Case Study – PS3

New study into the PlayStation 3

Major Case Study – iPhone

Apple have recently launched the iPhone to add to their iPod and iTunes suite of products.

Internet Case Study – Amazon

Amazon.com is an American electronic commerce company based in Seattle, Washington. It was one of the first major companies to sell goods over the Internet and was one of the iconic stocks of the late 1990s dot-com bubble.

Founded as Cadabra.com by Jeff Bezos in 1994 and launched in 1995, Amazon.com began as an online bookstore. though it soon diversified its product lines, adding DVDs, Music CDs, Computer software, Video games, Electronics, Apparel, Furniture, Food and much more. Amazon has established separate websites in Canada, The UK, Germany, France, China and Japan it also ships globally on selected products.

A popular feature of Amazon is the ability for users to submit reviews to the web page of each product. Such rating scales provide a basic idea of the popularity and dependability of a product.

Amazon derives about 40% of its sales from affiliates, whom the call “Associates”. An Associate is essentually an independent seller or business that receives a commision for reffering customers to Amazon.

Internet case study – Napster

In 1999 an 18 year old college dropout, Shawn Fanning, changed music forever with a file sharing program. His idea was so simple, it was a program that allowed computer users to share and swap files, now known as p2p (peer to peer file-sharing). It was specially to swap and share music.

His response to the complaints of difficulty of finding music over the net was to stay up for 60 hours straight. In this time he wrote a source for a program that combined a music search function with a file sharing system.

The resulting Napster site was illegal downloading and in 2001 a judge ruled that Napster must stop, and must block all its files. In July 2003, the ownersof Napster, called Roxio, launched a Napster 2, now a paying music download site.

This was launched in the UK in 2004, but it was up against Apple iTunes and other paid-for music sites. The tiny company has 50 employess in Redwood City, California. It provides mp3 downloads, movies and games.

Internet case study – MySpace

MySpace is quartered in Santa Monica, California, USA.
It’s a social networking site offering an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos and videos.
According to Alexa Internet, it is currently (Nov 2006) the world’s fourth most popular English-language website, the sixth most popular website in any language.
Sept 8, 2006 had 100 million hits. 230,000 per day.
It was founded in July 2003 by Tom Anderson, current president and CEO, Chris De Wolfe and a small team of programmers.
It was partly owned by Intermix Media, which was bought in July 2005 for US$580million by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation (the parent company for Fox Broadcasting).
MySpace is home to various musicians, film-makers, celebrities and comedians who upload short films and other work directly onto their profile. These songs and films can also be embedded in other profiles, on interconnections which adds to MySpace’s appeal.

Internet case study – YouTube

Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal, founded YouTube.com.
The domain name “YouTube.com” was activated on Feb 15, 2005, and the website was developed over the following months. The creators offered the public a preview of the site in May 2005, and six months later, YouTube made its official debut.
In Aug 2005, Macromedia released Flashplayer 8, which provides a large increase in file quality compared to Flashplyer 7 and had a very small download size, decreasing download time. Using this, for the first time ever, users did not have to have a separate video player (e.g. Windows Media Player, or Quicktime). They could now watch decent video in a web page practically instantly.
The company began in a garage and had a commitment to offering free services. They needed outside financial backing. In Nov 2005, venture capital firm Sequoia Capital invested an initial $3.5 million. In April 2006 they put in an additional $8 million.
YouTube is currently (Nov 2006) one of the fastest growing websites, ranked as the 10th most popular website on Alexa, far outpacing even MySpace’s growth. July 16 2006, 100 million clips were viewed daily on YouTube, with an additional 65,000 new uploads every 24 hours. The site has almost 20 million visitors each month, according to Nielson / Net Ratings, where around 44% are female, 56% male, and the 12 to 17 year old age group is dominant. According to Hitswise.com, YouTube commands up to 64% of the UK online video market.
Oct 9 2006, Google announced they would buy the company for $1.65 billion, Google’s biggest purchase to date. YouTube will continue to operate independently, and the coampny’s 67 employees and its co-founders will continue working within the company.

Internet case study – Vlogs

vlogging saw a strong increase in popularity beginning in the year 2005. The Yahoo! videoblogging Group, once seen as the centre of the vlogging community, saw its membership increase dramatically in that same year. the growth in the popularity of Vlogs can be attributed to several factors, such as the release of a new generation of iPods capable of playing video files and the introduction of video into the iTunes store. The popularity of all types of internet based video also grew significantly in this same period. This is evident in the increase of internet traffic to sites such as YouTube. In late 2005-2006 vlogs became a significant contributor to clip culture.
1998 – Adrian Miles publishes a paper called Cinematic Paradigms for Hypertext
2000, Nov 27 – Adrian Miles posts his first (known) videoblog entry ever.
2004, Jan 1 – Steve Garfield launches his video blog and declares that 2004 would be the year of the video blog.
2004, June – Peter Van Dijck and Jay Dedman start the Yahoo! Videoblogging Group, which becomes the centre of a community of vloggers.
2004, Sept – iPodderX, the first desktop video aggregator is released.
2004, Dec – mefeedia.com is the first vlog directory to use an aggregator.
2005, Jan – VloggerCon, the first video blogger conference, is held in New York City.
2005, Feb – FreeVlog, a step-by-step guide to setting up a videoblog using free tools and services, launches.
2005, May – Steve Jobs (Apple) announces audio and video podcast support in iTunes.
2005, June – The Yahoo! Videoblogging Group grows to over 1,000 members.
2005, July – VlogMap.org launches using Google Maps and Google Earth to display vloggers worldwide.
2006, June – Vloggercon 2006 is held in San Francisco
2006, Nov – 2006 Vloggies, the first annual videoblogging awards, is held in San Francisco.

Internet Case Study – Podcasting

The concept for podcasting (using syndication feed inclosures) was proposed in a draft by Tristan Louis in 2000, and in a slighlty different form by Dave Winer. It had relatively few users for the first couple of years. Winer’s company then added a new feature called radio userland which assisted the technical side of ‘audioblogging’ as it was then known.
In June 2003, Stepehn Downes syndicated audio files using his Ed Radio application.
In Sept 2003, Winer created an audio RSS-with-enclosures feed for his Harvard Berkman Cebter colleague Christopher Lydon’s weblog, which had previously had a text-only RSS feed. Lydon, a former New York Times reporter and NPR talkshow host, had posted 25 in-depth interviews with bloggers, futurists and political figures, which Winer gradually released to the feed.
In Oct 2003 Winer and friends organized the first Bloggercon weblogger conference. CDs of Lydon’s interviews were distributed as an example of the high-quality MP3 content that enclosures could deliver. Kevin Marks demonstrated a script to download RSS enclosures and pass them to iTunes to transfer to an iPod.
After the conference, Curry offered his blog readers an RSS to iPod script that moved MP3 files from Userland Radio to iTunes, and encouraged other developers to build on the idea.
The user interface iPodderX (now called Transistr) was developed by August Trometer and Ray Slakinski and released in mid-September 1994. Shortly after iSpider rebranded their software as iPodder and released it as free software. It was then taken up by others and developed extensively, though the original project was terminated after Apple objected to trademark issues. It led to other interfaces such as Juice, CastPodder and PodNova.
The term “podcasting” was one of several terms for portable listening to audioblogs suggested by Ben Hammersley in The Guardian on Feb 12, 2004, referring to Lydon’s interview programmes. In Sept 2004, Dannie Gregoire also used the term to describe the automatic download and synchronization of audio content. The use of ‘podcast’ by Gregoire was picked up by podcasting evangelists such as Dave Slusher, Winer and Curry, and entered common usage.
By Oct 2004, detailed how-to podcast articles had begun to appear online, and a month later, libsyn launched the first Podcast Service Provider, offering storage, bandwidth and RSS creation tools, allowing anyone to create a podcast.
In Feb 2005, Carl Franklin, publisher of the audio talk show .NET Rocks!, started the first official podcast production company, Pwop Productions, which now produces podcasts for Microsoft and other companies. Also in Feb 2005, Australians Cameron Reilly and Mike Stanic started The Podcast Network (the first commercial podcast network). Reilly wanted the network to be the Time Warner of new media.
Following London radio station LBC’s successful launch of the first premium-podcasting platform, LBC Plus, there was widespread acceptance that podcasting had considerable commercial potential.
In Feb 2006, Ricky Gervais launched a new series of his popular podcast The Ricky Gervais Show. The second series of the podcast was distributed through audible.co.uk and was the first major podcast to charge customers to download, 95p per half-hour episode. The first series had been freely distributed by Positive Internet, and marketed through The Guadrian newspaper’s website, and had become the most successful podcast to date with an average 295,000 downloads per episode. Even now its paid for, the Ricky Gervais Show is regularly the most-downloaded podcast on iTunes.

Internet Case Study – The Internet

Who created the internet?
J.C.R. Licklider
He claims to have created the internet in August 1962.
He envisioned a “globally interconnected set of computers through which everyone could quickly access data and programs from any site”.
He was the head of DARPA which was started in October 1962.
In 1968, DARPA created the “Arpanet”, it was later renamed “internet”.
Tim Bernes Lee
In 1980 he devised a piece of software that could “keep track of all the random associations one comes across in real life and brains are supposed to be good at remembering but mine sometimes wouldn’t”. He called it “Enquire”.
Building on ideas he fashioned a “hypertext” notebook – which was basically internet links.
He created a coding system (html – hypertext markup language) and then the first “browser” which allowed viewers to view other webpages. Within five years the number of internet users jumped from 600,000 to 40 million. At one point it was doubling every 53 days.

Internet Case Study – Google

Google is a play on the word googol, which was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, and popularised in the book “Mathematics and the Imagination” by Kasner and James Newman. It refers to the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. Google’s use of the term reflects the company’s mission to organise the immense, seemingly infinite amount of information available on the web.
Google founders:
Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
They met at Stanford University as graduate students of computer science in 1995.
When:
In 1998 Google’s first data centre was set up in Larry’s dorm room.
Then:
Sergey Brin contacted potential partners who maight want to license the Google search technology, which they claimed was better than any other available.
No one was interested, though Yahoo! founder David Filo encouraged them to continue.
Page and Brin decided to make a go of it alone. They called their company Google Inc and managed to attract $1m of set-up funding.
In Sept 1998, Google Inc opened its doors in Menlo Park, California, and hired their first employee. They were answering 10,000 search queries each day.
By Feb 1999 they’d outgrown their premises and moved to University Avenue in Palo Alto. They now had 8 staff and answered 500,000 queries each day.