Week 4- Final Blog

Today I will comment on three of the assignments:
First the Monetizing the Net video: I liked the idea that you can't afford to treat the internet as a captive audience and this was the assignment I found most interesting this week. The idea that you can find exactly what you want is very limiting compared to past models. I also really was interested in how internet can change the scale of production for companies, like in the beer distributor example. There seems to be no limit to this to include international. I have bought a swimsuit on line from China that came as quickly as mail from California and was just as simple.
I was also intrigued by the idea of Trip Adviser and Hotels.com being linked. I never knew this and it seems interesting to piggy back off of social networking sites. I'm really not sure what I think about this. I also was interested in the push towards your friends opinions. I feel like this is very prevalent recently and every website is beginning to offer options to see what your friends/people like you choose or recommended.
The idea that mobile advertising is a big mine field seems true in that I am very averse to this because one of the big initial advantages of a cell phone was avoiding people calling to sell stuff. If companies want to move here they need to wait then do so slowly. If they push it, they will turn people off, like the first attempts to advertise at movies do. To this day that idea has not succeeded because consumers did not feel that it was "right". The idea of the generational devide on mobile ads was also interesting. Companies need to work to be careful to only send to a specific and friendly audience.
In the talk between the professors, I felt it interesting that the Wall Street Journal was seen as a success. It was also mentioned in the article. I don't know how they can compete against competition who is picking their info up through the AP and giving it for free. I also felt like the recording stopped early.
Finally, I found the "Economics of Giving it Away" interesting. First the idea the minority of customers pay for the majority was interesting. The "freemium" concept seems to be everywhere on the web and is actually feasible due to the shear size of the web. I also had thought about how venture capital drying up has affected small businesses, but had not thought about how it would also affect websites. It seems amazing, but not too crazy due to the amount of digital innovation, that the marginal costs of anything digital falls by 50% per year. Companies need to always be innovating in that environment.