Nowadays, the strategy called co-creation has taken the business world by storm and many firms try to hop on board. Co-creation allows companies and customers to interact with each other by creating a customer experience that is valuable for both parties. On one hand firms get a better grasp of the wants and needs of their customers, while customers on the other hand feel that their ideas are valued and their needs get fulfilled.
Daily Archives: February 22, 2016
Design Decisions for Enterprise Social Media
During the volcano eruption of Iceland in 2010, the Dutch airline KLM used Twitter Hash tags to provide aid to stranded passengers. It’s not the only digital service they offer, passengers with severe complaints who express themselves on Twitter of Facebook can expect polite and helpful solutions for their grieve. For most companies marketing through online platforms is the starting point for participation in online interactions with customers. However the majority has lagged behind in adopting social media platforms for accomplishing business purposes more effectively and efficiently, such as talent management, innovation and operations. Problematic is the unnatural translation of social media such as Facebook, Linked-In and Twitter into those that can pursue organizational objectives. This blog post proposes a practical and systematic framework to consider platform features, questions and unique capabilities. In effect the framework reduces the complexity of the social media landscape into a manageable set of decisions points.
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Hurry up! Name Your Own Price!
Since online auctions are more and more used in e-commerce activities, interactive pricing mechanism becomes a popular trend on the Internet (Bichler 2000), in which both sellers and buyers engage in exchanging bids to interactively determine the price level (Voigt and Hinz 2014). From the view of sellers, they could increase prices without losing customers by differentiating prices based on buyers’ willingness to pay, and therefore make more profits. For buyers, they can decide whether or not close the deal according to their willingness to pay, with the aim of maximizing their savings.
Neighborly: the crowdfundingplatform for public bonds
Over the last few years, municipal finance has become increasingly complex. It is not surprising that most people do not understand how public finance works. Required information is scattered over different places, multiple diverse projects are bundled as a single mega bond and the process is slow and bureaucratic. These characteristics make public bonds not public at all.
Neighborly, the crowdfundingplatform for public projects in the US, brings municipal bonds back to its roots by making it understandable and accessible for the public again.
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Personal travel guide
You know the hassle when you want to go somewhere for like a 2 days trip and it takes hours to find out what are the true must see and places to eat at, and in the end you cannot even visit all of the places because you over planned your trip with activities. This is why Tripomatic will save you a lot of time.
Flitsmeister: exploiting consumer data creation
Flitsmeister is a perfect example of an application that exploits data to gain benefit, exposure and make traffic more efficient. Flitsmeister is a free application for your mobile device that warns you when you’re approaching for instance a speed camera or traffic jam. Flitsmeister is a Dutch mobile application and founded in 2009. Although the application is not that new, Flitsmeister is becoming better and better in exploiting the consumer generated data. Therefore, I will describe how Flitsmeister does that, and what business models are making Flitsmeister possible.
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Online Word-of-Mouth: Ratings, sentiments and sales rank
Introduction
Online Word-of-Mouth (referred to as OWOM for the remainder of this blog) is increasingly important for business because consumers use OWOM information to search, evaluate and choice a product (Hu, et al., 2013). Online ratings and reviews are a form of user generated content and, a more narrow term, OWOM. This blog evaluates the most important theoretical and practical findings of an article by Hu et al. (2013).
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Waze: Crowd sourcing for real time navigation?
Waze is a GPS-based geographical navigation application program for smartphones and tablets with GPS support and display screens which provides turn-by-turn information and user-submitted travel times and route details, downloading location-dependent information over mobile networks. It was originally founded by an Israeli developer and was later acquired by Google.
What does Waze do?
Waze is pretty simple, just like looking for directions in Google maps, one can give the starting point and the destination information to get the desired route details. The resulting map with the direction details also includes community shared information like travel time, optimal route, hazards on the road, potholes, blocked roads, construction work, etc.
How does it work?
There are two ways one can contribute to crowd sourcing via Waze. Passively, when the user opens Waze, the smartphone automatically starts sharing information with the other users on the road. Like, traveling speed helps show where traffic is and reroutes everyone around potential traffic zones along a particular route.
The users can also actively take part in sharing information. In addition to traffic updates, information about live road events such as police activity, accidents, speed traps, stalled vehicles, and other road hazards are collected this way. For example a fellow user of the application can update any road block they come across on their way and that gets publicized to the entire community. Above is one example of a travel route in San Francisco where a fellow user had updated the pothole information.
Other Applications:
Not only everyday routes, Waze also helps with the traffic and roadblocks schedule during festive seasons or special events. Waze community when they foresee disasters or major events happen, update the map with possible road closures, obstructions. This helps everyone bypass traffic and take safe routes.
Apart from this, waze is now partnering with governments to come up with better solutions for cities like planning garbage disposal routes and better city planning.
Waze motivates users to contribute via a point system With higher points you can change your profile picture and get a higher status in the community. Users get points based on the edits and updates they do to improve the maps.
Monetization:
Waze offers re-sellers and advertisers a web interface to advertise based on locations where a small icon will appear on a given location for an interested Wazer to engage with the ads. Waze also offers to TV news stations a web interface to broadcast current traffic reports and alerts directly from the app.
In the future we can expect waze to evolve as a bigger player in the market and probably take over companies like Uber and lyft, with their concept of car pooling ideas. Waze has built a bigger community that can be leveraged to introduce live tracking of users near you who would want a ride.
So what are you waiting for? Netherlands is one of the 13 countries which has a complete map on waze. Start using it and start contributing to live Netherlands navigation information!
References:
Lyft could see future competition from Google as Waze trials car-pooling app
http://infospace.ischool.syr.edu/2012/12/21/does-waze-really-work/
http://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-waze-and-how-to-use-it-2013-6?op=1&IR=T
Shooting Virtual Bad Guys – For Charity!
The video game market is huge. In 2014, the global market for PC and console games was valued at 46.5 billion US$ (Statista, 2016). Steam – the largest PC gaming platform – had just over 6000 games in its library at the end of 2015. This number has grown significantly given that there were roughly 3700 games in the Steam library in 2014 (Makuch, 2015). Add to this the price of games which usually ranges anywhere from $15 – $60 and you will understand why the industry has grown so large. But what if you’re a broke but charitable student? Surely there must be a way to get your fix of new games, without breaking the bank?
Consumer Value Creation 