Business Innovation

Innovation is often associated with inventions of new products – like the iPod, for instance. The technology underlying the iPod is not new, nor was it original. Creative Technology was earlier than Apple Computers in coming up with the MP3 player (which the iPod really is). Apple even had to pay Creative Technology royalties for the iPod’s use of the user interface. But Apple has proved to be the more innovative of the 2. It is now a leader in the mp3 space. And I hear that the iPod Touch is pretty cool too, and it uses a total different user interface from Creative’s.

On the other hand, can we call a new way of doing things, such as the way a parcel is delivered, innovative? Of course. Who can discuss innovation without mentioning Federal Express (Fedex) providing its customers end-to-end information on its parcels as they leave the customer on its way to the  intended recipient? This is called business innovation. Read about how important this is in the business battle for supremacy.

Paying to Collect Money

Its a business problem on the web. How do you set up a web business (otherwise known as web 2.0) and collect money for the services you offer? Many do not know how to value their services, and so do not collect any money. They turn to selling online advertisements to keep the business afloat while continuing to develop and offer interesting and innovative services online. Examples are aplenty – all the free e-mail services company such as Yahoo, Google; and the ever growing social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace, to name just the biggest players in this space. There are even portals to help you start your social networking sites, such as Ning.com.

Internet businesses are also making money by charging for premium services on top of their free versions. That’s probably a good way to get people to understand, try and discover the value of the service before committing money to them. This is nothing new. It happened more than 15 years ago with the concept of Shareware – free to use software which you should pay for if you keep using it. Today, internet services ’shareware’ are proliferating. Over and above the software itself, some of these businesses are selling related services, such as increased disk space that the services runs on. Again, this model is not new as many equipment sellers of handphones, printers, etc. are selling parts and accessories to sustain their businesses.

Amidst all these diversity of business models, a company has been set up to help business charge for and collect the money, primarily those on a subscription basis. And its not Paypal. Check out Zuora. While the underlying issues in the subscription service model is not new either, having a one-stop shop to handle the collections is a good idea. Paying people to collect money for you is pretty cool – and I am not referring to the run-of-the-mill debt collectors.

See also: Social networking meets old media: Maybe the ad model can work

Power to the people

Running today’s Business Intelligence software applications can be quite a hog on hardware resources, particularly when you have millions of records to make sense of. For all the sophistication and complexity of these analytic systems – the main objective of its use is to understand the business better, or in the case of the largest supermarket chain in Singapore, it is to understand its customers better. What are they buying? Where parts of island do they come from? What is their average bill size? How often do they buy? What other buying patterns can be discerned? The answers to all these questions can help NTUC Fairprice supermarket to better target its customers through bundled offers, store layout, product mix, etc. Pretty powerful stuff.

The sophistication of these Business Analytics systems approaches those that are already in use in the Financial sector today. Well has technology trickled down to the masses.

Browser Battle, again

Interestingly, deadheat rivals in the browser market, Microsoft and Mozilla, are readying their latest browsers for release at about the same time. Mozilla’s Firefox 3 is now in beta 4 and Microsoft’s IE 8 is in beta 1. From reviews coming out of the world wide web, people are saying that FF is be faster, much faster than the current FF 2.0. IE 8, on the other hand, is more standards compliant – at least it will install with the prevailing standard specifications as default though users can turn on IE-specific renderings.

Whichever browser it is, we hope that our overall user experience improves and makes the web a more compelling platform to do our business – both personal and commercial.

Check these out:
Will IE 8 Break the Web?
Microsoft Backflips
Journey to Firefox 3
What’s new in Firefox 3
Multifirefox

IT uncovers trash

No, not your dustbin under the table. This is real trash – and IT did it! Sheesh, the next time you want to do something naughty, stay away from IT. But then again, IT is so ‘all around us’ we can’t escape. What to do? Just don’t do it!

Juicy stuff!

IT of Business

Hey, have you seen this? Click on it to read about it! This is especially if you are thinking of signing up for a business type of degree with more of an IT focus.