Deliverable D6.4 Marketplace sustainability concept

Project title: Applying European market leadership to river basin networks and spreading of innovation on water ICT models, tools and data.A detailed description of the functionalities is given in WaterInnEU Final Virtual Marketplace Report (D6. 2). The general exploitation plan for WaterInnEU including the additional services, e. g. matchmaking support, e-pitch events, and management structure is described in D4. 4 - Exploitation plan for beyond the life of the project. This report complements D4. 4 by describing how the virtual platform can be sustained beyond the project from a technical perspective

eEnabled internet distribution for small and medium sized hotels: the case of hospitality SMEs in Athens

Advances in information and communications technologies (ICTs) have strategic implications for a wide range of industries. Tourism and hospitality have dramatically changed by the ICTs and the Internet and gradually emerge as the leading industry on online expenditure. The Internet revolutionised traditional distribution models, enabled new entries propelled both disintermediation and reintermediation and altered the sources of competitive advantage. This paper explores the strategic implications of ICTs and the perceived advantages and disadvantages of Internet distribution for small and medium-sized hospitality enterprises (SMEs). Primary research in Athens hotels demonstrates the effects of the Internet and ICTs for secondary markets, where there is lower penetration and ICT adoption. Interviews and questionnaires identified a number of strategies in order to optimise distribution. The analysis illustrates the strategic role of ICTs and the Internet for hospitality organisations and Small and Medium-sized organisations in general. Most hotels employ a distribution mix that determines the level and employment of the Internet. The paper demonstrates that only organisations that use ICTs strategically will be able to develop their electronic distribution and achieve competitive advantages in the future

Cloudbus Toolkit for Market-Oriented Cloud Computing

This keynote paper: (1) presents the 21st century vision of computing and identifies various IT paradigms promising to deliver computing as a utility; (2) defines the architecture for creating market-oriented Clouds and computing atmosphere by leveraging technologies such as virtual machines; (3) provides thoughts on market-based resource management strategies that encompass both customer-driven service management and computational risk management to sustain SLA-oriented resource allocation; (4) presents the work carried out as part of our new Cloud Computing initiative, called Cloudbus: (i) Aneka, a Platform as a Service software system containing SDK (Software Development Kit) for construction of Cloud applications and deployment on private or public Clouds, in addition to supporting market-oriented resource management; (ii) internetworking of Clouds for dynamic creation of federated computing environments for scaling of elastic applications; (iii) creation of 3rd party Cloud brokering services for building content delivery networks and e-Science applications and their deployment on capabilities of IaaS providers such as Amazon along with Grid mashups; (iv) CloudSim supporting modelling and simulation of Clouds for performance studies; (v) Energy Efficient Resource Allocation Mechanisms and Techniques for creation and management of Green Clouds; and (vi) pathways for future research.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables, Conference pape

Is Content Publishing in BitTorrent Altruistic or Profit-Driven

BitTorrent is the most popular P2P content delivery application where individual users share various type of content with tens of thousands of other users. The growing popularity of BitTorrent is primarily due to the availability of valuable content without any cost for the consumers. However, apart from required resources, publishing (sharing) valuable (and often copyrighted) content has serious legal implications for user who publish the material (or publishers). This raises a question that whether (at least major) content publishers behave in an altruistic fashion or have other incentives such as financial. In this study, we identify the content publishers of more than 55k torrents in 2 major BitTorrent portals and examine their behavior. We demonstrate that a small fraction of publishers are responsible for 66% of published content and 75% of the downloads. Our investigations reveal that these major publishers respond to two different profiles. On one hand, antipiracy agencies and malicious publishers publish a large amount of fake files to protect copyrighted content and spread malware respectively. On the other hand, content publishing in BitTorrent is largely driven by companies with financial incentive. Therefore, if these companies lose their interest or are unable to publish content, BitTorrent traffic/portals may disappear or at least their associated traffic will significantly reduce

WEB PISTON: CHOOSING A NEW STRATEGY

Web Piston is a successful enterprise that provides its small business and individual clients with automated web design and web hosting services. Owing to the rapidly changing competitive environment, however, the company’s founder, Ricardo Lasa, feels that a change in strategy is necessary. The case describes the competitive environment for web hosting and outlines four alternative strategies: 1) becoming a “freemium” player, 2) becoming a custom web site developer, 3) creating a marketplace to match web clients and developers, and 4) focusing on developing portals for deployment on social networking sites. The principal objective of the case is to provide a rationale for making the decision, or to offer an alternative strategy. A teaching note may be obtained from Dr. T. Grandon Gill ([email protected]). The case is almost entirely undisguised and was specifically intended to focus on building judgment/evaluation skills in the presence of considerable uncertainty

The emerging role of banks in e-commerce

How is the banking industry responding to the rapid development of on-line commerce? Evidence suggests that many banks are beginning to deliver credit and deposit products electronically. In addition, some large banks are developing products designed exclusively for e-commerce. As banks venture into the electronic arena, however, they are finding that new opportunities bring new operational and strategic risks.Electronic commerce ; Banks and banking - Customer services

Surprising Subscriptions: How Electronic Journal Publishing Has Affected the Partnership Among Subscription Agents, Publishers and Librarians

This compilation is a mixture of papers submitted by speakers and text derived from notes taken by the moderator and Mary Hawks of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Library and has been reviewed by the participants

Symposium Presentation: Doing Internet Co-Branding Agreements

Co-brand agreements are what I do. I am the self-titled King of CoBrands, as this is what I\u27ve been doing with my life. So, let\u27s talk a little about co-branding agreements and about why they might matter. First let\u27s define our terms. Now, where there used to be one site, the provider site, there will be two sites, the provider site and co-branded site, which contains the branding of the portal, but contains all the same functionality, or similar functionality, as is in the provider\u27s site. Then the portal will drive traffic to this co-branding site, for purposes that we\u27ll discuss in a bit. This kind of behavior has actually become ubiquitous on the Internet. This is what people are doing, and in fact, many companies are building entire businesses on the idea that they want to be a provider of co-branded sites as their main line of business. So let me give you some examples in the real world of how people are doing this. A co-branding agreement starts with two websites.There is Website A, which we\u27ll call, for purposes of this talk, a provider ; and there is Website B, which we\u27ll call a portal, or a brander. Website A will take its standard website that offers functionality or content, and it will create a version of that and slap the branding of the portal onto a different set of pages