Importance Of The Segmentation On Time-Rich And Time-Poor For Development And Marketing Of Computer Games

ICT (Information Communication Technology) development has already changed many aspects of our life. One of the most successful industries in using ICT as a means for development of new products as well as marketing and sales activities, is the entertainment industry. The games industry is developing rapidly and has penetrated every layer of society. In 1998 video and electronic game revenues reached USD 5.5bn in North American markets alone. The annual increase has been approximately 25% during a number of years. The success of ICT based entertainment products depends to a high degree on the penetration of PCs and Internet connections. Many governments all over the world have strategies and programs in order to reduce the digital divide and to offer all citizens Internet access. In the not so distant future Internet access will be as natural as water, electricity, radio or telephone. Time is more and more becoming an important variable for market segmentation. Everybody has 24 hours per day and night at his or her disposal. However, the perception of time varies. Some feel they have too much time and they are time-rich. Some feel that they have too little time and they are time-poor. Traditionally, time-rich people were also money-rich, but the big majority was both time-poor and money-poor. This is completely turned upside down in the Information society. Nowadays people are equally divided between time-rich and money-poor, and time-poor and money-rich. Both time-rich and time-poor need entertainment and are potential consumers of entertainment especially games as e-services but in different ways. This is a conceptual paper and its purpose is to investigate the importance of the division on time-rich and time-poor for the entertainment industry and practical implications with a special focus on computer games as products and e-services

Public Procurement and the Development of the Swedish Telecommunications Market

This thesis describes and analyses public procurement and its processes in general against the framework of industrial marketing and purchasing. In particular, it focuses on the public procurement of telecommunications (“telecom”) and its effects on the de-monopolization and development of the Swedish telecom market based on empirical material from three case studies, interviews and publicly available written sources. Public procurement is a significant part of any country’s economy. There is a plenitude of publicly available data due to Sweden’s and other public administrations’ transparency policies. Despite this fact, public procurement has been poorly covered in business administration literature when compared with the private sector’s purchasing and selling activities. This thesis tries to bridge the theoretical gap between knowledge of purchasing in business-to-business (“B2B”) and public procurement. Public procurement can be considered as a special type of B2B transaction and, particularly in the case of bigger procurements, of project purchasing. The important difference is that public procurement must follow specific and stricter legislation compared with the private sector’s purchasing activities. Among other things, public procurement law restricts contact between the procuring organisation and tenderers in some phases of the procurement process, allows no changes after the publishing of the Request for Proposal and opens the possibility to appeal to the court if any party considers that the procuring organisation has not acted in accordance with the public procurement rules. The telecom market has, over a period of thirty years, been transformed from a monopoly with practically no choice to a fully competitive market with several service and equipment providers as well as different pricing schemes and competing technical solutions. The development of the Swedish telecom market can be divided into four stages: Full monopoly, partial de-monopolization, full competition and system integration. The main driving forces behind this development have been the political decision to liberate the telecom market and achieve full competition as well as rapid and diverse technical development, which includes the introduction of mobile communication, broadband and Internet. At the same time, the dependency on well functioning telecom in the public sector is constantly increasing due to political agendas such as agencies availability 24 hours 365 days (“24/7 agency”), use of telecom as a means of rationalization and increased internal efficiency as well as new usages in areas that previously were not using telecom in their daily routines. The public procurement of telecom has changed from being a relatively simple administrative issue through being of technical concern to becoming more and more of strategic importance, especially in case of outsourcing and/or procuring system integration from a prime contractor

Time-Rich and Time-Poor Consumer Behavior the Importance of Time in Market Segmention

Some individuals and families are time-rich and others are time-poor. The degree of time-poverty or richness is more or less objectively or subjectively experienced. Therefore, time is an important variable in market segmentation for defining the customer target groups, developing products and services and building the most efficient marketing channels

Knowledge Management Applied to Electronic Public Procurement

International audiencePublic procurement is a knowledge-based process. It involves, amongst others the knowledge of needs and trends, knowledge of concerned products or services, on their evolution in time and knowledge about actors able to offer them. The knowledge of political and legal context should be also considered as well as the environmental and social impact. Electronic procurement aims in reducing the amount of paper, but also in quicker and more knowledgeable processing of proposals and decision taking. We consider procurement activity as a part of a global organizational knowledge flow. This work goal is to analyze the whole process, identify the elements of knowledge necessary for successful purchase processing, to study the contribution of AI approaches and techniques to support the above elements. It is also to position e-procurement in the organizational knowledge flow

Conflicts in Public Procurement

During the last couple of years, there has been a tendency to include more and more political goals into public procurements, such as environmental and societal considerations. This can result in higher prices paid by the public sector compared with similar procurements in the private sector. The decision makers at local level are elected and should represent the interest of their communities and voters, which includes promoting regional/local companies and economic development. This task can sometimes get into conflict with public procurement law or the political goals of a central government. (original abstract

How Can Public Procurement Influence Business and Social Development?

Public procurement is a large part of any country's economy, independently of its geographical location, political inclination or level of development. On average, public procurements amount to 17% of GDP among the EU countries (Bolkenstein, Frits, 2004). Public procurement can be considered as a special case of business transactions between organizations. Public procurement is based on a different and stricter jurisdiction than transactions between private companies. Just as in the private sector, the public sector strives to get the best possible deal. However, profit is not the driving force in the public sector, which means that public procurements have other and broader consequences than the private sector's purchasing activities. Purpose This paper explores, investigates and analyses positive and negative  consequences of different aspects of public procurement and its influence on the market and as a tool to achieve political goals