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Why use web 2.0? (Part 2)
By: Kevin Xu
What is so special about web 2.0 anyways that makes entrepreneurs and startups around the world eager to profit from it? Sure it is the newest and fastest form of information on the internet. It is also the fastest growing concept on the internet and constantly changing. It sounds all nice and dandy but why do we want to grow a business around it? Why can’t we just set up a shop and plain out sell our product/service?
The way I see it, the businesses that don’t have an online component fail. That’s not to say every business needs to have a website (depends on what kind of business) but most should. If you set up a shop in the local town, the chance that you are known out of town is slim. The idea decades ago of setting up shop, making lots of money, and then starting a franchise with shops set up all over the country is gone.
Dell made it big because it was the first company to sell computers exclusively online. Before you had to go to a store and some saw that as a hassle. Other companies now also do the same thing, sell their items via an online store. Almost every large store has one: Best Buy, Walmart, Target, etc. This is called E-Commerce and it is the best thing to happen to these businesses. Only the small stores that you never hear of don’t have a website thus they will never make it big. There are some stores that only have a website to sell things and they make far more money than any small physical store. Think about it, no rental fees, no workers to pay, it’s just you and whatever you are trying to sell.
But we don’t want to sell an item so how are we going to use web 2.0? It is clear to us that we want to start a service online. Being born in the technology revolution, we understand the power of web 2.0 and how a simple search engine (Google) can have a stock skyrocket to $700 or a video service (Youtube) can be worth up to $1.65 billion. These prices actually don’t surprise me because I expected them to boom. Many analysts think that we are at the end of the ‘dot-com’ bubble but I believe that it is only beginning. How the internet has changed the economy, culture, and politics is fasinating and in only a couple of years. There is much more to come.
Stay tuned for Part 3- What problems can we solve?
Previously:
Why form a startup? (Part 1)
~Kevin X
January 9th, 2008 at 2:42 am
Hi Kevin,
Your description on various advantages to setup a website and the benefits of Internet are briefly explained but I didn’t got the point, it is the Web 2.0, where is that information Sir?
January 9th, 2008 at 3:21 am
Hello there. Sorry if that information wasn’t clear. I explained it better in this post here and assumed most people knew what it was about.
In layman’s terms, web 2.0 is the user-generated social-interaction of the web and creating and using something like that will hopefully lead to a successful business and getting the world to hear us.
February 8th, 2008 at 4:12 am
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