Disruption in media business – 4 points sometime forgotten

digital disruption

You want your company to survive in digital-era? Four potential areas to check are: channel approach, processes, scope and people. Failing to be digital in any of these areas may significantly hinder down your capability to survive in ever increasing competition or just make your profits go down.

Continue reading Disruption in media business – 4 points sometime forgotten

IPO of King – second day in market, same direction remains

Now valuation is getting closer to what could be expected. Depending of the speed of erosion of revenues I would imagine to be interested in this stock around $16-17. This would naturally be just short term stake for this year.

Around end of Q2 there should be some indications if the new game is getting attention of consumers or not. Farm Hero Saga seem quite similar to Candy Crush Saga, but why not, maybe recycling works here as earlier concept did.

Interesting week ahead. Maybe buyers will find suitable level for this interesting stock during coming week. Now it seem to be closing around $18, which is 2.22% drop from opening day. Total loss so far 19.6%.

Enterprise architecture – transformational industries

I was participating yesterday in an interesting panel discussion organized by KAOS (Enterprise architecture knowledge community). We were talking about transformational industries and impact of enterprise architecture in that scene. Here I collected few of my own takeaways and thoughts risen by the discussion (Not fully covering, just a flow of thoughts around the topic). Continue reading Enterprise architecture – transformational industries

Impact of Alibaba’s IPO to Yahoo?

It will be interesting to see how Alibaba’s potential IPO will impact into Yahoo. Yahoo has 23% stake of Alibaba. Value estimates of Alibaba seem now been dropping from $100 billion into area of 70-80 billion. Even with that Yahoo’s stake would be worth 16-18 billion. Continue reading Impact of Alibaba’s IPO to Yahoo?

49% of small businesses never update their listings online

Just found a survey made by ConstantContact among SMBs in february. They figured out that SMBs have challenges to handle even their basic online marketing. This is somehow understantable as they need to focus to their own business and they usually do not have knowledge or resources to tackle ever increasing complexity of online environment. Actually 70% of companies in this interview say that they do not have time to manage the listings. Continue reading 49% of small businesses never update their listings online

Alibaba – Does it say “open sesame” for IPO treasure?

There is nice story about treasure behind name of this Chinese company.

Impressive is also the company carrying this name: their profit rose from US$1.02 billion to US$1.84 billion. Expected revenue level for 2016 is even more attractive: US$18 billion!  The analysts are taking it from there adding nice 25x multiple with 20 per cent discount rate and thus reaching an entity worth US$98 billion today. So it seems as valuable as Facebook was during IPO.

It will be interesting to see what happens. I do not predict any specific fate for this “treasure box”, but rather pointing few things that make me wonder.

Alibaba’s market share: Alibaba is currently dominating huge share of Chinese online market. It seems difficult to maintain current position, if competition is opening up.

Alibaba’s market: Alibaba is focused in China. The growth expectations of that market seem to be slowing down from faster period of growth experienced earlier.

Analysts seem to be little undesided too with the valuation. The latest comment i found has already decreased estimate to $62 billion. Timing is cruicial in IPO as you can see from valuation changes. Intresting to see what happens. Merchandise is excellent, but what it is worth?

Why crowd sourcing works and why it doesn’t as source of online content

People like to be experts, it is stated. Thus they want to share their expertice in restaurants, shops or different products among their peer group. This works conveniently for online services seeking relevant content.

It is also said that people like to utilize insight provided by those they trust as part of their purchase decision process, but there is a catch.

Challence 1: What is the motivation of the expert to create evaluations? Does volume go over quality? What is the relationship between expert and the target evaluated? These are not always clearly visible for those utilizing evaluations. Thus evaluator profiles become increasingly important for end user to be able to check relevance of evaluations.

Challence 2: If you want to use evaluations created someone you trust to have judgement, how do you find that among wast ammount of evaluations? Some services offer opportunity to prioritize those who belong to your own social media circles, but you do not neccessarily have an expert among people you know for all purposess. For these situations it would be neat to be able to select evaluations based on your own profile: people with similar values, preferences etc.

When tackling these challences in the back ground there is always the rude fact of small ammount of evaluations or limited capability to filter those. Usually inorder to get relevant and fresh evalauation, categorization of them is not really possible, because of limitted ammount or limitted information of evaluator to base categorization (language, date and stars is quite limited).

Collection of information needed in online services becomes easier

People make personal information increasingly available into online services. A study done by Bovitzin shows that 70% of young and 77% over 35 years think that their private information should be kept unavailable. At the very same time over half of these people are willingly providing they private information to online services. Reason for this behaviour seem to be that people believe information exchange as integral part of social media. Interesting to see how this develops as utilization of shared data increases and both positive and negative effects become visible.

Open data provides new bulk source of infromation that can easily lead to new innovative online solutions as barrier of entry is getting lower. Ammount of open data sites is increasing rapidly as governments see increasing utilization beneficial for businesses and thus local economies.

Scoopshot is excellent example of information collection with crowd sourcing. Similar approaches are utlized in review sites, which make their users as content providers. This enables better coverage of online services also in not so dencely populated parts of real wolrd.