Companies like Amazon or Sprint are banking on customer lifetime value (CLV), a marketing formula based on the idea of spending money up front to gain customers whose loyalty will reap rewards over the long term. As many companies turn to subscription-based business models, CLV will become a larger issue.
Information is more abundant than ever. Day after day, the flood of data is growing at exponential rates. Barely ten years ago, the main issue for politics and industries, was to hold a firm grip on this daunting explosion. Today, the challenge consists in being able, in real-time, to take advantage and transform into value massive swaths of data.
The free software movement when viewed from afar remains poorly understood but on closer inspection reveals a web of surprises. Who knows that around half of all "volunteers" are actually being paid for their contributions? The frontier between commercial and non-commercial activity has become somewhat blurred and the idealized vision of a utopian community actually hides an extremely wide range of actors and entities.
The phenomenon of free has hit many businesses hard, particularly media businesses, argues Saul J. Berman, Global & Americas Leader for the IBM Strategy & Change Consulting Group. In 'Not for Free: Revenue Strategies for a New World', Berman offers lessons from successful business model innovations as well as from failures. Who pays for free content and why new models are essential for success?
The global economy is becoming increasingly interconnected, and innovative businesses are harnessing the power of this network.
When the French poet Louis Aragon wrote the line "the weight of the future pushes each present moment back to but a memory", its application to either the internet or management would never have entered his mind. And yet, the words of the great poet resonate for the contemporary challenge of information technology in enterprise.
Nearly 40 years ago, telecommuting looked like an unstoppable trend. Today, it still does. Why is this revolution taking so long and what will the future of work look like when it finally arrives?
The revolution in Tunisia and the toppling of Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak resemble any number of prior upheavals, except for one thing - the role played by social media. Facebook, in particular, which once seemed just a high-tech way for teenagers to waste time, is now emerging as an important political tool. Why has social media been so useful to the protesters in North Africa? How will it be applied next? Will it really change the world?
Wikipedia just turned 10. The largest reference work ever produced, the Web site makes vast amounts of knowledge available to everyone that was once available to just a few scholars in major university libraries. But some thinkers say the volunteer-written encyclopedia is itself a sign of something still more important: the rise of social production.
The world is on the brink of yet another technological revolution: "the Internet of Things". Just as the networking of computers led to multiple changes in our lives, the growing networking of things - connecting cars, power grids, even toilets to the Internet - may lead to other profound adjustments. Many forecasters say these changes will make us healthier, wealthier, and safer. But as with any new technology, there are also risks.
In the age when the massive success of social network sites relies on users' willingness to freely disclose their personal data for profiling purposes, issues of user privacy and personal data protection are under the spotlight. This article addresses current developments in the field of decentralized social networking as a way of countering the trade-off between privacy and connectivity in social network services. We argue that such tools may constitute the first attempt to fully leverage the social opportunity of virtual networking tools.
More objects are becoming embedded with sensors and gaining the ability to communicate. The resulting information networks promise to create new business models, improve business processes, and reduce costs and risks.
Julian Assange, the Australian founder of WikiLeaks, the controversial website that has been posting classified government documents, is now being held without bail in the U.K. (since this article has been written, Julian Assange has been released on parole in return for a 283.000 euros bail), awaiting extradition to Sweden for questioning regarding an alleged rape. But sensational news aside, his site's recent release of confidential U.S. State Department cables has implications for businesses and corporations with sensitive information to shield, according to experts at Wharton and the University of Pennsylvania.
Word of mouth used to be just that - what your friends told you about a book, a movie, or a restaurant. Today, we not only have friends to turn to for such information but also thousands of strangers, who are posting their opinions online and leading the rest of us this way or that. This new public reservoir of advice and first-hand experience is leading to a major shift in the relationship between consumers and commerce, creating new opportunities for some companies - and a fresh source of risk.
Social media is the flavor of the day in marketing, the latest in a line of digital innovations that were supposed to "change everything". But media experts say this innovation really is becoming a revolutionary force, not just for consumers but for marketers. Social media's ability to connect people is reinforcing consumer clout, while at the same time giving businesses more data to create better products and services. Still, the power that social media unleashes can turn on a company, all too quickly.
It is not just Hollywood celebrities whose lives are an open book. Everyone is now being watched, monitored, and analyzed more closely than ever before - and for all sorts of reasons, good and bad. Highway cameras keep track of who is speeding, corporate computers collect information on what we buy, and all sorts of surveillance tools help governments find out what their citizens are saying. Computer technology has become so intrusive, some experts argue, that the traditional notion of privacy has largely been gutted. But others insist that the use of data can be regulated and that a balance can be struck that protects privacy while still permitting the collection of appropriate kinds of information.
The Internet may be one of the single greatest changes in communications since the telephone, maybe the telegraph. In only 20 years, the fabric of life has changed in almost every corner of the world, thanks to the Internet. Now, some scholars and medical researchers believe that it may be changing humanity itself.
Through GSM mobile telephone technology and its ability to local people geographically, we can now attempt to measure collective emotions in urban environments. This opens the door to a host of new social and commercial applications for this generation and the next.
