mikaelad’s Blog

My case study is on google.com. Google is a worldwide search engine that earns it’s money from advertising and links such as e-mail, maps, images, news and more. From my case study i want to find out how google has made money over the last 10 years.

Google has an individual share price of $442.93 US (17.9.08). Google was started in California in 1996 by Larry page and Sergey Brin. Their search engine was originally nicknamed “BackRub” because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. Thousands of advertisers use Google AdWords program to promote their products and services on the web with targeted advertising, and the company believes AdWords is the largest program of its kind.

The website google.com was registered on 15 September 1997, and the company was incorporated as Google Inc.on 7 September 1998. The total initial investment raised for the new company amounted to almost US$1.1 million, including a US$100,000 check by Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems.

Financing and growth.

The first contribution, in 1998, was US$100,000  from Andy Bechtolsheim. Six months later major investors being rival venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital joined giving a much larger contribution. Google has also tried experimenting with other areas other than the Internet. On the 17th of January 2007, Google announced that they bought the radio advertising company ”dMarc”, that allows companies to advertise companies via an automated system. They have also experimented advertising through newspapers and magazines. In  2004 , Google acquired a company called Keyhole, Inc., which developed a product called Earth Viewer which was renamed in 2005 to Google Earth.

Shares and the stock exchange

19 August 2004, 19,605,052 shares were offered at a price of US$85 per share. Of those shares, 5,462,917 were offered by existing stockholders and the rest were floated to the public. The  vast majority of the 271 million shares remained under the control of Google. Yahoo!, a competitor of google, owned 8.4 million shares of Google as of 9 August 2004. On the 31st of October 2007  google shares hit US$700 for the first time. This fluctuation in the share price was due to the strong earnings in advertisement, and the launch of iGoogle (a personalised home page).

 

 

 

 

Bibliograpy

Wkipedia, the free encyclopedia,  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google, 17.9.08.

Google, www.google.com, 17.9.08

 

Student Learning Checklist

I think that people of the future will bank online. They will be able to pay online for everything that they do and be able to access their money where ever they are, because of having the internet on their phones.

Technology has made a difference to how people pay because now people don’t have to carry around massive amounts of cash, but instead they can just carry a credit or debit card with them. Paying bills and transfering money has also been made a lot more easy because of technology.

In the last 20 banking has changed because it is all computerised now. There are no more checks or bank books, instead they use cash cards. BPay has also been established. Everything to do with banking is now accessable on the internet. There are also a lot more bank branches.

The bad things about banking using technology are that people can hack into your e-mail and find out any passwords or PIN codes.

The changes in the last 20 years in banking have made life easier for many people, especially for the new generation of people that are just starting to bank now. For the older generation, the people who have always used cheque books and bank books, banking has been made more difficult as they have had to learn a whole new system.

To protect yourself online from scams and fraud you shouldn’t use debit cards, because if criminals intercept the information and drain your account and it takes longer to replenish the money than if you use a credit card.

If you use your primary e-mail address then hackers can get your username a password for that site. They can find out your password by using the “forgot your password” feature that is on many webistes.

The safety features that Internet explorer has are:

• Uses a zone-based security framework that groups sites based on certain conditions, including whether it is an Internet editable whitelist.
• Internet Explorer 7 introduced the phishing filter, that restricts access to phishing sites unless the user overrides the decision.

Fire fox:

• Firefox uses a sandbox security model, and limits scripts from accessing data from other web sites based on the same origin policy.
• Because Firefox has fewer and less severe publicly known unpatched security vulnerabilities than Internet Explorer

 

eBay

eBay is an online auction house, where you can sell almost anything. You can sell anything from an old model car or clothes to your sense of humor or a glass eye. The only thing that you can’t sell on there is a body part as that is illegal.

eBay was set up in 1995 by a computer programmer Pierre Omidyar as AuctionWeb. The first ever item sold on eBay was a broken laser pointer for $14.83. Chris Agarpao was hired as eBay’s first employee and Jeffrey Skoll was hired as the first president of the company in early 1996. eBay went public on September 21, 1998, and both Omidyar and Skoll became instant billionaires.

eBay was launched in Australia in October 1999 under the web address of www.ebay.com.au. In some countries, eBay requires sellers to use their PayPal service to help payment with the view that PayPal is the only choice that makes sense and so should be the only choice available. PayPal then adds its own transaction fees on top of eBay’s listing fees. In April 2008 eBay announced an introduction of a ‘Paypal only’ policy in Australia.

 

1. Some of the barriers for under 18′s shopping online are that the company doesn’t know how old you are, you don’t have a credit card that you can charge your purchases to, and you aren’t as aware of the different dangers of the internet.

2. To convert overseas prices into Australian prices you can use an online converter or with most websites when you go to pay for an item you can chose an option that changes the price into Australian Dollars.

3. The only way to accurately calculate the cost in Austeralian dollars is with a pre-set calculator because the decimal place can get to a large number and you wouldnt be able to type it into a calcurtalor or work it out mentally.

Coles online

 

 

1.  OVer the last 10 years Amazon has grown from the first e-commerce site only selling books to seeling DVDs, books, computers, clothes, sporting goods and much more. They were established in 1994, the company began as an online bookstore named “Cadabra.com”. Bezos renamed the company “Amazon” after the world’s biggest river. Amazon.com issued its initial public offering of stock on May 15, 1997, trading under the NASDAQ stock exchange symbol AMZN.

Amazon grew steadily in the late 1990s while other Internet companies grew blindingly fast. turned its first profit in the fourth quarter of 2002: U.S. $5 million, just 1¢ a share, on revenues of more than U.S. $1 billion, but the profit was symbolically important. The company remains profitable: 2003 net income was U.S.$35.3 million, U.S.$588.50 million in 2004, U.S.$359 million in 2005, and U.S.$190 million in 2006.

 In January 2007 Amazon launched Amapedia, a collaborative wiki for user-generated content to replace ProductWiki. In November 2007, Amazon launched Amazon Kindle, an e-book reader which downloads content over “Whispernet,” a free EV-DO wireless service on the Sprint Nextel network. Initial offerings include approximately 115,000 books, newspapers, magazines and blogs. The screen uses E Ink technology to reduce battery consumption. In January 2008 Amazon announced they would be rolling out their Amazon MP3 service to their subsidiary websites worldwide throughout the year.

2. A Kindle is used to download books, newspapers, blogs through wireless broadband connection. It takes less than a minute to fully download a full-length book. There is no back-lit and and uses electronic ink to mimic paper.

3.  This could revolutuionise the book industry because it is ‘always connected’ to what Amazon has to offer.

4. E-commerce is very convenient because all of the files that can be accessed by the Kindle come from the Internet. Althought they can be donlooaded straight onto the Kindle you can pick what files you want from the Internet and then download it off the Kindle. Selling the Kindle off of the Amazon website is a good idea because when people are looking for books they can see this and want to buy it because of the convenience of it.

5. (a) Ease of naviagtion- this is a very easy website to naviagtion because of all the options on the side and links that are attached.

(b) Layout of the home Page- very easy to find what you are looking for and see other things that take your interest. Most popular links easy to see on the home page.

(c) Method of payment- You can pay by credit card, or debit card, Amazon.com girft cards, cheques, money orders, cashiers cheques.

(d) Ease of Product selection- One the home page you can clearly click on the hyperlinked pages to go to see more details abou the product and payment details.

(e) return and refund- Returning and refunds should be completed within 03 of the original transaction. As long as the product is unopened or fulfilled you should be able to get a refund.

1. the important factors that need to be considered when setting up a new e-commerce site

• consider a range of issues before setting up the website.
• you can use your own website/e-mail system or you can join a e-market place.
• you need to find out what e-commerce software you will use and if it suits your company and customers.
• you need to consider if your product can be sold online or if it has to be sold directly to the customer.
• If there are any business partners that you should consider
• How will you price your products and how you will present them.
• You should think about how you are going to collect payment and how long delivery will take, security of your customers details, how you will arrange the catalogue

2.  Mukti Bontanicals is a B2B because they supply to health food stores, pharmacies and beaty therepists etc.,  which are businesses as well. They are a B2C because they sell wholesale to other cumstomers.