Team 4 Final Project Proposal

E-Commerce

Team 4

Mike

Ken

Min Siang

Final Project Proposal

November 28, 2007

 

Google Open Social

 

            Open Social is one of Google’s latest efforts. Although not a social networking platform in itself, Open Social seeks to establish a platform for developers to create applications that can be used on any social networking site that chooses to participate in the project.

 

For our final project, Team 4 proposes to do an analysis of Google’s Open Social initiative. We will begin by looking at the phenomena of social networking in general, including a description of some of the most popular social networking sites (Facebook, Friendster, MySpace), as well as who uses them and who profits from them. We will then look more deeply into what Open Social is.

 

            Next we will discuss Google’s strategy behind Open Social, as well as its possible motivations for initiating it. Was it sour grapes at failing to acquire Facebook? Or is this just another of Google’s “throw it against the wall and see what sticks” strategies? We will also examine the relationship between Open Social and its other “open” initiatives (Open Handset Alliance, Google Docs), if any actually exists.

 

            We will then look at the possible impacts that Open Social will have on social networking sites, their users, advertisers, and application developers. Will this initiative change the face of social networking? And if Google becomes the center of social networking, how will they use this position of power? Who will gain, and who are the potential losers if Google succeeds?

 

Finally, we will make some predictions about the future of social networking and of Google’s place in the social networking universe.

Team 8: Final Proposal “Pet Guardians” –When You’re Not There, We Care

Motivation and Target Market:
      People in Taiwan who call their pets daughters or sons are no longer regarded as oddities. As the nation ages and its birth rate declines, pets have become the most intimate companions for metropolitan residents. With annual per capita income over US$13,000 it is not surprising that people are lavishing time and money on companion animals. There are at least 2 million pet dogs and over 200,000 pet cats in Taiwan, according to the Council of Agriculture. It is estimated that pet owners spend at least NT$2.3 billion (US$69 million) annually on pet food, veterinary and grooming services as well as accessories. (from an article in the Taiwan Review).  In Hsinchu, many of the professionals work in the IT industry. Typically, this industry requires that professionals travel a lot on business trips. Also, the benefits of these jobs include an adequate amount of vacation time. In Taiwan, very few people have their own home with a yard. So they tend to choose housedogs rather than yard dogs. House dogs, usually special breeds, require more care and attention.
Mission Statement:
       We decided to do a “click and mortar” business that focuses on services, rather than products. This business model incorporates both online and offline presences. Click and mortar businesses have the advantages of both .com and physical stores. When a bricks and mortar firm goes online it is able to use this core competency more intensively and extensively.The business that we will make up is a pet care business that uses technology to enhance customer service to clients. The name of the business is “Pet Guardians” and the core competence of the business is to provide care for pets when the owner is away. Technology will be used for customers to monitor their pets and make schedules for their pets, as well as to get to know who is taking care of their animal while they are away. On the back end, the company will use user information to maximize the customization of their services to their clients. Also, they will monitor the progress of their performance. The website will be made using content management system (CMS) , html and VirtueMart are written in PHP and made for use in a PHP / MySQL environment. It will also involve extensive design work and attractive digital imaging. The website is intended to be very interactive and user friendly. We offer the total pet care solution for busy pet owner professionals in the Hsinchu area who take business trips, vacations, or commute. The online and physical services as follows:
Online Services:
1)      Web cam monitoring of pet
2)      Pet schedule and updates
3)      Upload pet information
4)      Upload customer information
5)      Choose a caregiver
6)      Easy online payment methods
7)      Receive online updates on the condition of your pet
Physical Services:
1)      Feeding your pet the meals of your choice
2)      Pick up your pet from your residence and take them to comfortable, spacious kennels
3)      Walking your pet
4)      Trips to the vet
5)      Shampoo
6)      Grooming
7)      Provide Toys
We will put a disclaimer that says that the company is not liable for any damage to the pet during their stay at “Pet Guardians” and have customers agree to this legal clause using a form.
Problem definition:
1)      Design and develop the proper business model to suit the website and our business
2)      How to do the personalized services for our customers and their pets?
3)      How can we earn money (even online shop and services)? What is the benefit for online environments (including Content Management System for e-commerce)?
4)      How we design our price online and physical environment?

Team 10 Final project proposal-

Praise showers Google in classrooms across the globe as everyone tries to understand how Google got where it is today, and more importantly how best to emulate Google. The democratic way Google ranks search is a simplistic yet elegant solution to the Internet and from this search algorithm Google was born. As Google’s is dominating internet search it has begun amassing a war chest to rival those of small nations. Google seems to be hitting on all cylinders, practically every announcement from the company being accompanied with a jump in the stock price. So what exactly can go wrong at Google? For our final project we want to look in detail at all the bad things that could happen at Google to derail this high flying company. To look at the other side of Google that we haven’t really looked at in class.

-         Soaring stock price will not continue forever.

n          Failure to attract new talent

n          FYIFV (Forget you I’m fully vested attitude) ‘polite’

-         How Google’s own policies have created a monster in the innovation area

n          Allowance of 20% time toward own projects, yet only able to give a green light a couple of projects

-         Privacy & Antitrust concerns related to Double-click acquisition

n          How the public will react if privacy is not protected. How homeland security is pushing privacy boundaries

-         YouTube – Viacom’s $1 Billion lawsuit, if successful will lead to multi billion dollar lawsuits from rest of the large media companies

-         Battle for search supremacy in China with a hostile government uneasy about data mining. Effects of losing the battle in China.

-         Google challenging all the internet heavyweights and how they are dealing with all of them as well as the costs of fighting protracted wars with the likes of EBay, Yahoo, Amazon, Microsoft, VMware etc… With me or against me attitude

-         Willingness to continue pursuing new products half heartedly instead of pushing deserving products more forcefully. – iGoogle, Google Finance, Froogle -> google product search

Team 6 – Project Proposal: Growing Opportunities for Online Auctions

Background:

One of the greatest potentials of electronic marketplaces is in its ability to bring together buyers and sellers with greater effectiveness and at a scale that has been unprecedented. Buyers and sellers from all over the world may participate in trading relationships without temporal or spatial constraints. Indeed, real-world examples of successful online marketplaces -such as eBay- offer over millions of items for sale at any given time for anyone, from anywhere. Internet auctions are an interesting form of transactions that introduce new possibilities to different kind of businesses; for some of them this model of managing the transactions is sometimes preferable to traditional way of online buying as the participants feel that they are controlling the price of the product.

Motivation: Recently, there has been considerable growth of online auctions activities; however, what makes merchants adopt and use this model has not been researched deeply. There is a lot of information about the potential impact of this kind of commerce on businesses and the factors that lead to its adoption. Our main motivation on elaborating this project is to identify and elaborate a list of new opportunities that arise from business models based on electronic auctions. Below there are some examples of how some organizations have been taking advantage of it:

- Introduction of radically new products: The process of marketing research is accelerated by conducting the auction on-line.

- Managing Suppliers Relationships: To have a better deal from suppliers, many businesses, particularly those in the manufacturing industries, use the electronic auction model to obtain raw materials at the lowest possible price.

- Managing Surplus Production: The Web auction has been viewed as a tool for companies that fail to move their stock on time, by doing so they can sell their products at a reasonable price without exposing themselves or their brand, since online auctions allows them to maintain their anonymity or to distribute their products in another site.

- Perishables: To cases as seasonal products that are a marketing time bomb –as time passes by their value can disappear- electronic auctions offer the fluidity needed to reach an optimal price as zero hour approaches.

In our project, we will collect and analyze information about how these new ways of managing transactions online are helping some businesses to improve their operations or even to find better ways to increase their sales without losing control over the price and image of their offerings.

Team 3 Final Project Proposal [Comparing Ebay.com vs. Mercadolibre.com]

In the e-commerce industry Ebay.com stands tall and proud, being the auction giant of the world they have been able to tap into various parts of the world. Users from Asia, Europe and North America account for Ebay’s largest market space. However, this leave the Latin American part of the world unaccounted for; where there seems to be great potential for success that keeps growing every day. With ebay.com having majority market space in the world and Latin America, with a rapidly growing online population of about 21% being online and large number of remote villages without major shopping centers, Latin America presented an unprecedented opportunity for an eBay-like site where merchants could sell goods directly to shoppers, for a fee.

As a result, Marcos Galperin started mercadolibre.com, which is now the Ebay of Latin America. One thing is for sure, that Ebay.com has had strong influence in Mercadolibre, indeed, Galperin has modeled MercadoLibre on U.S. e-commerce pioneers, especially eBay, which has been closely involved in its development for six years. Galperin says, “But we always knew that we needed to change stuff to make it work in Latin America.” EBay’s influence is clear in MercadoLibre’s design, which bears a likeness to eBay’s yellow and white site and is similarly organized. Like eBay sellers, MercadoLibre merchants deal directly with their customers via message boards and are responsible for promoting, selling, and arranging delivery.

Conclusively, there seems to be some unclear answers as to just how similar these sites are. Nevertheless, team 3 will conduct research on both sites and provide in depth analysis and comparison on both B2C sites. Looking closely at Business models, EC business strategies (market, pricing and sale strategy), market analysis, industry analysis, and more importantly: Why did Ebay.com become partners with Mercadolibre.com?

Proposal of Final Project – Comparison Between HEMiDEMi and funP (Team 12)

E-commerce Final Project Proposal

Team 12 John, Kate, Clare

“Sharing” is the key concept of Web2.0. Users not only receive the information but also give feedback and participate. In our term project, we’ll introduce two famous communities in Taiwan, the first-mover “HEMiDEMi” and the new star “FunP”, because these two website represent Web 2.0. In the first part, we’ll introduce these two communities’ background; second, we’ll introduce these two websites in detail and compare them to each other. Finally, we’ll discuss our issue and make a conclusion.

Background Introduction

Hemidemi– is the first famous bookmark website in Taiwan. You can share your bookmarks with everyone here, recommending your favorite articles and join the groups to make friends.

FunP — March, 2007, the students from NCTU created this website called FunP. It’s a homonym for the word ”fart” in Chinese. FunP is a bookmark website and a community as well, the famous function “recommends”, i.e. decides the ranking and order in the website.

Questions about HEMiDEMi and FunP

1. What is the key concept in each one of them?

2. What are the characteristics in each one of them?

3. What are the differences between HEMiDEMi and FunP in functionality?

4. What are their business models?

5. What are the traffic trends in these two websites?

6. What kinds of visitors are likely to visit these two websites? What are the visitors’ characteristic difference between these two?

Issues between HEMiDEMi and FunP

1. What innovations they can do in the future?

2. Is it legitimate to use “iframe” to bed the article from author’s webpage?

3. How to expand the market and increase the number of users?

4. Who will win in the battle? Can the market sustain both?

E-Commerce Proposal (Storefront Model) Team1

The storefront model is what many people think of when they hear the world “e-business”. This model combines transaction processing, security, online payment and information storage to enable merchants to sell their products online. To conduct storefront e-commerce, merchants need to organize online catalogs of products, take orders through their Web sites, accept payments securely, send merchandise to customers and manage customer data.

The shopping cart is an order-processing technology that allows customers to accumulate items they wish to buy as they continue to shop. It is supported by a product catalog in the form of a database located in the merchant’s server.

Nowadays, sports have become part of our daily lives. Fans develop a certain passion for a team or specific players and they are willing to buy things that show this passion, and Taiwanese people are not the exception.

In order to satisfy the needs of sports fan in Taiwan, we will come out for a business plan to sell sports apparel and equipment locally via online. Among the sports we are planning   we can mention football soccer, baseball, basketball, volleyball, swimming, tennis, ping pong and badminton.

We will limit the sell to people who are register in our database, meaning that in order to be able to buy from us, the potential customer, the visitor, will have to register with us.

Additionally, we will provide recommendations to the visitors of both new and old products together with rating for these products.

The payment methods are still not defined but for sure one of them will be credit card.

Last but not least, the text will be at the beginning in English, but in the future we will try to add some other languages.

Final project–Team 9: Andrea, Jason&JanMee

Social Network Sites: Comparison between MySpace and Facebook 

Social network sites (SNSs) are increasingly attracting the attention of academic and industry researchers intrigued by their affordances and reach. Social network sites (SNSs) such as MySpace, Facebook, Cyworld, and Bebo have attracted millions of users, many of whom have integrated these sites into their daily practices.  

As of this writing, there are hundreds of SNSs, with various technological affordances, supporting a wide range of interests and practices. While their key technological features are fairly consistent, the cultures that emerge around SNSs are varied. Most sites support the maintenance of pre-existing social networks, but others help strangers connect based on shared interests, political views, or activities. Some sites cater to diverse audiences, while others attract people based on common language or shared racial, sexual, religious, or nationality-based identities. Sites also vary in the extent to which they incorporate new information and communication tools, such as mobile connectivity, blogging, and photo/video-sharing.   

Scholars from disparate fields have examined SNSs in order to understand the practices, implications, culture, and meaning of the sites, as well as users’ engagement with them.   

As a result, we are very interested in explain the importance of the Social Sites in the World Wide Web.  Our project analyzes a wide spectrum of social network sites using various methodological techniques, theoretical traditions, and analytic approaches. We will present you the 10 top social Sites and compare the most two visited sites: MySpace and Facebook. Finally, we will try to give some ideas about the future of the Social Sites.

E-commerce project idea from team five

Our idea about the final project is to create a webpage about e-commerce in Sweden and Taiwan where we will try to compare the major e-commerce companies. We will also make a part that about “do’s and don’ts”, cultural differences and major holidays. How much information there will be on the webpage depends on how much time we will have.

Topics that we will consider to cover on our webpage:
-    Ikea
-    Asus
-    Acer
-    Volvo
-    Saab
-    TSMC
-    Ericsson
-    Benq
-    How is the e-commerce used and what are the habits in the two countries regarding the topic?

-    The Swedish “Midsommar”
-    Jul
-    Påsk
-    Kräftskiva
-    Nyår

-    Full Moon Festival
-    Chinese new year
-    Dragon boat festival
-    Ghost Festival

-    Chopsticks in the food
-    How to say cheers
-    Table manners

Google phone – Team number 10

Google phone

We can clearly know the goal of Google phone: it makes Google services more mobile and wider. Combined with mobile phone, Google service not only can be provided on internet through our personal computer but also on our cell phone at anytime. Before the idea of Google phone, we operate our computer to use G-mail, Google search, Google map, YouTube and etc. With Google phone, we can be more connected with Google services closely. Thus, Google phone make its property more unique than Apple’s i-phone.

Google phone software is open and free resource. Moreover, Google open freely from cell phone software to operation system software. Extremely, Google can have no charge for message delivery service. Relatively, Google phone can own an advantage to offer much lower price than Apple’s i-phone so that Google can attracts more users. Furthermore, Google can bring the users of the internet into the market of mobile phone. If Google get the bid of 700MHz wireless frequency spectrum, Google can predominate over the price of mobile service. Therefore, Google phone can control the whole situation in current cell phone market.

Although Google associates with cell phone-produced companies and telecommunication companies such as, Samsung, NTT-DO CO MO and etc, Google still make its effort to develop its cell phone market because the second largest telecommunication companies in America: AT&T and Verizon which they occupies for 52% in American market don’t participate in this association. Even Nokia, the largest company in the market of cell phone, has declared that Nokia don’t join in Google phone program. Google phone faces one problem: how to build its own market steadily and compete with its strong competitors.

As we all know, Google earns a profit from advertising online. With Google phone, Google can extend its coverage to cell phone users, not just only internet users. As a result, Google can develop a new advertising model on cell phone and make a significant profit. In brief, Google provides its software and don’t produce cell phone actually. Google phone give us a new thinking: software plays its important role in the market of mobile phone.

李惠菁, Bobby, 趙文瑀 and 游雅筑.