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ZOOMING IN
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REPORTS
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TREND HUNTER
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EBCENTER KNOWLEDGE
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USEFUL INFORMATION
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ZOOMING IN
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Europe fines Microsoft
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After a five-year investigation, the European Commissioner, Mari Monti, concluded that Microsoft violated legislation on European Union antitrust law and slapped it with a 497 million euro fine.
Moreover, he gave the software giant 120 days to disclose to its competitors all the technical information that will allow non-Microsoft servers to achieve full interoperability with the Windows Operating System.
Lastly, Microsoft has 90 days to launch a version of Windows without Media Player. These measures will only be applied to the European Economic Zone (EU, Norway, Island and Liechtenstein) so as not to come into conflict with other competition authorities.
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Commentary by Ramon Casadesús, IESE professor
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Microsoft’s Fine: a Boost to Innovation
Can the 497 million euros that Brussels condemned Microsoft to pay for abuse of its dominant position dissuade the company from carrying on its current practices? Ramon Casadesús, IESE professor, analyzes the consequences of the European sanction to Microsoft.
Full Story
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REPORTS
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Senior Citizens also use the Internet
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Title: Older Americans and the Internet
Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project
Date: 25th March 2004
Abstract: The Internet knows no age, at least in America where 22% of those over 65 usually go online. That translates into a total of 8 million Americans and a growth of 47% in the past four years. These are data from the report “Older Americans and the Internet”, by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
The study shows that, at present, the gender ratio among wired senior citizens is 50% men and 50% women, unlike the proportion in 2000 when about 60% of over 65s were men and 40% were women.
The profile of online seniors is still predominantly white, highly educated and in the higher income bracket.
Fully 94% of wired seniors have sent or received e-mail (compared to 91% of all Internet users). 66% of them have looked for health or medical information online; 47% have bought something on the Internet; 41% have made travel reservations online, and 20% have made use of online banking.
In spite of this, many over 65s, who live their lives far removed from the Internet, know few people who are connected and cannot see why they should spend time and money learning how to use a computer and surf the Web.
Full Story
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Spanish Publicity Online, a Mature Market
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Title: Estudio sobre inversión publicitaria en medios interactivos. Resultados del año 2003
Source: Interactive Advertising Bureau Spain & PricewaterhouseCoopers
Date: March 2003
Abstract: The online publicity market in Spain shows unmistakeable signs of growth according to the “Study on publicity investment in interactive media” that PwC and the Internet Auditing Bureau (IAB) carry out each year based on the analysis of the income of the main online media. In 2003, the total volume of publicity investment in interactive media rose to 72.6 million euros, almost 13% more than in 2002.
The so-called traditional advertisers make up 44% of this investment, an increase of 22% on the 2002 figure. The most outstanding among those were the finance sector with 10.8% of the total investment, followed by the automobile sector with 7.3% and the tourist sector with 4.7%.The study attributes this rising tendency in online advertising media to TV saturation.
The report also reveals that while the integrated formats in the web page (banners, buttons) are the ones that make up most of the income with 47.23% of all advertising, the floating formats (layers and pop-ups) are catching up with 16.6%. Sponsorships took in 14% of the investment and e-mail marketing stands in fourth place with 6.36%.
Full Story
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TREND HUNTER
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Online Music Everywhere
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The number of companies eyeing the creamy cake of the online music business is growing and Apple already has 50% of it.
iTunes, Jobs’s online music shop, must not only fight off Sony, EMI or the now-legitimate Napster, but also the ever-present Microsoft (through MSN), and even other companies that in principal have nothing to do with the music business such as Starbucks cafés or Wal-Mart, the giant retailer.
To all of those we have to add Eventim.music, an online shop, opened just last week at the fair in Hanover by the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder. This German web, now in operation, charges 0.99 € per song, while its main competitor in Europe, another German music company Popfile.de, owned by Universal Music, charges 1.49 € per download.
These prices are above those charged in the United States, where a price war is looming: Wal-Mart has already announced its songs at 0.65 € each as against Apple’s at 0.72 €, which is what Starbucks want to charge.
As far as the technology used is concerned, iTunes has bet heavily on Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), a clear improvement on MP3. Napster and EMI use WMA, while Sony is developing its own technology, which will more than likely be compatible with WMA. It seems that the battle will be Apple against the rest.
News in Business Week and Navegante.com
Online Music Shops: iTunes, Wal-Mart, Napster and eventim.music
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The Legal Problems of RFID
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In the United States a debate is breaking out over the legal problems posed by the use of RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), identification technology that promises to take over from the bar code.
Retail giants like the US supermarket chain Wal-Mart or Metro, the German chain, have plans to use RFID technology on a large scale to monitor their products from the moment they leave the manufacturing plant to the second they reach the cash register, although nothing would stop them from going even further.
This has aroused the suspicion of some people, fearful that companies might track shoes, clothes and even money and make use of this information.
At least three North American states (California, Utah and Missouri) have started to develop bills to mitigate the possible privacy problems related with this technology.
The distributors that already use this technology defend themselves by saying that it is strictly used for internal logistic procedures, while experts clarify that the tracking tags can be disconnected once they leave the shop if they are so programmed.
Articles in Kalsey Consulting
News in News.com, Internet News and Wired
Blog in MIT
Further information in Electronic Privacy Information Center and Caspian
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Spim: Instant Spam
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Spammers do not just limit themselves to electronic mail; they are beginning to use the advantages of multi-channel distribution. For this reason the spim or IM spam (unsolicited electronic mail sent via instant messaging services) is becoming very worrying indeed.
According to a Ferris Research study in 2003, more than one thousand million messages were sent that could be called spim, which means four times more than the previous year. The company expects the number to quadruple this year too.
This trend is a direct result of the growing popularity of instant messaging: in 2003, 582,000 million instant messages were sent worldwide, according to a study made by the Radacati Group.
Although the volume of spim is still nowhere near the spam that is sent over the Internet each day (Ferris Research put the figure at two thousand million rubbish mails), there are already some anti-spim products on the market that are used to slow down the annoying unsolicited messages.
Definition in The Word Spy and Wi-Fi Planet
News in Time and PCWorld
Articles in CNet
Study in Ferris Research (Payment Service)
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EBCENTER KNOWLEDGE
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Protection, a Strategic Value
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José María Insua, PwC Director
Security is an essential element for a company’s reputation. An error, like the loss of key information, can ruin the good name of a company. That is why organisations must stop thinking of security as the exclusive concern of the IT department and include it in their strategies.
Full Story
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How to synchronise Strategy with Information Systems and create Synergies
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At present there is a heated debate going on about the strategic value of CIT, which some people qualify as commodities. During a continuity session that the e-business Center dedicated to clearing up doubts on this controversy, Sandra Sieber, an IESE Professor, assured us that information technologies create competitive advantages, put that these depend on the use we make of CIT.
Full Story
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Keys to Online Loyalty
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On 17th, 18th and 19th March Barcelona hosted 2nd Barcelona International Marketing Meeting (BIMM), a meeting that hopes to be an international reference of marketing. In that second Meeting, BIMM attracted more than 2,000 professionals. The e-business Center was represented at the event by research assistant Carles Cabré, who presented a paper about online customer loyalty.
Full Story
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USEFUL INFORMATION
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Special Fee at Internet Global Congress 2004 and Free Ticket Raffle
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From 10th to 14th May, Barcelona will host the sixth Internet Global Congress (IGC), a meeting point in which experts from all over the world will take part. They will analyse the impact of the Internet on companies, leisure, consumer applications, society, politics and culture. Among its more than 200 specialised conferences, the IGC 2004 will have Zhan Ye, an expert on online games, and the visionary Douglas Van Houwelling, President of Internet2 project. Thanks to an agreement reached between e-business Center and the IGC, all the subscribers to our newsletter will get 10% reduction on the entrance price. If you are interested in this discount you have to enrol as a member of e-business Center PwC&IESE.
EBCenter will raffle a free ticket among those who enrol for the event.
Registration
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Copyright 2008 e-business Center PricewaterhouseCoopers & IESE Business School.
Copyright 2008 e-Business Center PwC&IESE. All rights reserved. This document can be redistributed, retransmited or copied without modifying for any but commercial use. This copyright comment and the URL http://www.ebcenter.org must be included at all times.
In accordance with the wording of the Organic Act 15/99, IESE, Universidad de Navarra (hereinafter IESE), informs that the Personally Identifiable Information (Personal Information) used in this communication, is included in a computerized file of which IESE is ultimately responsible for. If you wish to exercise your rights of access, modification, cancellation and/or opposition, you can send an electronic mail to ebcenter@iese.edu
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