Strategy and Quotes

So I have been doing some reading (mostly from the book Web 2.0 A Strategy Guide) and I have certainly found some interesting concepts that I would like to share:

1. Don't build applications. Build contexts for interaction - A slide from O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. This is a business strategy that was adpoted by Flickr.
2. Investigate in a multiple revenue stream model (subscription, advertisment, transaction fee, licensing)
3. More to come..
   

Tasks

It is now time to start my research. Here is my reading list:

• Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics by Brian Clifton. Link.
• Actionable Web Analytics: Using Data to Make Smart Business Decisions by Jim Sterne. Link.
• Pro Web 2.0 Mashups: Remixing Data and Web Services by Raymond Yee. Link.
• Web 2.0 A Strategy Guide by Amy Shuen. Link.
  

This week's task also include writing up the 3 prototype that I have done so far. I also have a meeting with my client on Thursday the 11th of December.

PID Results

The first marker (out of 2) gave me 80% (A) which I am very happy with. I will be sending my PID to my client in the next few days.

Using a real client and demostrating a proof of concept certainly paid off!

Lesson Number 1 - Client Exposure

I got a gentle reminder about client exposure - It is very important that when you are consulting that you do not reveal your client's identity. Mostly because you do not want to give their competitors an insight as to what they are getting up to.

Open Source Business Inteligence

My supervisor introduced me to Pentaho which is a open source tool that specialising in the analysis and reporting of data. After a quick digging session I came across a video chat about location inteligence applications (unique Google Map fixtures). I am off to do more digging around and come up with some cool ideas for my client.

Agile Prototyping

I want to introduce you to Dapper. This online tool allows users to create custom and dynamic feeds from any website. Dapper allows you to expose information in many formats such as XML, RSS and CSV. The website using a data mapper which allows you to select the content you would like to retrieve from a given website.

So lets use an example. I used Dapper to retrieve a list of companies (names and address fields) from Scoot and output this data into an RSS feed. I specified a search URL string which was used as the source of the data mapper. I selected the company name and the address as fields which were then shown in an RSS feed. I used Yahoo! Pipes to transform the address (within the RSS feed) to a Geo address code which can then be outputted as KML (Google Maps loves KML) So now we have a Google map fixtures of pizza express restaurants purely driven by Scoot. This mashup is not restrictive to pizza express as the user can specify any search criteria and have it displayed on a map. Here are some screenshots:

I want to thank Andy Dickinson for his online tutorial.

Interacting with Google Analytics

So I was browsing Google Analytics to track down my site visitors and I discovered that you can export CSV data. Data provided by Analytics is quite valuable so developing a mashup around this should be slightly easier as Yahoo! Pipes loves CSV!.

Client and Prototypes

The client in question are situated within the sports industry. A high proportion of their sales is conducted online through an e-commerce store.

I will be working closely with this client to prove how web 2.0 business strategy can be beneficial to their organisation and how it can have an influence on the way they do business. In particular it will allow the client to gain more information about their clients, sales and competition.

As part of my project initiation document (PID) I have developed 2 loosely-coupled mashup applications.

Project: Web 2.0 Business Strategy

After experimenting with Yahoo! Pipes and Microsoft Popfly I soon decided that I will be using mashups as a proof of concept to demonstrate to organisations how the aggregation of data can help with their marketing and strategy decisions. The project itself will describe the development of light-weight business intelligence applications for companies with e-commerce websites.

To demonstrate the value of this project I will be conducting a case study for a real client. However, despite using a client as a case study, the main intention of this project is to explore how web 2.0 business strategy can be applied to any organisation.