Work-flows
6. Multi Channel Facilities
7. Single Sign On
8. Special Applications

3. Transactions (Commerce)

1. Catalog
2. Shopping Cart
3. Address Book
4. Shipping Options
5. Payment Gateways
6. Self-service Tools
7. Marketing Instruments

4. Context
5. Personalization

1. Implicit Personalization
2. Explicit Personalization

6. CS - DC
7. BI

Interesting is people's behavior in researching travel related information and decision making. It turns out that their favorite methods include researching travel related price comparison sites, RSS-feeds, review sites, blogs and travel sites, while consumer generated content and easy to use tools have a huge impact on their decision making.

Online Travel is a booming segment representing 2% of Internet traffic and 24% of online advertising expenses and offers excellent growth opportunities during the coming years, in the US as in Europe and increasingly in Asia/Pacific. Among the leading sites Expedia, TripAdvisor, Y! Travel, Orbitz, VirtualTourist (Blog) and Gusto (Network)..., and of course it's also possible to research flight related information in the US via Google, just type the airport's three letter code followed by the word "airport" or the name of the airline followed by the flight number.

Having a passion for travel and sports I did a bit of research about Bezurk.com, a travel search engine located in Asia Pacific, which recently launched a new flight search product incorporating a very innovative user interface featuring cutting edge AJAX making sorting, filtering and comparing travel products a walk in the park.

Labels: bizdev, strategy

  ¶ 'Quick Look into the Online Travel Industry' posted by eA : 5:01 PM  1 comments links to this post

  Brand the most Valuable Asset of a Global Company Just received the 2007 BRANDZ Top 100 Most Powerful Brands report established by Millward Brown Optimor. As businesses go global and information becomes more and more critical it's the brand that leads the most valuable assets of a company, well and of course it's Google to lead the list:

Brand | Brand Value | Change from year before
1 Google | 66,434 | 77%
2 GE (General Electric) | 61,880 | 11%
3 Microsoft | 54,951 | -11%
4 Coca-Cola | 44,134 | 7%
5 China Mobile | 41,214 | 5%
...
22 Vodafone 21,107 -12%
42 Yahoo! | 13,201 | -6%
43 eBay | 12,927 | -2%
67 Orange | 9,922 | 5%
77 T-Mobile | 8,047 | -32%
92 Amazon | 5,964 | 0%

Hottest topic in technology:

• Convergence of different services (voice, data, GPS, music, Internet, email, etc) delivered over different devices

in mobile communications:

• Saturated markets and price competition in mature markets erode margins, companies are moving into non-traditional services

Managing information becomes more and more important for individuals and corporations that want to use the web strategically to build value. Easy to use tools will have a huge impact on the way people and companies interact in communications, digital media and business.

• Rebranding into Google Product Search
• Global Brand Awareness: YouTube and Wikipedia among Top 5 Now

Labels: bizdev, branding, google, markets

  ¶ 'Brand the most Valuable Asset of a Global Company' posted by eA : 4:35 PM  0 comments links to this post

  Developing New Incentive Models for Modern Work Groups In these days it's trendy to collaborate, share data and information over the Web. It seems to me like the Web has quickly morphed into a giant global operating system which allows to remix the Web via mash ups. As a result of a constantly growing acceptance of social applications the global audience has set a new standard for online creative content, online news, audio and video streaming.

• TrendSpotting - New Technologies First in Consumer Markets

In an enterprise employees usually are organized in different roles around issues. Issues are identified during meetings, in conferences and discussions, then resolved between the meetings. Blogs and wikis are inevitable requirements for a modern work group.

The more I got surprised reading 'Executives Remain Wary of Web 2.0' from BusinessWeek that executives put their resources behind 'technologies that enable automation and networking'

1. Web Services
2. Collective Intelligence
3. Peer-to-peer Networking

followed by mainstream Web 2.0 technologies such as

1. Social Networking
2. RSS
3. Wikis
4. Blogs
5. Mash Ups

A major reason was that 'people with heavy knowledge tend to keep that for themselves, because that's the way they define their job'.

Well, knowledge is power and should be honored.

Labels: bizdev, collaboration, web2.0

  ¶ 'Developing New Incentive Models for Modern Work Groups' posted by eA : 12:35 AM  0 comments links to this post

  Betting and Gambling Safe Online with eCOGRA As the field of e-commerce and online gaming begins to mature eCOGRA (eCommerce and Online Gaming Regulation and Assurance) has set a standard for the online gaming industry approving sites with the 'eCOGRA Play It Safe' seal. An accredited site ensures eCOGRA compliance providing player protection, fair gaming and responsible conduct. View their Generally Accepted Practices (eGAP) for Casinos and Poker.

• Approved quality online casinos and poker rooms
• Portals offering integrity and quality of gambling related content

As betting and gambling online has hit the headlines during the last months the eCOGRA global online gambler report provides excellent insights and knowledge about the attitude and behavior of gamblers. Here some extracts:

'The best things about Internet gambling are ‘convenience and accessibility’ and ‘fun and excitement’, while ‘losing’ and ‘financial implications’ came top of the worst things.'

'The average player is male (73.8%), aged 26-35 (26.9%), play 2-3 times per week (26.8%), played for 2-3 years (23.6%), plays for between 1-2 hours per session (33.3%)...'

• Press release
• Full Report

Labels: bizdev, ecommerce, entertainment

  ¶ 'Betting and Gambling Safe Online with eCOGRA' posted by eA : 6:45 PM  0 comments links to this post

  Google Authorized for E-Money by UK-Based FSA Well, payments is one of the most regulated businesses online, but it's also a very innovative way to differentiate one's business by new payments models. Customers like to buy what they want wherever they are and it is just a question of time that Google will expand into the European payments market.

I haven't heard yet an official statement from Google, but on a blog post from Linkdump on Payments I found a quotation of an FSA register search:

• Google - 462517 - Google Payment Limited, authorised, also for issuing electronic money (Mar/19/2007)
  
• Paypal - 226056 - Paypal (Europe) Ltd, authorised, issuing electronic money (Feb/13/2004)
  

where PayPal has about 35 mio. customers across Europe. I did a bit of research out of my head and searched for German-based Click&Buy (~7 mio. customers ww) and UK-based Moneybookers (~2.8 mio. customers ww):

• 454127 - ClickandBuy (Europe) Ltd, authorised, issuing electronic money (Nov/29/2006)
• 214225 - Moneybookers Ltd, authorised, issuing electronic money (Feb/05/2003)

Both are authorized for e-money, too. The e-money license allows to offer a variety of financial services online including to send money worldwide to anyone with an email address, which has a very strong viral character and international transactions can be offered cheaper than by banks and traditional money transfer companies.

UK is the best place to acquire the e-money license across Europe and being certified by the FSA means to meet the highest standards in the financial world online.

More on Google Checkout

Labels: bizdev, checkout, ecommerce, google, payments, uk

  ¶ 'Google Authorized for E-Money by UK-Based FSA' posted by eA : 6:15 PM  0 comments links to this post

  Europe's Top eCommerce Sites Dec. 2006 From Europe's key markets U.K., France and Germany during holiday shopping season week ending Dec/03/2006: Unfortunately Ebay is excluded, but I would put it somewhere on top in all 3 countries (-:
From ComScore:

France: Groupe PPR CDISCOUNT.COM Amazon Sites 3 Suisses Apple Computer, Inc. ALAPAGE.COM QUELLE.FR Yves Rocher AmericanGreetings Property Hewlett Packard

UK: Argos Amazon Sites Tesco Stores Littlewoods Shop Direct Group Play.com Sites Apple Computer, Inc. NEXT Group Ticketmaster Groupe PPR The Carphone Warehouse Group

Germany: Amazon Sites Otto Gruppe O2ONLINE.DE NECKERMANN.DE QUELLE.DE Apple Computer, Inc. Tchibo T-MOBILE.DE WELTBILD.DE Medion Shop

Labels: bizdev, ecommerce, europe

  ¶ 'Europe's Top eCommerce Sites Dec. 2006' posted by eA : 9:41 PM  0 comments links to this post

  Continued Growth in UK eCommerce Markets, Ikea's Coming Running eCommerce operations in Germany, Sweden, France and the US, Ikea quietly added a checkout to it's UK website for the instant restricted to certain shipping areas and entered the newly released Top 50 list of UK online retailers. From InternetRetailing:

1. Amazon UK
2. Argos
3. Tesco.com
4. Play.com
5. easyJet
6. Expedia.co.uk
7. Amazon.com
8. Thomson Holidays
9. British Airways
10. Apple Computer
...
49. Ikea

Nothing new in the top rank..., more than 50% are existing bricks-and-mortar retailers, half of the UK top 50 companies sell travel and tickets to their audience.

Labels: bizdev, ecommerce, europe, markets, uk

  ¶ 'Continued Growth in UK eCommerce Markets, Ikea's Coming' posted by eA : 8:28 PM  0 comments links to this post

  New BBC/Google-YouTube Media Deal As the worlds of TV, entertainment, computing, and communication go digital the trend has shifted towards digital media and an online lifestyle. With a current market share of 54% Google/YouTube dominate the Online Video Market with an attractive user audience loving Internet-based clips and videos they can view, listen, interact with and participate when, what and how they want.

With the potential to attract new audiences in and outside the UK BBC's media marketing is shifting to a new format, online video. From BBC: BBC strikes Google-YouTube deal:

'Three YouTube channels - one for news and two for entertainment - will showcase short clips of BBC content.'

'YouTube is a promotional vehicle for us.'

Producing a contoversial discussion BBC also takes advantage of a new revenue-sharing mechanism that would "reward creativity" announced by YouTube founder Chad Hurley in January:

'The deal is likely to be controversial with other media companies, who have accused the BBC of straying from its licence-fee funded public service remit and moving too far into commercial web ventures.'

More:

• YouTube's Rewarding Creativity soon
• Google Reader Supports Video Now
• Trendy: More Online Video Entertainment in 2007
• Current Business Models for Free Online Video

Labels: bbc, bizdev, google, TV, youtube

  ¶ 'New BBC/Google-YouTube Media Deal' posted by eA : 3:12 PM  0 comments links to this post

  Consumer Internet into the Office Personalized Start-Pages are frequently used as an information resource and a preferred place to personalize trust worth and up-to-date news and services.

As a result of user demand more and more gadgets are developed for this very competitive portal market. A recent deal between IBM and Google introduces more than 4000 Google Gadgets to the users of IBM WebSphere.

From Reuters:

'SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - IBM (IBM.N: Quote, Profile , Research) has reached a deal with Google Inc. (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile , Research) to bring the consumer Internet into the office by piping YouTube and thousands of other Web programs into IBM software used by millions of office workers.'

With this approach Google's Gadgets fuse in the IBM WebSphere Portal, converge in customer interactions and represent a further step towards a personalized customer experience.

More from Reuters:

'IBM WebSphere is the global market leader for portal software with a roughly 30 percent share, according to Gartner and IDC surveys. It competes with SharePoint from Microsoft Corp.'

'Customers such as German airline Deutsche Lufthansa and Disney hotel operator Starwood Hotels will now be able use Google Gadgets.'

Also:

• Into the Enterprise with Google Apps Premier Edition
• Into the Air with AJAX
• TrendSpotting: New Technologies First in Consumer Markets

Labels: bizdev, google, homepage, ibm, productivity

  ¶ 'Consumer Internet into the Office' posted by eA : 6:20 PM  0 comments links to this post

  Into the Enterprise with Google Apps Premier Edition It's always been messy to collaborate on projects created with MS Office products and to share them with co-workers. The better that Google launched Google Apps Premier Edition with new administration APIs aimed at businesses for the next-generation communication and collaboration.

• TrendSpotting: New Technologies First in Consumer Markets

Those applications are already out for a while, however the new thing is a premier edition option including:

• 99.9% uptime guarantee for email
• APIs for your existing infrastructure: Single sign-on and provisioning
  
• 24/7 assistance, including phone support
  

Google Apps are excellent AJAX-based communications tools reducing the amount of friction to interact with each other and to improve communications.

The rapid adoption of broadband has made it possible to move more and more applications to the Web and it's a step further to a Web-based collaboration-suite with drastically reduced maintenance costs with an option to buy further premium services.

Before using Google Apps one should read the GOOGLE APPS PREMIER EDITION AGREEMENT carefully and think of questions about privacy, ethics, security and technology support. It might also be interesting what happens in case of an outage or data losses.

• Into the Air with AJAX

Labels: apis, bizdev, collaboration, google, productivity

  ¶ 'Into the Enterprise with Google Apps Premier Edition' posted by eA : 11:58 PM  0 comments links to this post

  Innovation Counts: Social YoUser Networks on Top of 2006 Google Zeitgeist Well, Google is the leader in search overall and guarantees for innovation, but with focusing on one or two products it's a lot easier to innovate and to compete and the upstarts have beaten Google and of course Yahoo in some of the hottest topics on the Web: Blogging, video sharing, social networking.

Google.com Zeitgeist 2006- Top Searches
1. bebo, 2. myspace, 3. world cup, 4. metacafe, 5. radioblog, 6. wikipedia, 7. video, 8. rebelde, 9. mininova, 10. wiki

To take advantage of the business opportunities in 2007 a transformation of the traditional creative and business processes enabled by digital technology has to take place to create solid online communications, to serve the community with outstanding services, to ensure further developments and last but not least to hook in some of the best social turntables are some reasons.

• Design and YoUser-centric Innovation
• Social YoUser Models in 2007

Labels: bizdev, google, markets, search, web2.0, zeitgeist

  ¶ 'Innovation Counts: Social YoUser Networks on Top of 2006 Google Zeitgeist' posted by eA : 5:50 PM  0 comments links to this post

  Social YoUser Models in 2007 User's most coveted sites have one in common: YoUser-generated content. The new Me-, My-, You-sites give control to the user and benefit from a word-of-mouth spreading through blogs and social networking resulting in an explosive growth.

Today, a YoUser's personal IT infrastructures and services often are equal to or better than even sophisticated enterprises. The emergence of Internet platforms, new technologies and a nearly ubiquitous Internet access furthered this evolution exploiting the limits of traditional media.

The modern YoUser will become increasingly dissatisfied in doing business with low-tech enterprises.

Shaping a business model based on the idea of a community means to balance the divergent interests of YoUsers, artists, the entertainment industry and technology.

Besides selling one's own products and services current business models for the YoUser involve

• Contextual, displayed, targeted and linked advertising
• RSS advertising
• Sponsoring and donations
• Affiliate programs and merchandising
• Social Commerce
  

I think that over the next few years many people will spend a lot more time on the Internet using it as a platform to meet, communicate and shop, to participate in virtual 3D events and to conduct business on a level of interaction we have never experienced before. Blurring the virtual and physical worlds just makes me think of how many business opportunities and of course challenges will occur in 2007.

• Web 2.0 Aftermath
• Creating Customized Applications via Mash Ups
• Trendy: Mobility and Cross-Platform Capabilities in 2007

Labels: bizdev, collaboration, strategy, trend

  ¶ 'Social YoUser Models in 2007' posted by eA : 2:29 PM  0 comments links to this post

  Web 2.0 Aftermath As costs of Web server hardware and Internet bandwidth continue to drop setting-up database-backed websites using advanced toolkits such as innovative Ruby on Rails and AJAX interfaces has become a lot easier than a few years ago.

An active creator today can enhance brand visibility and credibility, achieve customer intimacy or just simplify the process to find the latest information about new products and services allowing visitors to subscribe to blogs via RSS and be notified when posting something new.

Characteristics of today's Web 2.0 architecture allow better communications and data exchange resulting in improved social networking technologies, service orientation and cinematic user interfaces based on AJAX and Flash complementing modern SOA's.

Most websites have just started or do not yet apply Web 2.0 characteristics, but many people talk already about what's after Web 2.0. It's pure speculation, but I think that future disruptive services will leverage further human intelligence applying technologies such as the Semantic Web and FOAF which will enrich today's Web technologies but also raise privacy concerns.

Labels: ajax, bizdev, FOAF, rails, Semantic Web, web2.0

  ¶ 'Web 2.0 Aftermath' posted by eA : 7:10 PM  0 comments links to this post

  Trendy: Mobility and Cross-Platform Capabilities in 2007 Anytime, anywhere access to any multimedia services is in progress and addresses current trends in the telecommunications sector. Today's cellphones converge more and more into hybrids combining voice-centric and data-centric services.

• Upward Mobility (Business Week)

IP and IP-based products and services with a focus on new user-centric broadband services transform already and will continue to transform information and communications products and services within the fastest moving market in the world today.

An intense competition, exploding multimedia content, new devices and IP based networks make it neccessary to create seamless services that meet the needs of targeted customer segments.

Superior and clever presentation layers in terms of quality, cross-platform capabilities, video, audio, probably also offline storage(AMASS) will be a requirement to leverage these trends.

• The Web's Brightest AJAX Libraries and Toolkits
• Top AJAX Libraries and Toolkits (Specialized Search Engine)
• Creating Customized Applications via Mash Ups
• Back in Black: CSS Rounded Corners
• Sketching Early Stage Designs with AJAX
• AJAX Toolkits of course OpenSource
• AJAX Will Transform Web-based Applications Forever
• Winning OpenSource Frameworks in Web 2.0

Labels: ajax, bizdev, flash, trend

  ¶ 'Trendy: Mobility and Cross-Platform Capabilities in 2007' posted by eA : 5:55 PM  0 comments links to this post

  Trendy: More Online Video Entertainment in 2007 Since I expressed my thoughts last summer about the hottest topics on the Web Blogging, Video Sharing, Social Networking and Socializing on Tech-Based Interaction the gravity has further shifted to sites featuring online video and entertainment especially among very young target groups. BBC brought an excellent special about online video and the future of TV:

• Online video 'eroding TV viewing'

The technology behind the recent success of digital video distribution, the use of Flash which allows users to easily embed videos onto their own web pages complements that of blogging, forums, or web-pages.

I did a bit of research on the Internet for streaming video content over the Web that will enhance the online media experience for video enthusiasts. Brightcove, Bittorrent, You Tube, Veoh, Video Egg... and created a list of more than 40 sites. For the case of a very specialized scene like 'Skiing Le Face du Charvet in Val d'Isere, France' I set up a customized search engine that allows to search and find across those networks:

• Comprehensive Video Search Engine
  

Here a list of more than 40 online video distribution networks:

• Angry Alien, ArtistDirect,
• Blastro, Blennus, Blip.tv, Bofunk, Bolt, Break.com,
• Castpost, Current TV,
• Dailymotion, DevilDucky,
• FindVideos, Free Video Blog,
• Google Video, Grinvi, Grouper,
• iFilm,
• LuluTV,
• Metacafe, Midis.biz, Music.com, MusicVideoCodes.info, MySpace, MySpace Video Code,
• Newgrounds,
• PcPlanets, Pixparty, Putfile,
• REVVER,
• Sharkle, StreetFire,
• That Video Site, The One Network,
• VideoCodes4U, VideoCodesWorld, VideoCodeZone, vidiLife, VIDNET.com, Vimeo, vSocial,
• Web62.com,
• YouTube,
• ZippyVideos, ...

More posts about online video:

• Current Business Models for Free Online Video
• Most Coveted: YoUser-Generated Videos
• Creating an Atmosphere Sharing Video over the Web

Labels: bbc, bizdev, entertainment, flash, mashup, movies, trend, TV, web2.0

  ¶ 'Trendy: More Online Video Entertainment in 2007' posted by eA : 2:55 PM  1 comments links to this post

  Creating Customized Applications via Mash Ups In these days it's trendy to collaborate, share data and information over the Web. It seems to me like the Web has quickly morphed into a giant global operating system which allows to remix the Web via mash ups.

Over a period of nearly two years I posted more than 200 entries on my personal blog. The increasing amount of posts made it necessary to apply new ways to look up existing entries and to extract information quickly with precision.

Applying the state of the art Google AJAX Search API this combination of Web-based applications across different sources offers a useful, cheap and easy way to create a customized application solving this issue.

I found it easy to integrate and a fast way to search several blog posts without leaving the site and the quality of search results for my blog improved a lot applying the GblogSearch module. Reason enough to give the search box a prominent place on top of the page now.

Extracting information quickly with precision inspired me recently to create two customized search modules featuring AJAX and Video. I'm thinking already about leveraging a mash up including groupware and collaboration, information management, knowledge management, content management, work flows, multi channel facilities and single sign on. Mash ups put more power in the hands of end users.

Labels: ajax, apis, bizdev, google, mashup, search

  ¶ 'Creating Customized Applications via Mash Ups' posted by eA : 7:47 PM  0 comments links to this post