Online businesses also require a long-term

Perhaps the best way to approach the subject of the Supernova conference taking place in San Francisco on an annual basis, whether to consider the type of audience that, according to organizers, are addressed: technology executives, business strategists, entrepreneurs, investors daring, political, service providers and analysts, among others.

The main concept intended to discuss and explain, and around which try to integrate into the world of business, government institutions and technology leaders, is the decentralization caused by connectivity every day more and more global, pervasive and ubiquitous, that takes place through computers and other communication devices interconnected throughout the world.




Such phenomena are by collapsing the old industrial model and changing the world as we knew it, because businesses are distributed and shared more and the users acquire a major in the same never experienced before, using tools like blogs, recommendation services web page and cyber-connected networks.

Big numbers

In 2007, Americans bought over the network products and services worth U.S. $ 127,000 million, representing a 25% increase over the previous year, according to a recent article in Managing Technology accounts for some of the topics discussed at the last Supernova conference, held during days 16 to 18 June.

To be important, however, represents less than 4% of total retail sales in the U.S., although it should also have other online services: for example, Google admitted that last year more than 16,000 million dollars and most of them came from its advertising services.

What we have been discussing in the Supernova is that, despite the great potential of the Internet market, these figures reflect, very few companies have actually had success in developing new effective ways to make profits online. Most companies have seen on the net, at best, simply another means to insert in her traditional advertising models.

Explorers

Eric Clemons, professor of Wharton SchoolSaid that there are many sources of value and untapped business niches on the Internet, particularly in the area of online services. As a business model actually developed and operated online, as opposed to using the network as a means to implement the old models, described, among others, two examples: Gaia Online and Photoshop Express.

The first, Gaia Online is a virtual world created several years ago by a Japanese comic book artists. More than 300,000 daily users enter the same by participating in role-play multi-player, create their own avatars and interacting with each other through forums. About five million users, most of them teenagers and young adults, come every month to this page, which gives an idea of its success.

The developers began seeking small donations from users to keep the site active, and the answer was that they were three times more than they had anticipated. Then they came up with the idea of giving users the ability to buy (and sell) virtual products. Where does Gaia real incomes? To sell, the price is nothing virtual $ 2.5 each, limited editions of virtual goods have value for users to become old and start to dwindle. To this we must add also the sale of real and hats and shirts based on some of the most popular virtual items.

Then there is advertising, which has begun to experience Gaia for about year and a half, by original actions such as his association with New Line Cinema. Users of the virtual world of Gaia have to perform some activity of the same to get a trailer to a film promoted by this company. And this is, in the words of Executive Craig Sherman of Gaia Online, "to create experiences that are fun and meaningful to the Gaia community as well as beneficial to sponsors."

For its part, Adobe has long put up a different action by no less successful, made available to the public, and amateur photographer in particular, completely free of charge, a simplified, yet effective, its flagship product: the tool Professional Photoshop image processing. The popular version is called Photoshop Express offers users the ability to upload, edit, store and share their photos, as well as integrate with other services like Facebook, Photobucket or Picasa.

Do the benefits of all this to Adobe? Sales of premium and professional services in addition to potential customers from the mass public to its free services, advertising, and agreements whereby computer manufacturers buy licenses for the software components pre-installed Photoshop Express.

In line with these initiatives and this new vision of business online, include the intention of the company Sun Microsystems to continue releasing products (as they have been doing with Java or Solaris). During the Supernova conference, the company president, Jonathan Schwartz, was to present a world map showing which dots (increasing by 100,000 per day) the density of downloads ZFS, a file system released. Schwartz concluded: "Each of these points is a potential customer."