Topic: Business
After weathering the bubble and Y2K, the enterprise software industry must now figure out how to integrate into an ever more networked world. Top analysts take up the challenge in this lively panel discussion from Software 2006. Service Oriented Architecture holds promise as a platform for sharing business processes. But what are the pressures on the big and small players in this new world? Will customers buy in? How can IT be seen not just as a cost center, but as a true provider of service and innovation?
In this freewheeling panel discussion from Web 2.0, game industry leaders discuss the changes they've seen in the gaming world and predict its future development. The gaming world is extremely large and, with its demographics broadening daily, the panel examines how existing business models of advertising and subscriptions are being joined by micro-purchases within games. They also look at how small game companies can continue to co-exist with the behemoths and at the potential increase in user-created content.
Jason Fried treats the Web 2.0 2005 Conference audience to a talk about how to create a Web 2.0 company and how to do more by focusing on the idea of less. He confronts conventional business building practices and proposes the idea of "under-doing" the competition. Having less produces more constraints, which, in turn, yields better products and increased customer satisfaction.
O'Reilly Media collects and analyzes the data from its book sales, its technology conferences, and from its online communities. The results are compiled into an informal zeitgeist, which is commonly referred to as the "O'Reilly Radar". Tim O'Reilly, CEO of O'Reilly Media, shares what is on his radar screen during the keynote address from EuroOSCON, on October 18, 2005. Some of the blips on the Radar screen include Ruby on Rails, mashups, Greasemonkey, internet telephony, and rich media.
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with UC Irvine business professor Peter Navarro. He's got a follow-up to his popular book "If It's Raining in Brazil, Buy Starbuck's." It's called "The Well-Timed Strategy." Dr. Navarro understands business cycles and explains how they can be used to create business strategy. He argues that business schools don't do enough to teach students about macro-economics. Successful businesses know how to read these cycles and build their strategies accordingly.
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Jim Fowler, the CEO of Jigsaw. They discuss an innovative online database which is changing the world of sales.
It's time to get excited about software again. Software spending is up, capital investment is up, but what does Web 2.0 really mean for the enterprise? Vanessa Colella blends optimism with practical suggestions on how software companies can move to the next phase by understanding their niche in the customer's ecosystem. Shifting the focus from the provider to the customer will help companies rise to the new challenges of supporting tacit interactions, those messy decisions-based problems which businesses, and software vendors, must now face.
Yahoo! has been one of the leading companies in the field of content syndication. and has been working to create a Content Syndication Ecosystem where publishers, advertisers, and customers are able to interact. Scott Gatz, Yahoo!'s senior director of personalization products, describes how Yahoo has been able to create an environment where customers get the experience they need; while allowing publishers to develop a repeat daily relationship with their users.
Every day, millions of online gamers from around the world are spending astonishing amounts of time within online games' virtual worlds, or what Ed Castronova likes to call synthetic worlds. From Ed's unique vantage point, as an avid gamer, and a pioneer in the study of the economics of these synthetic worlds, he shares some incredible statistical information, and intelligently discusses the ways in which the economics within these synthetic worlds have spilled over into the real world and impact it in some truly amazing ways.
Ray Lane addresses the question of how today's software companies can make money in this keynote from the Sand Hill Software 2006 conference. He gives a clear view of the challenges facing the software industry and describes the strategies that offer the best hope of success. As a partner at leading venture capital firm, KPCB, with a seat on the boards of a clutch of software start-ups, and as former COO at Oracle, Lane is well placed to offer authoritative advice.
