Business Models

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Business models, lets just say there are alot of business models out there and although a business model, is a business model, is a business model, it is fair to say that with some creativity some of the more boring business models have come into their own with the introduction of the web.

There are many effective business models. Below will outline 9 of them. 

1. Brokerage: Put simply a broker brings buyers and sellers together, with little interaction during the actual transaction. A good example of this is Ebay. Ebay provide the forum with which to start the conversation between the buyer and the seller.

2. Merchant model: A merchant  is a wholesaler or retailer that invests in an inventory of goods and takes a gamble that he or she can on sell them down stream at a profit. A good example of this is WWW. Amazon.com. with the largest inventory of goods worldwide ( I believe this to be true, I think Michael Rappa told me) I heard a funny stat that said when Amazon.com went public, their inventory was large enough to fill six football fields. I wonder what it is now?

3. Advertising: Advertising on the web was met with a level of trepidation in the early days, now however we see it saturates every sight we visit. Being able to gain valuable information from click through figures ( The amount of people that click on a link, how long they stay on a site for, where they go after) a virtual paper trail can be created by following one click of a mouse.

4. Subscription model: Subscriptions, a situation where the user pays a one of monthly fee for goods or services has become a popular method, in particular with software. Most commonly we pay a monthly or quarterly fee for our computer to be protected from viruses. An email is dispatched just before the subscription end date to prompt you to top up or renew your subscription. One quite unique example of this is Barham Avocados.( www.barhamavocados.com.au). While Avocados are in season, you can subscribe to have a box delivered to your door monthly. The avo's are at differing stages of ripeness to ensure they are ready throughout the month. I think this is an incredibly innovative way for a farmer to do business and a clear example of where time poor consumers are headed.

5. Informediary: Is a  site that stores and manages information and controls how much of that information can be accessed. Yahoo is a good example of an Informediary website.

6. Manufacturer:  This is a situation where the manufacturer deals directly with the consumer, flattening the chain of command and in turn simplifying the process. This interaction in the long term helps the manufacturer to know exactly what their customer wants and gives them the opportunity to change depending on the demands of their customer.

7. Affiliate Model: Affliates. We referred to the click through earlier and with an affliate program, this is where the click through comes into it's own. Basically the affliate model sees advertisments on other companies websites,with relevent or complimentary information enticing the consumer to click  and be taken to a product or service that they may require. I feel this is the way of the future and as frustrating as it is as a consumer to be targeted in this way, there have certainly been times where I have been the sucker and clicked on a relevent "Affiliate" link.

8. Community Model: This is an intersting one. The idea that you create content, be it code for websites, advertising for tv or radio or textual information for people to share and tac onto this some advertising and in turn create revenue from alternative streams.

9. Utility Model: The utility model has been used in the power and telephony industries for many years, however it has found a slight resurgence online with the introduction of paid time for information used or intenet usage.

Collaberative Consumption

I'll be honest by this stage of the blog I am feeling a little bogged down with all the details. I have made some in roads into our next topic The Global information technology Report. and it is arduos reading. so when I took a break, grabbed a cuppa and put on my head phones, the break through to collaberative consumption was a welcome break.

I love this concept and have utilised it in a number of ways. I live in Daylesford, for some people living in Victoria, I have heard the words " Oh you live in Daylesford, you must be a hippy".  Sure there are a number of alternative thinking individuals but not all and it is actually those individuals that bring a really interesting and welcoming energy to the town. The reason I give this background is that we  have a site on Facebook called Junked up and the premise is to decrease landfill. 

https://www.facebook.com/groups/507353539346279/ . This has been a great forum for not only moving things on you don't need but also to interact as a community.

I have friends that regularly engage in house swapping and have never encountered any negative experiences.

For me I think the next big thing is going to be ethical consumption. There is already "Thankyou water" where a % of money from the purchase goes to creating safe drinking water in developing nations (www.thankyou.co). There is toilet paper that sales go to creating toilets. I think going forward we all will expect a product for our charity dollar and make that "Feel good" factor remain for longer than just the time it takes to donate. Every drink of water, every trip to the loo, we will be filled with positive affirmation, that we are changing the world, one wee at a time(http://au.whogivesacrap.org).

Now to the mind bogglingly hard core information from The Global information Technology Report. I hand wrote the figures from each graph on a notepad before I realised there were some very user friendly individual country break downs, giving me all the info I required for the following questions. lets get this over and done with shall we.

Professor Soumitra Dutta from the World Economic Forum, so eloquently described The Global Information Technology Report as " A wholistic measure of how we as an economy are ready to deal with all this connectiveness"

Lets see how we stack up.

1. What is the mobile phone usage /100 population. Compare Australia, USA, China & India

2. What is internet use /100 population. Compare Australia, USA, China & India

3. Compare main strengths and weaknesses of Australia in the survey.

Our core strengths ranking us in the top ten nations out of 142 include infrastructure & digital content, government usage and social impacts. We are just out of the top 10 at 12 for the environmental sub index and have an overall ranking of 17 out of 142. Our primary weakness in the Global Information Technology Report is that of affordability. In the area of affordability we come in at 100th with countries including India (1), china (42) and the United states (10) far surpassing us. 

4. What does the survey suggest to you about the information technology readiness of Australian business compared to Australian consumers.

It is really interesting to see how we compare to other countries. Who would have though India would come in at number 1!

I think consumers in Australia are champing at the bit to use information technology to its maximum ability. I will watch with interest to see if the affordability factor comes down in the coming years with the introduction of the NBN in which ever guise it takes.

References

http://www.newyorker.com/

http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/

 www.barhamavocados.com.a

http://au.whogivesacrap.org/

www.thankyou.co