February 28 Class Notes

The following are the slides for class.

Some of the links referenced in the chapter:

• GE
  
• GXS
  
• ARIBA
  
• CommerceOne
  
• ProcureNet
  
• Neoforma
  
• Nistevo
  
• VerticalNet
  
• Covisint
  
• Exostar
  
• MetalSite (No Longer ?)
  
• AdhesivesandSealants.com
  
• ASPnews.com
  
• Corio
  
• Lessons Learned from Loudcloud
  
• Opsware
  
• Diamonds.com
  
• PostMasterDirect
  
• Hart-Hanks
  
• D&B Sales & Marketing Solutions
  

Student Presentations, Chapter 6

Innovative Online Marketing Research Methods

• ROI Real-Time
  
• Search for Tomorrow
  
• Marketing Research, Online, on tap
  
  

Digital Devide

• We Live in a Technical World
  
• ‘Digital divide’ narrowing fast, World Bank says
  
  

Online Data Capture

• The Darkside of Online Shopping
  
• Watch Out, Google! Amazon Gets Search
  
• Business Intelligence
  
• A9
  
• iWon
  
  

Collabrys, Inc. (A) case: For Discussion Only

I have listed below some of the questions to guide your reading of the Collabrys, Inc. (A) case. We will be discussing the case in class on Monday, March 21st, 2005. I would suggest that you think about other issues that are not discussed through the questions below.

What is the Business Environment like for Benjamin Wayne and the other managers in Silicon Valley in the year 2000? Specifically, consider the following issues:

• What are characteristics of the business environment make starting a new business difficult?
  
• Which of these characteristics are “generic” and which are the characteristics that are specific to the Internet boom and bust?
  
• Why starting a business at this particular time and in this particular place exacerbates those difficulties?
  

Consider the major turning points in the evolution of this startup. What did they learn at each stage in their development?

• To begin, determine what is Collabrys’ product/service. What is the value of the service that Collabrys delivers?
  
• Identify the major stages/turning points in the evolution of Collabrys.
  
• What did Wyane and his team learn at each stage?
  
• What are the rules implied by the various decisions Wayne and the other senior managers make? (Read article: Strategy as Simple Rules)
  
• What kinds of rules are these (refer to the how-to rules, boundary rules, priority rules, timing rules and exit rules discussed in the article “Strategy as Simple Rules”)?
  

Which of the two strategic options should Collabrys take? Why?

• To respond to this you have to essentially answer the questions – Should Collabrys be selling technology? Or Should Collabrys be delivering a service?
  
• It will help to create a table of “pros and cons” for each of the two business models – the Selling Technology model and the Delivering Service model.
  

Chapter Presentation Guidelines

The follow are the guidelines / expectations for chapter presentation:

1. A presentation (preferably powerpoint or at least overhead slides) that does not exceed 15 minutes. You can store the presentation on your e-mail and pull it up from the class laptop when you need to present it.
   
   
2. The presentation should discuss articles in great detail. For example, you can discuss an article and visit the website of the company discussed in the article etc.
   
   
3. You should send the links of the articles, the sites you intend to visit and the presentation at least a couple of days before the presentation.
   

Group Project Guidelines

This is a guideline to get you running with your blog project. We will follow up in a couple of weeks with more specifics (i.e. what part of the grade is associated with which tasks etc.) This should help you continue to move in the right direction.

You will be graded on your blog, and the criteria will include:

• The focus and quality of your entries, and the frequency of entries (1 per week is a minimum)
  
  
• relevant links within your entries and included in your blog template. These links will include related resources, related blogs (from outside this class), other bloggers from your group etc.
  
  
• community you develop. this will be measured by the quality of your comments, and the 'traffic' you can generate (if you include sitemeter or similar so this can be measured.) We will cover more about developing community on your blog as the semester unfolds, but suffice it to say identifying and linking to other related blogs is a first step.
  
  
• your bloglines subscriptions will also be reviewed, minimum suscription = this class and your group members. we will look at other resources to which you are subscribed.
  

You will be graded as part of your group, and the criteria will include your participation in other group members' blogs (and class memebers' blogs). This can be satisfied in 3 ways:

1. your thoughtful (value adding) comments on your group membersblogs
   
   
2. your support to help your group members make their blogs as good as they can be (i.e offering technical / design support when appropriate). We will survey you at the end of the semester to determine your level of support in this area.
   
   
3. your thoughtful (value adding) comments on non-group member blogs (but blogs of real interest to you) will also be evaluated for this part of the grade. You should link to these blogs from your blog.
   

What should you be doing at this stage ?

1. have your blog set up (and linked to this blog).
   
2. first post accomplished.
   
3. links to outside resources (either within a post or / and on the template.
   
4. set up an account on bloglines.
   
5. subscribe to your group members blogs (need to e-mail each other what the URLs are OR get them directly from the class site)
   
6. subscribe to the class blog.
   

Check your comments: Confirm I am subscribed to your blog!

Make sure to check and respond to your comments. I will be making comments over the next week or so, offering some suggestions on 'improvements' to blogs. I will access your blog when i see an update from bloglines so please make sure your blog is listed on my list of subscriptions: http://www.bloglines.com/public/alexbrown.

I have already visited about 4 blogs this AM (that were updated on bloglines) and I am _very_ impressed with what I am seeing, and I left a comment on each blog.

Dell Case pushed back to Wednesday March 9: Chapts. 6 and 7 Moved

As was correctly pointed out in class, I had not given you the necessary 2 week lead time for the Dell case. This has then been pushed back to Wednesday, March 9.

Chapter 6 will now be Wednesday, March 2 and Chapter 7 will be Monday March 7. For those groups planning to present the impacted chapters, if you are not able to do so given the new schedule, please e-mail me and include which chapter you would prefer.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Cheers, alex

February 23 Class Notes

The following are the slides for class.

Some of the links referenced in the chapter:

• HotHotHot.com
  
• Amazon.com
  
• Amazon Profit Misses Forecast, Shares Dip
  
• EBay profit jumps 44% but misses estimates
  
• Napster sees profit – from sold-off Roxio
  
• Profit from Peer-to-Peer
  
• British e-tailer Boo.com calls it quits
  
• Webvan checks out
  
• The Truth about Internet Business Models
  
• Not Half.com
  
• Buy.com (annual financials)
  
• archive.org (note, very COOL site)
  
• Decoding Web Services
  
• Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary
  
• Business Models of the Web
  
• About.com
  
• iVillage
  
• L.L.Bean
  
• charlesschwab
  
• Was boo.com!
  
• Napster
  
• Free Riding on Gnutella
  
  
  

Creating links to outside resources

To be completed by monday, February 28 class (a post that links to another site, and links included in your template).

Your blog should include posts that include relevant links to other resources, or issues about which you are blogging (i.e. if your blog is a 'movie review' blog, and you are writing about a particular movie, when you mention the movie you should link directly to its web-site (assuming it has one).

Your blog should also include relevant links that are included in the template (so they appear permanently in the left hand, or right hand column (depending on your particular blog design.)) For this blog, they all appear in the left hand column. I will demonstrate this in today's class.

But to get you started, how do you hyperlink to another web resource ?

Easy!


To include a link to this Site from your blog, simply change this blog reference from:

Information Technology Applications in Marketing (My favourite Class)



to

<A HREF="http://buad477.blogspot.com">Information Technology Applications in Marketing (My favourite Class)</A>


Note: It is not important to know what <A HREF means, nor do you need to remember, whenever you need to create a hyperlink, you can simply view source on a document that contains a hyperlink ... and that is why writing html is not complex!

Note: when creating a 'post' for your blog (and if using blogspot)
select: edit HTML option

Any questions ? Use the comments area.

Class Blog Examples

Japanese Kaizan. Nice addition of links, not only in the first entry, but also in the template on the left hand column to relevant resources.

UD Relay For Life. This blog will actually be used by the UD Relay for Life 'team'. It already advertises a meeting to be held next tuesday.

Feel free to ask any questions in the comments below. Happy blogging!

More on blogging

The following articles will give you some additional insight into the use, and potential dangers, of blogging from the bloggers' as well as the entities' perspective. I'll plan to discuss these a little on monday so please review the articles (and respective blogs) beforehand. (also feel free to use the comments option to post your thoughts).

SLU attempts to silence a controversial blog, and the blog in question: TAKE BACK OUR CAMPUS! Thought this was interesting given we are an academic institution!

Chief humanising officer, and the blog in question: Scobleizer. Putting a human face on the often criticized Microsoft.

Have a blog, lose your job?, and the blog in question: ninetyninezeros (i think). Note the irony with this story ?

HBS Article (Evans and Wurster)

to be reviewed for monday has been put on reserve at the library. You can go the library and make a hardcopy of the article for reading. We have also been working with the library to put the article on electronic reserve. The four digit password is 8801.

February 16 Class Notes

The following are the slides for class.

Some of the links referenced in the chapter:

• Cendian (was ShipChem.com)
  
• Herman Miller
  
• A Tale of Two Planners
  
• Reinventing Herman Miller
  
• How the Internet Can Boost Your Brand
  
• Nissan Wants to be Like Dell
  
• Stephen King
  
• Dell
  
• Seeking the Deeper Path to E-Success
  
• Bar Codes in a Chip
  
• FedEx
  
• Nestle Taps SAP for E-Business
  
• Decoding Web Services
  
• What Are Web Service, Anyway?
  
• Value-Chain Report
  
  

Webvan: it was all wrong!

I was a little 'surprised' that no one in the two classes seemed to have heard of Webvan which is, in my opinion, the poster child for what was all wrong with internet investment in the late 1990s. Anyway, from the google search WEBVAN interesting links include: Wikipedia definition: Webvan and Wired: Why Webvan Drove Off a Cliff.

February 14 Class Notes

The following are the slides for the February 14 class.

Some of the Links referenced from the Text:

• As We May Think (Vannevar Bush)
  
• Hobbes' Internet Timeline
  
• History of ARPANET
  
• History of HTML
  
• Sabre
  
• Travelocity
  
• Marketing in Hypermedia Computer_mediated Environments: Conceptual Foundations
  
• Drugstore.com
  
• The 10 Driving Principles of the New Economy
  
• Ebay
  
• Tesco
  
• FindMRO
  
• Onstar
  
• Priceline (biddingfortravel.com)
  
• Edmunds
  
• What Do People Want Online?
  
• iPrint.com
  
• Cyberatlas
  
• EPIC: 2014
  

Additional Reading.
For additional resources you can also access:

• Introduction of WWW
  
• Aspects of WWW as a Medium
  
• Markets, Pricing Models and Digital Economics
  

Bloglines Subscription: Make it public

For your bloglines subscription, please make it public. This will enable other students (and teachers) to view your subscriptions and also help me know you are subscribed to our class. While doing this you can select individual subscriptions to remain private (if you are concerned, and do not want to share one or two of your choices)!

To make your subscription public:

click on the 'share' tab (from one of the horizontal labels)
add a username (under the "Blogrolls" header)

save it.

that should do it. it does not 'activate' straightaway, but works. you can test it by using the URL: http://www.bloglines.com/public/alexbrown (replacing alexbrown with your username)

cheers, alex

What's a blog ?

To help those still puzzled by the idea of what a blog really is, check out What the Blog?” Yvonne DiVita found at Diva Marketing via my Bloglines subscription!

Tasks to complete by class 2/14

Just a reminder, the following tasks should be complete by monday:

a. e-mail alex@udel.edu your team
b. e-mail alex@udel.eduyour blog theme for approval
c. sign up for an account on http://www.bloglines.com
d. subscribe to this blog via bloglines
e. complete and return the personal data form (you can bring this to monday's class)
f. READ the syllabus carefully

(note, all e-mail communications to alex must include buad477 in the subject header).

Additional things to begin:

a. once the blog theme is approved, sign up for your (very easy to use) http://www.blogger.com account (or other blogware account if you choose).

cheers, alex

Class Project

Each student is required to create a 'blog' around an approved theme (approved theme, such as: my hometown; my sports team; conflict in iraq; a country; etc. Note: Be passionate about your theme!) Please e-mail your theme idea to alex 'at' udel 'dot' edu You are advised to use http://www.blogger.com as your blog platform as it is free, easy and hosted.

Each team member is required to subscribe to each team members' blogs, and this blog (via a news aggregator: bloglines). (You must use bloglines for this part of the project.

Thus each blog needs an RSS feed. For those blogs created by blogger, and therefore on the blogspot domain, the URL of the feed will be in the format:

http://yourname.blogspot.com/atom.xml (for example, this class' feed is http://buad477.blogspot.com/atom.xml).

Each team member is required to 'comment' 10 times throughout the semester on each team members' blog entries. Comments are to be thoughtful responses to the entries posted by the blogger. Each blog must contain at least one new entry per week (although you are not limited to only one entry of course). Each blogger is also responsible for responding to the comments posted by classmates (and others who may comment).

There will be certain 'design' criteria for each blog, i.e. link to each
team members' blog, link to other other theme-related blogs etc. These 'assignments' will be articulated using this blog, with updated entries titled: Blog Project: X (where X is replaced with a relevant title such as Make all your H2 tags green).

Welcome to the Class Blog

This blog is designed for BUAD477, Information Technology Applications in Marketing. This site will serve as a resource, and to manage the student blog projects.

To subscribe to this blog you will need to:

a. sign up for an account on bloglines
b. subscribe to the feed: http://buad477.blogspot.com/atom.xml

This is a requirement for this course.