Business Models  «Prev 

Personalized Content

If, for example, the visitor viewed that blue denim jacket on each of their last three visits, maybe on their next visit you want to "pop-up" a special on that jacket to get them to buy.
If your visitor always shows interest in certain jazz CDs, you might start offering content about jazz festivals in your prospect's part of the country plus information about the latest CD releases of those playing at the festival.
Personalized information can be more useful to people than generic information. However, engineering a dynamic site can produce less-than-satisfactory results if the basic structures and designs are not in place first.
Today, the startup is bringing its personalized content app to Android phones with a new app and is adding support for Google Buzz. Once you sign in with your Twitter, Facebook, Buzz, and Google Reader accounts, serve the content in your social streams in one interface. Using the company’s ‘digital intuition’ technology, you can analyze which types of content and sources you click on the most and then automatically surface similar content as you interact with the app.

Technological Foundations

The technological foundations of e-commerce are largely hidden, but they are the base on which electronic commerce is built. Kalakota and Whinston use the analogy of a traditional transportation company to describe the complexity of the network and how the different components that make up the technology infrastructure are interlinked.

  1. The network infrastructure is like the network of roads that are interconnected and are of different widths, lengths and quality, for example, the Internet, local area networks, intranets. Network infrastructures also take different forms such as telephone wires, cables, wireless technology (such as satellite or cellular technology).
  2. The publishing infrastructure (including the World Wide Web, Web servers) can be seen as the infrastructure of vehicles and warehouses, which store and transport electronic data and multimedia content along the network. Multimedia content is created using myriad tools such as HTML and JAVA. This content can be very different with varying degrees of complexity similar to different vehicles travelling on the roads. For example, text only, or more complex is an application, such as a computer game, containing audio, video, graphics and a programme.
  3. Messaging and information distribution infrastructure are the engines and fuel, which transport the data around the network. Once the multimedia content is created, there has to be a means of sending and retrieving this information, for example by EDI, e-mail, Hyper Text Transfer Protocol.
  4. Once content and data can be created, displayed and transmitted, supporting business services are necessary for facilitating the buying, selling and other transactions safely and reliably. For example, smart cards, authentication, electronic payment, directories/catalogues.