Technology and Market Structure of Virtual Network Games

By: David ZHENG

We cannot see the future, of course, but there are a number of technological innovations that are relevant to gaming, that are also fairly easy to see coming. Currently, access to gaming involves some sort of access to computing technology, and access to gaming that can earn money involves access to a shared, persistent, physical computing environment, specifically a virtual world . The technology supporting virtual worlds is advancing so quickly that it would be foolish to describe the next generation in any detail. Suffice it to say that there are large, lucrative industries working energetically on different dimensions of the environment that virtual worlds thrive in.

These industries produce three items of interest, namely, connections, interface and content. Developments in connections include the internet and, increasingly, wireless communications. Development of interfaces includes voice command, head-up displays and body motion detection (computer-controlling gloves, gaze readers). Developments in content include the supply side of the market for games, where annual revenues have grown beyond Hollywood box office revenues. All three industries are expanding at a rapid rate. Whatever emotional experiences people seek, it may become possible, in the near future, to effortlessly connect to a virtual world that provides that experience at fairly low cost. Kurzweil argues that the explosion of computing power alone may be sufficient to change the daily course of life.

Since these developments all involve networks, they may seem to suggest a monopolistic market structure. If economic life online involves getting your email and hanging around with friends, there will be positive externalities with respect to the sheer size of the virtual world one visits. If I spend my time on Rubi-Ka, while you spend your time in Albion, we cannot talk to one another, and we cannot do things together. Thus, our time in virtual worlds is more valuable if everyone we know is in the same world. Moreover, if two worlds compete and one has more players than another, wouldn't everyone have an incentive to join the larger world, so as to enjoy the larger network of society, communication and entertainment that it affords? Might such network externalities lead to a domination of this market by one player?For example,some network games such as lotro gold,runescape gold,guild wars gold etc.

There are reasons to expect, however, that this market is not likely to be monopolized. First, there seems to be a great diversity of tastes for the different features of a world. Mr. Bird may want to be on Pluto, while Mr. Castronova prefers medieval Britain. One of the major attractions of life mediated by avatars is the anonymity it affords, and anonymity requires a person to have exit options: other worlds to escape to if one's reputation in this one gets unpleasant. Perhaps a savvy game developer could make a world so large and varied as to provide the essential minimum level of entertainment and anonymity to a sufficiently large number of people, so that membership in that one world becomes optimal for all. This seems unlikely, however, given that there is a marginal cost to creating and maintaining game content. Moreover, there are no economies of scale on the supply side to match the increasing returns on the demand side (Liebowitz and Margolis, 1994). Production of game content and its maintenance are both labour-intensive activities. One could perhaps increase production of content by allowing other producers (say, by opening game code to the public), but continued control of the world being created would be problematic. On the whole, it seems very unlikely that one developer could produce a world big enough to monopolize the market.

A second reason involves congestion. Virtual worlds are virtual because they are online, but they are worlds because there is some physicality to them. Avatars take up space. If a world has a certain amount of entertaining content in it, that content will almost always be subject to some kind of congestion effect. The cool monsters are in the Dungeon of Befallen, but if tens of thousands of us go there to hunt them, none of us will have a good time. Sometimes the only way to reduce congestion is to add content, but this, again, is labour intensive. There will also be congestion effects related to connection speeds and bandwidth.

A third reason that the market will probably not be dominated by a few companies can be found in the many competitive strategies that are available even now, but have not yet been exploited by new entrants. For example, the current set of developers have managed to impose huge switching costs on players by structuring gameplay around the time-intensive development of avatar capital. A player starts the game with a weak avatar, but gameplay gives the avatar ever-increasing powers. As power increases, the avatar is able to take more advantage of the game world, to travel farther, do more things, see more people. A person with a high-level avatar then faces a high hurdle in switching games, because in the new game he will start out poor, defenceless and alone again. This situation definitely locks in the game's player base, but it is also open to defeat by any number of schemes to reduce the switching costs. Surprisingly, no competitor to a current game has offered new players the opportunity to start their avatars at a higher level of wealth and ability if they can provide evidence of a high level avatar in another game. On the other hand, two games (Ultima Online and Dark Ages of Camelot) now offer methods to effectively start out ahead: in Ultima, you can directly buy your levels; in Camelot, you can start a new avatar at level 20 if you have already gotten one to level 50. These strategies help companies discourage the buying and selling of avatars outside the game, perhaps at a cost to the atmosphere within the world. In sum, what appear to be strong lock-ins and switching costs in the game market today may not be as strong as they seem; when savvy competitors appear, the player bases will generally be at risk. For example,some network games such as lotro gold,runescape gold,guild wars gold etc.

A final argument against a monopolization tendency comes from the nature of the content itself. Games are art, for the most part, and markets for artistic output exhibit a great deal of churn due to herding effects and the star phenomenon (MacDonald, 1988). If a company designs a better game, it will attract players. And while it is true that development costs can be significant, it will always be possible to produce a fun virtual world for a tiny amount of money and then scale it up as it becomes more popular.Whatever network externalities, supply-side returns to scale, and barriers to entry may exist in the market for virtual worlds, they seem insufficient to produce domination by a single company. The distribution of populations in virtual worlds is perhaps less like a natural monopoly market than a club goods market. Populations will sort according to the services, ambience, and fees of the various worlds. Virtual worlds will compete, as clubs do, but their size will be limited by congestion effects and by the marginal cost of increasing the scale of the world.

This analysis allows a tentative answer to the first question of the study: in the medium-term future, the online multiplayer gaming market will probably consist of a number of large, densely populated worlds, with varying degrees of portability between them. The worlds will generate large revenue streams and will occupy many hours of human time, some of it considered play, some of it considered work. The hours that people devote to games will result in the accumulation of stocks of digital capital goods. These objects will have considerable economic value. Given the expected growth in connectivity, interface technologies and content, there is reason to believe that this digital capital stock may eventually become quite large.

These considerations then lead to the next set of questions: If virtual worlds do become more important, how will this affect the real Earth economy?

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7 Winning Search Engine Optimization Tactics

By: Lee Kendrick

Search engine optimization should always be considered long before your website structure, colors, layout, and overall site design. But, the majority of people usually get caught up "in the moment"… thinking of riches instead of "how" they're going to attract more website visitors. This article is meant to get you back on track, and provide you with 5 winning search engine optimization tactics.

Identify Keywords

1. The single biggest mistake that most business owners make is trying to think of a "cool name" for their website, when they should have chosen a keyword-rich site name like 'prevent-corporate-bankruptcy.com' instead of SmithLawOffice.com' (as an example). Your potential customers search for keyword phrases… not business names… unless you're already a household name like Wal-Mart, eBay or Apple. Facing reality, many business owners gave up on websites ever helping their business a long time ago… usually because of a poor website name choice. And, it doesn't have to be this way.

Simply, discover what terms people are searching for. Identify the "action" keywords and phrases that people are actually using when they are searching Google, Yahoo, MSN or any of the other major search engines. I highly recommend looking for keyword phrases that incorporate the following keywords: buy, want, need, order, download, etc. I'm sure you're getting the idea now. Then, you need to purchase website names that are centered around the most popular keyword phrases. And, redirect these visitors to your current website. And, I promise that you can setup a website redirect in less than one minute… even if computers scare you. You just need to have access to your website hosting interface, with cPanel being the most popular choice.

Optimizing Your Web Page

2. After identifying a minimum of 10 keyword phrases, I recommend optimizing your current website pages' title tags, meta tags, image "alt" tags. You need to start using these keywords within your webpage content in bold text, underlined text, and as text links. Do not overuse these keywords though. These keywords should only comprise 4-6% of each page. So, if you have 500 words on a webpage, limit your keyword usage to 20-30 words. Most of the major search engines index every word of your page and compare them to your title META description and META keywords. So, you should never hide or add non-related keywords to your webpages: like Anna Kournakova, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, etc. This is a "black hat" tactic and should never be used, unless your want your website to be permanently banned by the search engine directories.

Most of the major search engines don't even consider the META keywords anymore, which is why the actual content of your webpages is becoming more and more important. Excessive repeating of keywords is considered as spamming, which will get your website penalized with a lower ranking. And, be sure mix your keywords in different combinations throughout the page and in your ALT tags, instead of using the same phrase over and over again.

Link Popularity

3. One of the most important factors to achieve a high ranking in the search engines is link popularity. The overall number of links to your web site is important, but the quality of the links are even more important. All the search engines are very fond of "on topic" links. Links from sites that contain your same keyword content and are focusing on the same topic as your site, are known as "on topic" links. Three of the best ways to get "on topic" quality backlinks are to comment on other industry-related blogs, make comments in industry-related forums, and to submit articles to article directories. Just make sure that you're adding comments or articles to high pagerank sites, avoiding low page rank sites.

Misspellings

4. Adding misspelled keywords within your META tags can also boost your website traffic, because many people are likely to misspell your keywords when browsing the search engine directories. As an example, here are several popular misspellings I found people making when they searched for a site submission service, as follows: "free search engine submision", "sumit", "subit", "search egnine submission", "submition", and "saerchengines".

Add Fresh Content

5. Adding fresh content to your website on a regular basis is another key factor that plays a critical role in your search engine rankings. Adding new content regularly gives your visitors a reason to come back. Search engine robots will also visit your website more often, once they notice that you update regularly. This is one of the main reasons why WordPress blogs are so popular right now. When visitors leave comments about blog posts you have made, the search engine bots see this as new content. And, it really helps your site rankings when a visitor makes a comment with a permalink back to their high pagerank site. This helps website owners save time, by allowing website visitors to create content for them.

Don't Kill the Search Engine Crawlers

Avoid using flash intro pages where it says "Click Here to Enter Site", because the search engines have a very difficult time indexing (seeing) anything beyond the intro page… unless you've submitted every webpage of your site to the search engine directories manually, which is very time consuming. Even if you use the alt attribute to specify alternate text for flash images, that text will not be anywhere near as important as real text on a main index page.

Provide Relevant Title Tags

7. Making your page titles simple, descriptive, relevant and "keyword rich" makes it easier for search engines to know what each page is about. Keyword rich titles help the search engine directories provide consumers with more relevant search results, helping them determine whether your website contains what they are trying to find. The title description is the most important element of your website design, after you have chosen your website domain name.

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Recession Proof Your Business - Get Bigger Profits

By: Ted Cantu

WARNING: Dumb Marketing can wipe out your business! Ex-Art director saves you money, time and tears of misfortune! Learn the ropes of how to strategize your online business.

It’s amazing the amount of BAD marketing that I run into along the rocky road to financial freedom. There are many false gurus, shaman, and magic gizmo sellers from every walk of life. I am offered everything from snake oil to the “one in a life time chance to meet Bruce Springsteen”. I am not even a Bruce Springsteen fan, (I only know a handful of his songs).

But anyways I am getting WAY off track.

HOW DO YOU RECESSION PROOF YOUR BUSINESS?

Before I fork over the “Golden Ticket” I think its important that you know the difference between a successful business and one that sucks the life out of you. Many entrepreneurs think they have a cash pumping business but in actually it is the cash that gets PUMPED OUT OF THEM! In short, they have a very expensive hobby.

The BIG QUESTION is….. (drumroll please)

What Creates A Recession?

I’m sure you got a text book answer. I can think of several myself. One of the things that comes to mind is that you have a disastrous guy in charge somewhere who calls all the shots. He does a shoddy job at best but still has the ear of the boss. As far as the man in charge he takes his cues from another era where the marketing made little sense then as well. He likes expensive advertising and has convinced himself that this stuff actually works.

I am talking about advertising in things like radio and television. You could get away with that stuff in the 1960’s back when you only had three networks, ABC, CBS and NBC. But now you got 900 digital channels, pay per view, HBO1, HBO2 and well you get the idea. Lets not forget the multitude of digital radio stations too. Getting someone’s attention now is going to be a heck of a lot harder than you thought.

How do you break through the CRUD?

When you need leaders you need people who can think on their feet. It’s a good idea to get someone who can actually push your vehicle out of the mud.

This means trimming the fat. You have to cut the ties with outdated thinking and things that will bleed your account dry, (television and radio being just the beginning). Your business could be in the dumpster because of outdated thinking.

Here are just a few things that could help you elevate your position in wealth.

1. Getting more of your business into ongoing profit generating systems.

2. Automating all of your sales pitches online.

3. Automate the way you accept payment for just about everything you do.

4. Find new ways to create streams of outgoing information without being on the phone.

5. Creating ways of making money and eliminating as much “face time” as possible.

Its not that I want you to stop liking people as a whole. On the contrary I am looking out for you. That is we have to take care of the boss – namely – YOU. And you cannot do that if you are running around all over town meeting with everyone who calls you on a whim.

I got a rule of thumb about this entire prospecting thing. I rarely ever meet with anyone in person unless I am sure they are going to be worth my time. I try to take care of this through online technology as much as possible.

The Power Of Automation

I set up roadblocks when I can. I try to create an online outlet for my prospect to get more information before they actually pick up the phone and contact me. I do not want to be on the phone all day although that sometimes happens. My prospects usually find a pre-recorded “movie” that explains my services to them in some form.

This really works wonders if you are dealing with people who are in a recession frame of mind. If they are normally close minded to new ideas and new thinking then putting your presentation on autopilot on the web — works! In fact it can work so well that it will create two dynamics for your business.

1. People will disqualify themselves and not bother calling you in the first place.

2. People will qualify themselves and call you with check in hand, (I’m serious)

You can set up all of your marketing on auto pilot. I record all of my online sales pitches. I accept FAXES online morning, day, noon and night. I have online web sites that accept payment and deposit them straight into my bank accounts. I run all of my presentations on my many web sites and blogs I have out there in cyberspace. And boy do I get the leads and jobs. I get stuff from all over the country from cities I have never been to.

This stuff really works.

What Business Are You In?

Remember what business you are in. You are in business to primarily MARKET your business. It’s not to learn the latest tricks in .NET development, SEO, cosmetic dentistry, even though you should be competent in the thing you specialize in. Your real skill as a businessman is to know how to market your services and how to land customers. If you don’t have that then you cannot do too much. You need to perfect this stream of steady leads day in and day out.

I recommend duplicating this format whenever you can. It may take a while to get this to work for you but it can be built. The idea here is to create pages that support every profit leg of your business. You have to prime the pump to get this going. Once it is built you can enjoy a day off now and then.

Who knows – maybe you can even take a nap. If you are a full time entrepreneur no doubt you deserve one.

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Benefits Of One Way Link Building Services

By: Derek Rogers

How can one way link building services help you and your business? In the world of internet marketing you probably already know by now that it is a tough and very competitive world out there. There are millions of websites, literally, and each one of them are trying to get customers just as you are. While not all are trying to get the same customers as you are, they are all trying to get customers. Now, your customer base will be a competitive field as well. You have other competition and they do want the same customers.

What can you do? There is a method called search engine optimization. This method is a host of techniques that work together to boost your ranking on the search engine and get your website noticed by your customer base, people searching for your keyword. Now, the problem is that other websites are trying for good ranking on the same keyword, at the same time. They too are trying to implement a good search engine optimization plan.

One method of search engine optimization is using one way link building services. Google uses many different elements to determine page rank. Links are extremely important to Google and the more links you have pointing to your website the better off you are. However, it is not always as easy as that. One way links are very difficult to get and maintain.

There are certain criteria that need to be met. First, these links must be of high quality. The links cannot be placed on link farms; this can actually hurt your page rank. The higher the quality of the page your link sits on, the better it is for your ranking. The links must also be from different websites. This means that each website your link is on, must come from an IP address different from all of the others.

Furthermore, the links must be permanent and one way. At one point in time, reciprocal links were the most common. You link to an important website and they link back to you. However, now a days more importance is placed on one way links than any other type.

Because this is hard to achieve, you can take many advantages of one way link building services. These services are offered by individuals or companies that are experienced in building one way links. They have access to websites that are high quality and accept one way links. Using these services can get your links on websites with high ranks on Google, which is ultimately important.

Provided that you use one way link building services that are reputable and experienced, you will find that your own rank increases and your customers have a better ability to find you and your services. One way links are just one method of search engine optimization that can help increase your popularity in the search engines and ultimately increase your traffic, sales, and income all at the same time, which is important to any business.

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Did I Choose The Most Cost Effective Porteble Computer ?

By: David Burton

Did I choose the best laptop ?

Keys to choosing the best laptop computer :

Who is theportable computer user? When choosing a laptop computer, it is important to understand who will be using it.., school student, college student, professional businessman ,office worker, etc.

Where will the laptop be used? For big mobile users such as college students and professionals, size, weight and battery life are very important. So when looking over the reviews and relevant specs, keep those factors in mind. The average high school student uses a laptop from room to room in their house, and have loads of access to AC power most of the time. So for these users, the factors listed above may not be as critical.

How will the laptop be used? The more mobile the user, the more durability is needed. Heavy users ie sales reps spend a great deal of time start and shutting down their laptops every day. an average large user will open and shut their laptop computer 6 times a day. Although that may not seem alot of wear and tear, there is also the issue of general handling. Heavy users will be travelling from location to location, in and out of cars,on and off planes etc on a constant basis. This increases the likelihood of damage to the laptop computer, via dropping, bumping and banging, drink spills on the keyboard, etc….

Should I buy a service contract for my laptop? the answer is YES. When you think about carrying around a fragile piece of electronics costing $1000 or more, the price of a typical service contract is a bargain. for a relatively small price £50 per notebook computer, its worth it to for you peace of mind.

How much should I expect to pay for a laptop? It used to be hard to find a quality laptop under £600; however, this is no longer true. There are several companies with great offers, starting around £300. The options / upgrades you select have a large impact in what you can expect to pay. Having a list of what you want in a computer, such as memory, speed, hard drive size, burners, etc..will help when you go shopping. Although online notebook computer manufacturers allow a great deal of customization, the general public are easily serviced with a “off the shelf” standard notebook computer.

What Laptop Brand Should I Select? the worlds your oyster in this respect with the amount of notebook computer manufactures out there,with different colours and sizes its everyones personal choice , I myself find that toshiba have all the features which service my needs.

Laptop computer http://www.discount-notebooks.net

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Post Regularly Because…

By: Len Hutton

Keeping people interested in your blog, whether it is a business or personal blog, is key to attracting a lot of regular visitors. Many blogs have died because people have just lost interest. The main reason for the lack of interest is simply a lack of posts by the blogger. Regular, frequent posting, which will boost your blog’s ranking in search engines, is essential to the survival of any blog.

You might be asking yourself, what is frequent posting? How many blog entries should I make on a given week? How do I make frequent consistently good posts? What are the reasons for me to post frequently? In this newsletter, we will go over all of the above.

What is frequent posting?

Frequent blog posting is posting enough to keep your readers interested. Obviously, people will not want to come back to a blog that hasn’t been updated in months. They want to see consistent posting so that they know coming back to check the blog next week to see if there are more posts won’t be a waste of time.

How many blog entries should I make each week?

This is one of the tougher questions to answer. It really depends on the purpose of your blog. If it’s a personal blog, a weekly or twice weekly update is an excellent idea. A political/sports/music/religion blog should have 3-4 posts per week. Business blogs should have at least 2 posts, but preferably 4 each week.

The thing to remember is that quality counts. Posting frequently just for the sake of posting frequently tends to result in subpar posts which people won’t care about. It is important to find a balance—frequent, quality posts that won’t result in burnout on your part. Why create 4 poor quality posts each week when you could post 2 quality posts per week?

How do I create quality postings on a consistent basis?

It’s all about following a consistent pattern of writing. Maybe you’re not a natural writer and this is difficult. That’s why we’ll give you an outline to help you.

1. Pick a topic that is interesting to you and to your readers. Maybe if your blog is a personal blog, you could write about the latest happenings in Hollywood.

2. Carefully think about what you’ll write about the topic. It makes it easy to make quality blog postings if you know exactly what you’ll write. Plot out everything about the post before even beginning to write it.

3. Before writing your content, pick out some keywords that are relevant to your blog. If you naturally use keywords throughout your post, you will please search engine spiders which will get your blog ranked higher on search engines. Your visitors won’t mind the use of keywords if they are used in a tasteful way.

4. Begin writing your post. Don’t limit yourself to a particular amount of words. Just do what’s natural. And if any blog post is hard for you, just take a timeout and relax. You should be able to finish the post a bit later on, after you’ve had some time to think things through, you should be able to finish the post with no problems.

Why is frequent posting important?

Blogs are meant to be outlets for individuals or businesses. They are used to get an opinion out on something and to engage readers. Readers need to have something that makes them want to keep coming back to a blog. That something is usually quality, frequent posts.

Gaining and maintaining visitors isn’t the only reason to post often in your blog. Catching the eye of a search engine—and achieving a high ranking—is another valid reason for posting frequently. Most likely, each posting in your blog features some keywords or keyword phrases scattered throughout it. Logic says that the more natural keywords you have on a blog, the better. Thus, the more posts you make on your blog, the more keywords you have on there. And the more keywords you have, the more likely a search engine bot is to crawl your site. The more your site is crawled by bots, the more likely it is that you will have a high ranking on a search engine.

Frequent blog posting can be easy as long as the person who is posting takes the time to plot out what they’ll write about. So take a few minutes to think about your post and then just do it!

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E-Commerce Strategy Development - Online Music Case Study

By: Sam Harnett

The UK online music market is a potentially huge market. Over the last eighteen months a great number of legitimate music services like ourselves have emerged to take advantage of the new music distribution model pioneered by Napster’s Shawn Fanning in 1999. Although we currently hold 35% of the online music market, we will have to continue to develop our strategy and online practises if we want to build our market share and compete with the big international competitors, namely the iTunes network. This document is both an analysis of our current strategy and a proposal to extend it.

Analysis of current system

The strategy we have developed over the last two years centres around selling songs on a price per song basis. This is one basic strategy that all online music vendors have adopted. One of the key factors in Apple’s success was its famously low 99 cents per song price tag. Because of this, we, like many other online music providers will find it very difficult to compete in pricing. According to popular legend, Apple secured this low price by refusing to sign the terms offered by the record labels then going ahead and launching iTunes anyway, daring the record labels to pull out. Labels have repeatedly tried to renegotiate this deal to no avail. None of the labels are willing to risk pulling out of the iTunes network and losing their foothold in the paid download business. As well as ‘pay per song’ there are a number of other tactics for selling music online. One method proposed by Ken Hertz, who represents Alanis Morrissette among other recording artists, is a flat fee collective licensing system. In flat fee collective licensing customers pay a fixed subscription fee to be allowed to download as much content as they want. This income is then divided among the content providers based on the percentage uptake of their content, as opposed to the unit uptake of their content (Fisher. WW, 2004). Fisher believes this model will lead to a reduced profit per song but an increased uptake of the service. This has already been shown to be an effective business model when applied to video rental. Having been pioneered by Blockbuster with their £13.99 online video rental service it has since been adopted by Amazon and Screen Select to provide similar services. I believe this model would be successful for us as it lets customers believe that by using the service regularly they are getting good value for money. Value for money has been a sticking point for music fans for a long time. Often, many people justify using illegal services like Emule or Limewire by claiming that the cost of purchasing music legally is excessive for

the product. The main problem with this model is that it would require the content owners (the record labels) to license their work to distributors.

Review of competitor activity

Our market is currently divided among a number of legal and illegal music services. These include services like Amazon where you can order a physical copy of a music CD online, services like the new Napster where you can search and download both free and paid for music and (semi) illegal services like Emule P2P where you can download anything you want for free.

Napster:

Napster has been involved in mainstream online digital distribution of music longer than any other company, and is arguably the most famous company in the field. Napster was launched as a free music sharing facility in 1999, and faced legal battles from the outset. It was finally forced to succumb to business pressure in 2001, at which point it began the six month process of re-inventing itself as a legal service. This brings us to the Napster we see today. Napster currently offers its customers three packages, ‘Napster To Go’ for £14.95 a month, Napster Membership for £9.95 and Napster lite. ‘Napster To Go’ and Napster Membership allows customers to download as much music as they like to their Computer. ‘Napster To Go’ also allows music to be downloaded via special terminals in high street stores and internet ready televisions direct to MP3 players. Napster Lite is Napster’s basic free package. It allows customers to pay for music on a per song basis at 79p. Customers can choose what they want by listening to 30 second segments of the content before they commit to purchasing. Napster lite also allows its users to access music stored on other Napster users shared space, but this is carefully screened to prevent piracy. One flaw in the Napster system is that in order to continue using the content you download, you need to keep paying for the service. This will to lead to consumer scepticism as people won’t like the idea of being trapped in the service to keep their music collection.

iTunes Music Store:

iTunes music store opened its door for service on 28th April 2003. Its strongest asset is its seamless operation with the Apple iPod. The iPod is the most popular MP3 player currently available and like most Apple products, usability was high on its priority list during development. The existing popularity of the iPod and iTunes combined made the process of extending the commercial attributes of the system a simple task. The music content is protected with Apple’s fair play digital rights management (DRM) but there are several hacks for this which Apple has so far been unsuccessful in blocking. Since its launch the range of features it offers has continued to expand. You can now buy gift certificates, download video and special content, create your own iTunes store and upload your own music via garage band, Apple’s music production suite. By allowing their users to produce and sell their own music apple has opened the door for their service to be used in many novel ways. For example Stanford has recently started using iTunes to freely distribute special academic and promotional content centred around learning and living on campus.

P2P networks:

The P2P networks are arguably the greatest threat to our model of business. Despite frequent law suites and attempts at sabotage record labels have been unable shut them down. A peer to peer network is basically a distributed file system where the shared content on every connected computer gets grouped together into one super directory. A search facility then allows connected users to find and download what they want to their local shared directory. As content gets spread across the network it becomes more accessible to other users. From the users perspective this has the advantage of being free, but the disadvantage of being unreliable. Content is often mis-labelled or incomplete. There are a number of tactics employed by content owners to further disrupt P2P activity including suing downloader’s, distributing mis-labelled content, and distributing content that harms a downloader’s computer. Record labels have also attempted to stop piracy at the source, by preventing users from uploading their music to their computers. However, this method has proven unsuccessful as it can be easily circumvented using real time encoding software, which encodes the music straight off the microphone jack. Record labels have also been sued by consumer rights groups and had their reputations tarnished over the legality of this tactic.

Online CD sales:

Among many consumers a consensus seems to have formed that paid music comes with CD and downloaded music is free. I personally like to have something physical to own when I purchase music. For this reason online CD sales are still very popular. CDNOW, Amazon and HMV online are some of the most popular retailers for this in the UK. A CD has the advantage of being a more tangible asset than a download and is therefore better suited to being given as a present, which will make a big difference to sales over the holiday season. It also doesn’t require the same expertise to use as a downloaded track. A CD essentially works like a little metal version of a vinyl. It is self explanatory to every generation how to make a CD player play a CD where as many people, particularly in older generations don’t know how to use a computer. This gives a CD a much wider potential audience. It may be beneficial for us to also consider selling music on physical media.

E-Commerce strategy

In order to plan our future direction we need to take stock of our current position. We can do this using a SWOT analysis.

Strengths:

1) We currently hold 35% of the UK downloaded music market, in business terms this equates to a majority. This is a large base of customers who will hopefully stay with us if we can continue to extend our services to compete with those of our competitors.

2) With the help of this plan we have a number of new revenue streams that we will hopefully implement soon. These will, if implemented properly, lead to an increase in our revenue and customer base.

Weaknesses:

1) We have not attempted to compete in the international downloaded music market. It makes no sense for us to only sell to UK customers. Traditional geographic limitations don’t apply on the internet. The complication of extending our system to sell music in many currencies is small compared to the benefit of increasing our potential customer base a hundred fold.

2) We don’t yet have systems in place to deal with things like gift vouchers or coupons that could be used for promotion.

Opportunities:

1) We current only allow our customers to purchase one song at a time off us. We could also allow them to purchase whole albums or customised content off us.

2) Although iTunes has secured a much better per song price than we could, they do not currently offer a subscription service. Our second most popular competitor, Napster does offer a subscription service but their customers have to continue paying for the service to continue using the content they’ve downloaded. If we can negotiate a subscription service that doesn’t lock the customer in we will be seen as the superior service.

3) iTunes is never advertised by itself. It’s always ‘iPod + iTunes’. If we can adopt a similar music player, develop our software to work seamlessly with it and negotiate cross promotion we will be doubling our exposure and simplifying the use of our service for the customers. This would also allow us to extend our service in a similar way to ‘Napster To Go’. We could begin to sell our content in high street stores using dedicated terminals or via internet television. This would allow our customer base to grow beyond the computer literate.

Threats:

1) File sharing networks offer the same service as us for free. Attempts to close these services down have so far been mostly ineffective. Although the close of Napster in 2001 was highly publicised it was ineffective as by this point many more services with more tenable legal position had emerged.

2) Many people expect to get something tangible like a CD or DVD when they buy music. One of the major tasks that faces the downloaded music industry is convincing people of the value of an intangible asset like a computer file.

3) Our primary competitors, Napster and iTunes continue have a larger international customer base than us. They have more exposure and more assets to extend their service with. We can’t hope to compete by trying to out compete in existing models, we need to develop new methods of selling music.

4) Our primary competitor, iTunes, has negotiated excellent prices with the content providers. Without the same economies of scale on our side it will be difficult to make the same deal.

In order to build what we have achieved so far I have compiled the following list of extension to our service that we could implement in the near future:

1) Develop a subscription service – We should develop a subscription service based on flat fee collective licensing that doesn’t trap customers in the same way as Napster’s services. This will be seen as a superior product by our target audience as it allows them to get good value for money from the service.

2) Custom CD service - In order to take advantage of gift buying in the holiday season, we should provide a service where customers select a set of tracks to be put on a CD or DVD, design a cover, and maybe add a personal message. The CD will then be burned and the packaging will be printed and sent to the customer for an additional fee. Basically what I’m proposing is a professionally produced version of a mix tape. This provides an extra income for us on top of the audio track sales and gives the customer something physical to give as a present. This is a service that none of the music-download companies I have found currently offers.

3) Ally ourselves with a popular MP3 player – A big part of iTunes success is its strong links and seamless operation with the iPod. By adopting a similar MP3 player, possibly the iRiver, we could tightly integrate our software with it, negotiate cross promotion and develop special terminals to sell our content in music stores, super markets, airports, train stations or anywhere else people are likely to be in need of quick entertainment.

4) Develop our international presence – We should extend the functionality of our site to allow it to sell music in many currencies. By accepting Euros and dollars we would be extending our potential customer base to twelve European countries, America and a number of smaller countries. This is potentially ten times as many customers.

5) Host a music community – We should allow customers to upload and sell their own content, taking a percentage of the income for administration. We could get a much better percentage of income from independent artists than we could off a major label with bargaining power and experience. Some of the artists we host may well end up becoming the next big thing. This would be great advertising for our company.

6) Incorporate gift vouchers, coupons and special offers – Gift vouchers are a popular Christmas present. Coupons distributed in the music culture magazines or by email like “Buy two tracks, get one free” or “First five tracks free when you sign up” would allow people to try our service before committing to it.

7) We could extend our system to recognise the sort of music a particular customer is likely to want based on past purchases. This would allow us to promote the right content to the right users so long as they’re logged in. Amazon has a similar technology built into their website and it has prompted me to buy books and DVD’s I wouldn’t have otherwise found. People often have very specific music tastes, so once we ascertain which genres of music a customer likes it will be a simple task to predict what they will purchase in the future.

Social/legal challenges

If we are to start selling internationally how should we approach pricing? The relative value of currencies changes daily. If for instance we were to offer our subscription service for £19.99 GBP per month, at the time of writing this would exchange to $35.00 USD and €30.00 EUR. When the exchange rate changes what should our policy be about updating prices? A policy that results in a rapidly changing price scheme will confuse our customers but a policy where prices can’t change quickly could result in us offering our service for too much or too little financial return. Another option would be for us to offer our service at different prices in different countries. This would allow us to better match the pricing trends in the local music industry. However, if we choose this option there is a possibility that our customers would start signing up in the region that has the lowest prices.

In order to implement a subscription service we will first need to negotiate a collective licensing scheme with the content owners. As discussed earlier a collective licensing scheme will likely lead to a reduced profit per track downloaded but an increased uptake of the service. We therefore have to convince the content owners that this model is potentially more profitable than the current model of setting a fixed price per unit or collection of music content.

We will need to protect the rights of the content owners by incorporating anti-piracy measures. Preventing piracy is a very difficult task that no one has yet mastered. Every time a new anti-piracy measure is introduced it is usually circumvented within three months (Moser, 2001). Apple currently uses fair play digital rights management and Napster currently uses Windows Media digital rights management. Both of these systems have already been circumvented. Content owners might not want a new service to operate on a security system that’s no longer effective.

Article Source:
http://www.articlecity.com/articles/computers_and_internet/article_4094.shtml

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What CRM Software Can Do For Your Business

By: Dave Roth

CRM software can do a lot for the business that a person owns or runs and the salespeople who work in it. However, a lot of people do not realize the importance of CRM software so they do not use it. Individuals also often think that CRM software is very complicated, and so they avoid using it because they feel they will not be able to figure out how it works. If it is too hard to use, people will avoid it, and they will find other ways of keeping track of customers. These may or may not work well. Still other individuals may be concerned that CRM software is too costly for them, so they decide it is not cost-effective for their business. CRM software is the right choice for most businesses, though, because it does so much in keeping track of the clients and any issues that pertain to them.

The most important thing that CRM software can do for a business is to keep it organized. Clients and their information is a vital part of business life. Even a small business must make sure that these clients are kept organized. They must not be ignored or neglected because they were somehow lost in the shuffle of people and paperwork that takes place every day. With CRM software, though, there is much less worry about the clients and their information. This software can also help to keep client information safer and more protected. By doing this, the company is better protected from future problems. In addition, the clients often feel better about doing business with the company. Any sensitive information that is provided to the company will not be lost or compromised.

CRM software is a great tool for salespeople as well. It helps to keep them prepared every day for what they must do. Those who work in sales often spend a lot of time each day trying to make sure that they are ready for the next day. They are also concerned about forgetting clients or forgetting appointments. With CRM software, there is a much lower chance of these problems. Everything that the salesperson needs to know about the client and everything that has to be remembered can be easily stored. The only disadvantage to this method is that a salesperson may not take the time to use the system. This, however, would be the fault of the salesperson, not the fault of the software.

For most companies, CRM software is a great way to build business. Not all companies will use this software, but those that do find that their business has been improved. The interaction that salespeople have with their clients is better, and the individuals who need to be reassured that they are important to the company can get that feeling. When they get that, they want to come back. They are interested in doing business with the company, and they feel that their ideas and opinions, as well as their business, are valued.

Article Source:
http://www.articlecity.com/articles/computers_and_internet/article_4042.shtml

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The Battle of the Browsers – The History and the Future of Internet Browsers

By: Nicholas C Smith

With Internet Explorer 8 now available, can Microsoft hope to retain market dominance over fierce open source rivals such as Mozilla's Firefox or the feature packed Opera web browser. Can history give us a clue to what the future of web browsers/browsing might hold? How did Netscape Navigator go from having a dominant 89.36% market share of all web browsers in 1996 and yet only 3.76% by mid 1999?

Let us take a journey that will begin long before even the intellectual conception of Internet Explorer, that will glance at its long defeated rivals, examine the current browsers available and will end with a prediction of what the future of browsing will offer us – and which browser(s) will still be around to offer it.

People often think that Internet Explorer has been the dominant web browser since the golden age of the internet began. Well for a very long time now it has indeed been the most popular browser and at times been almost totally unrivalled. This was mainly a result of it being packaged free with Microsoft Windows, in what some would later call a brutal monopolisation attempt by Microsoft. The last few years however have heralded the arrival of new, possibly superior browsers. Mozilla's Firefox has been particularly successful at chipping away at Explorers market dominance. So where did it all begin, and why were Microsoft ever allowed to have a hundred percent market dominance?

Origins

The truth is they never did have total dominance, but at times they have come very close. Microsoft actually entered the Browser Battle quite late on. Infact a man named Neil Larson is credited to be one of the originators of internet browsers, when in 1977 he created a program – The TRS-80 - that allowed browsing between “sites” via hypertext jumps. This was a DOS program and the basis of much to come. Slowly other browsers powered by DOS and inspired by the TRS 80 were developed. Unfortunately they were often constricted by the limitations of the still fairly young internet itself.

In 1988, Peter Scott and Earle Fogel created a simple, fast browser called Hytelnet, which by 1990 offered users instant logon and access to the online catalogues of over five thousand libraries around the world – an exhilarating taste of what the internet, and web browsers, would soon be able to offer.

In 1989 the original World Wide Web was born. Using a NeXTcube computer, Tim Berners-Lee created a web browser that would change how people used the internet forever. He called his browser the WorldWideWeb(http://www., which is still likely to sound familiar to internet users today. It was a windowed browser capable of displaying simple style sheet, capable of editing sites and able to download and open any file type supported by the NeXTcube.

In 1993 the first popular graphical browser was released. Its name was Mosaic and it was created by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina. Mosaic could be run on both Unix, and very importantly, on the highly popular Microsoft Windows operating system (incidentally it could also be used on Amiga and Apple computers). It was the first browser on Windows that could display graphics/pictures on a page where there was also textual content. It is often cited as being responsible for triggering the internet boom due to it making the internet bearable for the masses. (It should be noted that the web browser Cello was the first browser to be used on Windows – but it was non graphical and made very little impact compared to Mosaic).

The Browser Wars - Netscape Navigator versus Internet Explorer

Mosaic's decline began almost as soon as Netscape Navigator was released (1994). Netscape Navigator was a browser created by Marc Andreessen, one of the men behind Mosaic and co-founder of Netscape Communications Corporation. Netscape was unrivalled in terms of features and usability at the time. For example, one major change from previous browsers was that it allowed surfers to see parts of a website before the whole site was downloaded. This meant that people did not have to wait for minutes simply to see if the site they were loading was the actual one the were after, whilst also allowing them to read information on the site as the rest of it downloaded. By 1996 Netscape had almost 90% market dominance, as shown below.

Market Share Comparisons of Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer from 1996 to 1998

………………..Netscape…….IE

October 1998……….64%………32.2%

April 1998…………70%………22.7%

October 1997……….59.67%……15.13%

April 1997…………81.13%……12.13%

October 1996……….80.45%……12.18%

April 1996…………89.36%…….3.76%

In these two years Netscape clearly dominated the internet browser market, but a new browser named Internet Explorer was quickly gaining ground on it.

Microsoft released their own browser (ironically based on the earlier Mosaic browser which was created by one of the men now running Netscape), clearly worried about Netscape's dominance. It was not so much the worry that it would have a 100% market share of internet browsers on their Windows operating system, but more the worry that browsers would soon be capable of running all types programs on them. That would mean foregoing the need for an actual operating system, or at the most only a very basic one would be needed. This in turn would mean Netscape would soon be able to dictate terms to Microsoft, and Microsoft were not going to let that happen easily. Thus in August 1995, Internet Explorer was released.

By 1999 Internet explorer had captured an 89.03% market share, whilst Netscape was down to 10.47%. How could Internet Explorer make this much ground in just two years? Well this was down to two things really. The first, and by far the most important was that Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer in with every new copy of Windows, and as Windows was used by about 90% of the computer using population it clearly gave them a huge advantage. Internet Explorer had one other ace it held over Netscape – it was much better. Netscape Navigator was stagnant and had been for some time. The only new features it ever seemed to introduce were often perceived by the public as beneficial for Netscape's parent company rather than Netscape's user base. (i.e., features that would help it monopolise the market). Explorer, on the other hand, was given much attention by Microsoft. Regular updates and excellent usability plus a hundred million dollar investment would prove too much for Netscape Explorer.

2000 – 2005

These years were fairly quiet in the Battle of the Browsers. It seemed as if Internet Explorer had won the war and that nobody could even hope to compete with it. In 2002/2003 it had attained about 95% of the market share – about the time of IE 5/6. With over 1000 people working on it and millions of dollars being poured in, few people had the resources to compete. Then again, who wanted to compete? It was clearly a volatile market, and besides that everybody was content with Internet Explorer. Or were they? Some people saw faults with IE – security issues, incompatibility issues or simply bad programming. Not only that, it was being shoved down peoples throats. There was almost no competition to keep it in line or to turn to as an alternative. Something had to change. The only people with the ability and the power to compete with Microsoft took matters into their own hands.

Netscape was now supported by AOL. A few years prior, just after they had lost the Browser Wars to Microsoft, they had released the coding for Netscape into the public domain. This meant anybody could develop their own browser using the Netscape skeleton. And people did. Epiphany, Galeon and Camino, amongst others, were born out of Netscape's ashes. However the two most popular newcomers were called Mozilla and Firefox.

Mozilla was originally an open sourced project aimed to improve the Netscape browser. Eventually it was released as Netscape Navigator 7 and then 8. Later it was released as Mozilla 1.0.

Mozilla was almost an early version on another open source browser, Firefox. With it being an open source the public were able to contribute to it - adding in what features it needed, the programming it required and the support it deserved. The problems people saw in Internet Explorer were being fixed by members of the open sourced browser community via Firefox. For instance, the many security issues IE 6 had were almost entirely fixed in the very first release of Firefox. Microsoft had another fight on their hands.

2005 – Present

Firefox was the browser that grew and grew in these years. Every year capturing an even larger market share percentage than before. More user friendly than most of its rivals along with high security levels and arguably more intelligent programming helped its popularity. With such a large programming community behind it, updates have always been regular and add on programs/features are often released. It prides itself on being the peoples browser. It currently has a 28.38% market share.

Apple computers have had their own browser since the mid 1990's – Safari - complete with its own problems, such as (until recently) the inability to run Java scripts. However most Apple users seemed happy with it and a version capable of running on Windows has been released. It has had no major competitor on Apple Macs, and as such has largely been out of the Browser Wars. It currently holds a 2.54% market share and is slowly increasing.

Internet Explorer's market share has dropped from over 90% to around 75%, and is falling. It will be interesting to see what Microsoft will attempt to regain such a high market share.

Opera currently holds 1.07%.

Mozilla itself only has a 0.6% market share these days.

The Future of Web Browsing

Web browsers come and go. It is the nature of technology (if such a term can be used), to supplant inferior software in very short periods of time. It is almost impossible for a single company to stay ahead of the competition for long. Microsoft have the advantage of being able to release IE with any Windows using PC. That covers over 90% of the market. They also have the advantage of unprecedented resources. They can compete how they wish for as long as they wish. So there is no counting IE out of the future of web browsing.

Safari is in a similar position, being easily the most popular Mac web browser. Its long term survival is dependant upon Apple and the sale of their computers.

These are the only two browsers that are almost guaranteed another five years of life, at least. Firefox may seem like another candidate, but the public is fickle, and one bad release, or if it seriously lags behind the new Internet Explorer 8 for long, could easily see its popularity quickly descend into virtual oblivion.

However, it seems likely community driven browsers, such as Mozilla and Firefox, will be the only types of browser capable of competing with the wealthy internet arm of Microsoft in the near future.

As for web browsing itself, will it change any time soon? Well it already has for some online communities. For example, if you want to buy clothes you could try entering an online 'world' creating an online virtual You to go from 'shop to shop' with, looking at products and trying/buying what you see. Some 'worlds' allow you to recreate yourself accurately including weight and height and then try on things apparel such as jeans to give you an idea of how you would look in that particular item.

Will 'worlds' like this destroy normal web browsers such as IE ? - It seems unlikely. Traditional web browsers provide such freedom and ease of access that it is hard to see any other alternative taking over. However they are part of the new, 'thinking out of the box' wave of alternatives that some people will find attractive, and really who knows what the future will bring.

Article Source:
http://www.articlecity.com/articles/computers_and_internet/article_4137.shtml

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Cisco CCNA / CCNP Certification Practice Questions: Routers, Switches, Frame Relay, And More!

By: Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933

Let’s test your knowledge of the OSI model, frame relay, and other important topics for your Cisco certification exams!

CCENT Certification:

Identify the devices that run at the bottom layer of the OSI model.

A. router

B. switch

C. hub

D. wireless access point

E. repeater

Answers: C, E. Both hubs and repeaters run at Layer 1 of the OSI model, the Physical layer.

CCNA Certification Exam:

Identify the frame relay encapsulation options.

A. Cisco (default)

B. IETF (default)

C. ANSI (default)

D. Cisco

E. IETF

F. ANSI

Answer: A, E. The encapsulation options are cisco and ietf, and cisco is the default.

CCNP Certification / BSCI Exam:

Short answer: What LSA type indicates the location of the ASBR?

Answer: Type 4 LSAs indicate the route to the ASBR.

CCNP Certification / BCMSN Exam:

Which of the following is true of the "collapsed core" design?

A. There is no dedicated core switch.

B. There is no dedicated distribution-layer switch.

C. There is no dedicated access-layer switch.

D. A single switch will handle the tasks of all three of these layers.

Answers: A, B. The term "collapsed core" refers to the middle two layers of the Cisco three-layer switching model - core and distribution - running on the same physical switches.

CCNP Certification / ISCW Exam:

Short answer: What term is given to the network attack that occurs when an intruder gathers information in preparation for a larger attack in the future?

Answer: That is a network reconnaissance attack.

CCNP Certification / ONT Exam:

Short answer: WRED uses one of what two values in order to make a decision on what traffic to drop in case of network congestion?

Answer: WRED can use the DSCP (Differentiated Services Code Point) or IP Precedence values to make this decision.

Article Source:
http://www.articlecity.com/articles/computers_and_internet/article_4058.shtml

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