Lost in the Clouds

As cloud computing seems to get more popular (especially on a personal scope – at least for me and my peers), more and more companies are beginning to enter the market with bigger and better offerings. Box.net has recently introduced some major upgrades to its cloud service that may raise the bar of expectations across the field.

Box.net has started offering 5GB for their free accounts and even more impressive they offer an unlimited amount of space for their enterprise customers. As hard drives in personal computers continue to increase (at the same price), data centers seem to be following the trend. In an article written in Mashable, the CEO of Box.net Aaron Levie states, “It’s now possible for data centers to offer more storage for the same price.”

So what does this mean?

1. Demand – the demand seems to be present – and increasing. The needs of the consumers continue to become more reliant on online storage via cloud computing and companies like Box.net and Dropbox need to deliver.

2. Competition – now that Box.net is offering a higher storage limit, how will the competitors react? I looked at Dropbox and ZumoDrive – both offer only 2GB (seems to be the standard). As more people use cloud computing as a means of transferring and sharing data, companies may need to match each other on limits while positioning themselves elsewhere.

3. Future – I’m interested in how much bigger and better this cloud computing will get. Does this mean that everything I would ever do on a computer be ‘out there’ somewhere – and all I would need is a screen, mouse, and connection to that cloud high in the sky?

Collaborate with Social Media Tools

As discussed in class on Wednesday, online communities and collaboration have evolved over the years into now very powerful tools and resources. Mashable has posted the nominations of the “Best Social Media Management Tool” – each of which help manage social media, but also seem to further expand collaboration. Of the five tools, two stick out as important players in bridging the gap between communities and collaboration (and the measuring of its effectiveness).

CoTweet is a tool that organizes all a company’s social media accounts into one dashboard. Furthermore it allows for managers to collaborate on specific campaigns or even consumers. Coworkers can see all activity on social media and “…Can make responses more relevant as team members with certain knowledge bases can handle appropriate questions and comments from followers.” This collaboration allows for the best possible answer an interested consumer can receive with now a better potential of translating them into a sale.

HootSuite is another tool that brings together social media with collaboration. A little different than CoTweet, it focuses more on the market the company is reaching out to – providing bios, a ‘Klout’ score and links to their homepage. Upon further analysis and sharing this information among coworkers, Hootsuite is a good tool to better understand your customers, thus making better decisions of segmentation and targeting.

Although not making a whole new category in the community and collaboration timeline, these tools help understand who is talking about you, why, and how to better fit their needs.

E-Government

In Tuesday’s Montreal Gazette, an interesting article discusses the topic of e-government; they termed it as ‘e-democracy’ and go on to explain how the Internet can play a large part in a citizen’s participation in government. Integrated service delivery (ISD) is an interface through which citizens can conduct transactions on the Internet. BizPal is a Canadian ISD developed to help small and medium businesses complete forms and submit documents via the Internet.

So what does this mean to citizens and businesses? Three key benefits can clearly be identified: time, money, and accuracy. If the service time of completing a process for the government can be greatly reduced, it translates into a happier customer (or in this case – citizen). Secondly it is shown that costs incurred by the government are greatly reduced – face-to-face transactions are about $44, mail/fax are $38, telephone are $8, and online just over $1! Finally it is also shown that human errors are greatly reduced when submitting online. A vital element that wasn’t discussed is the user friendliness of these services. ISDs must offer an incredibly easy interface; if not, time, costs, and errors could once again increase causing an unhappy citizen.

The important issue of security was overlooked by the article – and should not be taken lightly. As traffic increases with these services, there will be millions of documents being transmitted electronically. This poses a huge opportunity for hackers. Sensitive material such as birth certificates, marriage licenses, social insurance numbers, and more are at risk of being stolen. Before governments get ahead of themselves with offering services to better facilitate processes, they must have a firm grip on security issues.

Web presence - worth the cost?

In this article written in The Globe and Mail on October 7, 2010, web presence – more specifically, e-commerce – among brick and mortar retailers is discussed. The major point is whether the costs (setup, staffing, maintaining, stocking inventory, copy, etc) outweigh the benefits. Some good points were covered: young shoppers expect to be able to buy online, e-commerce sparks brick and mortar sales since customers are likely to research purchases online first.

Although the costs of e-commerce can be overwhelming (and according to the article even exceed sales), I believe it is an imperative tool to compete in today’s marketplace – especially for consumer products. If the costs can be appropriately managed, and benefits measured a ROI can be planned and realized over time. However, this gets more difficult if the company doesn’t offer e-commerce, and rather just has web presence. Having experience in managing a non e-commerce website, I’ve seen the challenges of measuring ROI. It first starts with an objective of the website – if we’re not selling anything, why spend money? In many cases it’s mainly to provide contact information, hours, etc – as well as building a brand image. In our case, since the core business is selling high-end luxury jewelry, our objective is to display the products in such a fashion that it supports the brand image. Measurement is in the form of SEO tracking, web analytics, and customer (including new customers!) feedback.

Web presence – be it e-commerce or just useful information – is very important and one must understand benefits may not be seen until the mid or long-term.

Start-ups and PR

Good PR matched with good operations can send a start-up sky high. But it’s important to know what you’re getting yourself into before searching for the perfect PR plug.

The start-up venture Chocomize experienced first hand what it was like to have an incredible PR story that almost sent them beyond their capabilities. Featured in the New York Times yesterday, they explained what it was like trying to keep up with the orders resulting from a short blip about their company in Oprah’s magazine O (full article here).

One of the most crucial parts of their business (based solely online) – their server – crashed because of traffic. They were also short of employees and equipment. After a short week of panic to fill the orders, they were able to once again be in control of their operations.

Although it’s hard to predict when or if a story will be successful, start-ups must realize their full capabilities and max capacities. A similar occurrence happened with Mr. Wong’s start-up BlankLabel.com; after dealing with the situation he stated, “We should have invested more time in learning about our suppliers and their capabilities.” So it could be as simple as learning the full potential of suppliers and equipment. It’s unfortunate that Chocomize’s server crashed, but it could have been avoided through preparing it (or upgrading) for more traffic. Start-ups must be careful not to spread themselves too thin – especially when gearing up for a possible PR success story.