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NEW TECHNOLOGY It's the original bricks-and-clicks model. Started by Netscape co-founder Jim Clark, Shutterfly is a classic example of a Website model cashing in on a development in the real world to offer a related service in the Netspace. As people around the world replace their old-fashioned film-based cameras with the digital version-the ones that store the images in PCs, or even on diskettes-Shutterfly is e-hawking high-quality physical prints of digital pictures, created by using proprietary digital imaging technology, that customers can zap to its Website over the Net. They just have to e-mail the photographs-usually in the .jpeg format used by digital images-generated by their digital cameras to Shutterfly. Oh yes, it also hosts virtual albums for friends and relatives to log in and check out the latest snaps of their near and dear ones. Shutterfly is a great instance of a venture that meets a real-life need-but in a way that would have been impossible without the Net. Its basic service offers value because high-quality prints of digital photographs are difficult to generate. And by conducting half the transaction through the Net, Shutterfly is also able to attract much more customer-traffic than conventional methods. This venture should have a positive image. -Hasnain Zaheer CUSTOMER SEGMENTATION How do you get new customers to your Net-venture? Try Alfy.com. Its strategy makes it sniff at anyone whose age is in 2 digits: the idea is to be the portal of choice for those between 4 and 9. OK, so many of these kids can't even read-which is why Alfy uses cartoon characters and friendly visuals to communicate. But the business plan is serious: the objective is to, first, be a medium for ads for products where parents spend the money but small children influence brand-yes, there are plenty of such products. Second, Alfy plans to introduce subscription fee-driven content too. We kid you not. -Sanjiv Rana ALLIANCES One motive is driving all alliances in the Netspace: get more customers. And that's becoming particularly visible in the ISP business. Arguing that on-line services will, ultimately, become free, more than one ISP is taking the plunge into zero-fee access and looking for readymade user-bases. And where on the Net do you find such colonies of customers but at the most popular Websites? The pioneer-the California-based ISP named 1STUp-has signed deals with 2 of the largest portals on the Web, AltaVista and Excite, to offer their customers free Net access. 1STUp had to have at least 2 such deals: had it stayed with one, advertisers could simply have advertised directly on the portal instead. One up on everyone else, 1STUp is sure living up to its name. -Sanjiv Rana BROADBAND First, it was a business model. Now, the first-mover advantage on the Net is coming from technology. For a demo, examine ventures like sightsound.com, entertaindom.com, and pop.com, which have positioned themselves specifically to act as a middle-agent for the creators of films and music on one side, and the customer on the other. The service that they offer: enabling customers to download pay-per-view, or pay-per-hour digitised versions of movies and music. Using the powerful encryption technology that they have invested in developing, each of these ventures can ensure that the digitised files which are downloaded by the customers self-destruct if they aren't paid for, or if any attempt is made to copy the files. Sure, it's going to take a while before surfers get access to bandwidths fat enough to enable them to download an entire movie in a few minutes. It will also need Net devices whose displays rival those of TV sets, which people hook up to DVD-Rom players and VCRs for home film-viewing. However, both developments are more than inevitable and, when they do come into being, Hollywood studios as well as movie-viewers will, probably, make a beeline for the site that already offers such content. No one's saying Cut! to this e-xploration of e-ntertainment in a hurry. -Sanjiv Rana INFOMEDIARIES The best new opportunities on the Net lurk in the spaces between established businesses. That's how Billpoint and i-escrow found their raison d' être. Although on-line auctions are becoming hugely popular, all transactions have been suffering from one customer-unfriendly bottleneck: the buyer still has to pay the seller the old-fashioned way-with a cheque in the mail. And that's a killjoy. Enter 2 e-biz ventures from the stable of e-Bay, the world's No. 1 on-line auctioneers, which could prove to be real money-spinners-literally. The first, named Billpoint, enables the buyer to send her credit-card number, encrypted, to the seller. Billpoint uses this data to credit the relevant amount to the seller's account, charging a fee for its services. The second service of this nature comes from i-escrow. As the name suggests, potential buyers set up bank accounts out of which they pay for their purchases-but they don't send the authorisation for the payment till they've inspected the merchandise that is delivered and are satisfied with it. i-escrow handles the transaction and collects a fee. A new rival to their services has now come from the Silicon Valley start-up, Confinity, whose service, Paypal, charges no fee. It makes its profits from the float, investing the money between the time the buyer sends it and the time that it is forwarded to the seller. Look, and ye shall find the space for your e-Biz. -Sanjiv Rana REVENUE MODELS Even byproducts can be used to make money. It took 2 of the oldest on-line sellers on the Web, Streamline and Peabody, to show the way. Both these organisations are now selling the vast riches of information that they have amassed about customers to consumer-product companies. Costing, on an average, less than a third of what market-researchers charge, the information is both accurate and extensive-and of a depth that conventional research cannot yield. Since the e-tailers pay nothing to generate it, revenues are, virtually, equal to profits. -Hasnain Zaheer |
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