Technology Definition - Assignment Example

Part Technology definition The technology that has been chosen for analysis is the “Twitter”. It can be termed as a social networking service usedto send micro-blogs. DMonte (2009) defines that it is a free online service which lets you send a small message (max limit 140 characters) to a website where it is available to be read by everyone or a selected list of people. The selected list of people are called followers who want to read the regular update of statuses or “tweets”, done by the account holder. The first prototype of this unique concept was built within a span of two weeks in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, who is the current Chairman of the company. Then launched it on the internet in August that year, to judge the response from the people for such a technology in which they can let the whole world know what they are doing in their lives by simply sending micro-blogs. The Twitter technology is also equipped with the concept of receiving tweets on mobile phones in form of messages. Arthur (2008) states that Twitter is often called the “SMS of the Internet” and the character limit of twitter is also chosen in accordance with that of the SMS. McIntyre (2009a) states that since Twitter can be used by PCs and mobile devices both and it offers a very small blog message of maximum 140 characters, due to this advantage it has become one of the biggest mediums globally for sharing real-time data. The size of the messages have also decreased the problem of information overload on the Web. Payne (2008) states that the technology that was used to handle messages from 2007 to 2008 was of a Ruby persistent queue server called Starling. Venners (2009) states that in 2009, they changed the technology and started using software written in Scala. Part 2: 2.1 Trend of Business in the next 5 years Twitter has been one of the most successful social networking services and has gained its name among the top league including Facebook, video sharing platform of YouTube etc. McIntyre (2009a) states that according to a research by Wall Street Journal; Twitter has had an increase from 2 million users to 32 million users since last year only. There have been some internet measurements services stating that the figures are continuing to grow from 50% to 100% month after month. With such a huge and increasing market; Twitter and other businesses have a great future lined up. McIntyre (2009d) states that consumer feedback plays an important role to any organization in improving their products. Companies spend a great deal of their resources in market research and collecting consumer feedback. Tweets are a quick way of analyzing the customer’s satisfaction level with the product and can prove to bring a new life to the line of products offered by the organization and hence their business. For e.g. large organizations like Procter & Gamble have recently found new ways of acquiring feedback from their consumers and it can be forecasted that more companies will adapt this method of improving their business. McIntyre (2009b) states that large organizations and small businesses will realize the power of tweeting and make use of it to capture their specific target audiences for e.g. the diaper company can send tweets to their local area mothers regarding the special discounts. A time may come when oil and gas companies can tweet people when the price of gas falls down by a few points so that customers can benefit from it and hence increase the company’s business. 2.2 Will this technology matter? Payne (2008) states that Twitter has been ranked as the third largest social networking; coming in after Facebook and MySpace. It has been recorded that 7 million users have registered at Twitter till April 2009; this number is increasing by half a million every month. With this kind of global impact, Twitter technology has a great future ahead and will continue to influence users around the world. Businessmen and even politicians are thinking of new ways of how to make use of this considerably new technology. With reference to the arguments regarding the IT technology by Carr (2003), it can be stated that Twitter technology will continue to have its global impact because it is a free service and does not have any overheads related to it. IT vendors worry about price deflation but the companies should have no such concern here as this technology is a free service and has no price of regular update regarding their products. King (2009) states that Todd Chaffee, one of the board members of Twitter, forecasts that the company will make money from e-commerce since now users want to buy products from Twitter directly as they receive many product recommendations there. Part 3: 3.1 Potential Business Benefit/risk of the technology to the sector Benefits of Twitter Lynch (2009) states that it is a great and convenient way to promote ones business since people get attracted to small catchy advertisements rather than long emails filling up their email inboxes. This kind of micro-blogging is faster than writing promotional emails therefore reduces the time of the company’s resource. McIntyre (2009b) states that since Twitter is a person-to-person interaction service, therefore it is a great opportunity for the small business owners to establish their clientele. McIntyre (2009b) states that large organization also benefit from this technology by analyzing their customer locations and buying habits with respect to their feedbacks shown in tweets. McIntyre (2009d) states that target audience can be focused and satisfied accordingly. Risks McIntyre (2009b) states that negative campaigning can be initiated regarding any campaign or organization, and such use of social media is very difficult to cease. An organization cannot entirely depend on this medium for advertising its products as there tends to be too much noise at times, in-terms of receiving spam of very frequent update of one’s Twitter account. In this situation of spam emails, the relevant information can be easily ignored by the user 3.2 Intelligent Exploiter Framework for analysis of the technology ICT (Information Communication technology) component can be used to analyze Twitter technology. It is one of the best online services for people to interact and communicate with each other. Due to the awareness of this technology, businessmen have also come in the picture and give information about their services and products so that they can increase their clientele. Since this technology has a global impact, therefore information can be transferred from one part of the world to other customers in the other end within seconds. 3.3 Create whole new markets or dramatically alter the structure of existing markets? It can be stated that the existing markets will be dramatically changed as companies will start investing on online advertisements more than outdoor advertising. McIntyre (2009c) states that the estimates for global outdoor advertising sales amounted to 30$ billion this year. However, one of the great weaknesses of outdoor advertising is that the results are very difficult to quantify as people merely remember what they see on the billboards. It is also difficult to calculate how many people actually saw a particular billboard or newspaper ad. Therefore the success rate and effectiveness of such a huge amount of investment cannot be calculated. Twitter technology provides a solution for this and makes it possible to make these situations measurable. Since Twitter supports mobile technology, therefore the instantaneous feedbacks from customers can be received via Twitter. Feedbacks via Twitter can also be received by the companies in correspondence to their online product campaigns. It is a quicker way than developing questionnaires and feedback forms which are rarely filled out by customers. This will revolutionize the concept of marketing and decrease outdoor advertisement investments. References Arthur C, (2008), Making the most of Twitter, The Guardian, [Online] Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/may/08/socialnetworking.twitter (Accessed: 30th Nov 2009) DMonte L, (2009), Swine flus tweet tweet causes online flutter, Business Standard. [Online] Available at: http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/swine-flu%5Cs-tweet-tweet-causes-online-flutter/356604/ (Accessed: 30th Nov 2009). King R, (2009), Twitter on Ruby. [Online] Available at: http://blog.evanweaver.com/articles/2009/09/24/ree/. (Accessed: 30th Nov 2009) Lynch C.G., (2009), Potential for Business Users, CIO, [Online] Available at: http://www.cio.com/article/420763/Twitter_s_Potential_for_Business_Users?page= (Accessed: 1st Dec 2009) McIntyre D.A., (2009a), The Future of Twitter, 24/7 WALL ST, TIME, [Online] Available at: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1901188_1901207,00.html (Accessed: 1st Dec 2009) McIntyre D.A.,(2009b), Hyper-Local Marketing, 24/7 WALL ST, TIME, [Online] Available at: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1901188_1901207_1901197,00.html (Accessed: 30th Nov 2009) McIntyre D.A., (2009c), Making Old-World Advertising Work, 24/7 WALL ST, TIME, [Online] Available at: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1901188_1901207_1901199,00.html (Accessed: 1st Dec 2009) McIntyre D.A., (2009d), Changing Telecommunications, 24/7 WALL ST, TIME, [Online] Available at: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1901188_1901207_1901204,00.html#ixzz0YSxXULO1(Accessed: 30th Nov 2009) Carr N, (2003), IT Doesnt Matter, Harvard Business Review Payne A, (2008), Announcing Starling, Twitter. [Online] Available at: http://web.archive.org/web/20080120141113/http://dev.twitter.com/2008/01/announcing-starling.html. Retrieved 2009-01-11  (Accessed: 30th Nov 2009) Venners B, (2009), Twitter on Scala, Artima Developer. [Online] Available at: http://www.artima.com/scalazine/articles/twitter_on_scala.html. (Accessed: 1st Dec 2009) Read More