Tag Archives: Argentina

About 695 days ago Apps | Innovation

A Dutch Haven for App Developers

Courtesy: VentureBeat

In a few years time, Silicon Valley may not be the only haven for app developers. Tapulous co-founder Mike Lee, creator of the successful iPhone game Tap Tap Revenge, is establishing a new home for app developers in Amsterdam. READ MORE »

About 2456 days ago Setting Up a Website

Why You Need a Website

Nate White started selling fine custom coffee blends from the website of his company, West Coast Roasting Company, because he didn’t have a physical store and didn’t have any other way of easily reaching customers and letting them reach him. “I started selling roasted coffee before our business was set up,” says White, who is based in the Los Angeles area. “Once the business was set up, it quickly became obvious that the website was necessary to streamline things. It was taking five to eight e-mails back and forth to sell a pound of coffee to someone, and it was very difficult to keep track.” A website today is as essential as the name of your business, your phone number, or the façade of your retail store. Every business — from a restaurant to a biotech research firm to an industrial laundry — needs one. Yet research has indicated that about only 50 percent of small businesses in the U.S. actually have websites, with those numbers lower in less tech-savvy markets, according to a report by Internet consultant Peter Krasilovsky, of Krasilovsky Consulting, in Carlsbad, Calif. The Yankee Group puts that number close to 43 percent. Here are some compelling reasons why you need a website: Reason #1 – To set up a store front Many a small business has found that even if they can’t afford rent on Main Street, or in the Mall, they still can exist in cyber space and sell their goods and services. “The Internet has changed the way people shop. It’s no longer about getting in the car and driving down to the store, or even looking in the phone book,” says Mike Walton, of Mobius Designs, a Web design firm that focuses on Flash animation and scripting and has helped numerous small businesses create a Web presence. Walton also teaches website design at the British Columbia Institute of Technology. Having an address on the Internet gives you a place to describe your goods and customers a place to find you. Reason #2 –As a cheap way to advertise Creating your online presence needn’t be expensive. A very basic Web presence can be had for as little as $1,500, a standard website for $3,000-$5,000, and a full Flash site for $8,000 and up, Walton says. Compared to other forms of advertising, websites offer very good value to money spent, he adds. Reason #3 – Customer service A website is essential to establish your businesses’ credibility and to provide support for customers so that they can find easy answers to their questions about your business – such as where you are located, what products or services you sell, and how to contact you. This self-serve information for customers can help you, as a business owner, save time by leaving you free to focus on business. Reason #3 – Remain open 24/7 Few businesses keep their doors open around-the-clock. But a Web presence can make it seem as if your business does. Through click-on e-mail, customers, clients, or partners can contact you when it’s convenient for them. Potential customers can find out information about what you sell and how you sell it at all hours — on weekends, in the middle of the night, or in different time zones. Reason #4 – Think globally Having your signpost on the Web allows your business to do business all over the world. It lets potential customers in, say, Buenos Aires know what products you sell in Hoboken, N.J. A trick to expanding your business internationally is to offer translations of information on your website into the languages spoken in the countries you want to target (although this can get very expensive). Reason #5 – Launch promotions easily On the Web, it’s much simpler to change your product or service offerings, or your prices, than in a print catalog. You can also launch new promotions with a few keystrokes. Walton suggests adding fresh content and incentives to bring customers back for more. “If the website remains static, there’s no reason to return,” he says. “Weekly updates with web-only deals and coupons is a great way to keep your customers checking back if you don’t have any actual content to add. For a small company, a regularly-updated news page is often enough to keep you in the loop.”

About 4466 days ago PCs, Laptops, and Notebooks

It Slices! It Dices! It Doesn’t Do Either Very Well!

Road Warrior I have a complicated relationship with things electronic. On one hand, I want to carry as few of them as possible. I use a laptop not simply because it’s portable, but because it’s one compact piece of machinery instead of three bulky ones (monitor, keyboard, and computer). On the other hand, I tend to be suspicious of devices that claim to be two or three things in one. With certain notable exceptions (laptops, refrigerator/freezers, Ron Popeil’s Veg-O-Matic), the two or three features are usually so compromised that you’re better off with separate devices, each doing what it does best. And so I was torn when, despite the love and respect I had for my cell phone and my suspicions about multitasking gadgets, my eye began to wander. I saw people with devices that are cell phones, PDAs, and wireless E-mail modems all in one, and I longed for one. I wanted to be able to get my E-mail on the road without having to lug my laptop or log on to someone else’s computer. I wanted to have all my E-mail addresses and phone numbers and my calendar right there on my phone. And so, last month, I cheated on my beautiful, faithful Nokia. My first affair was with the Sprint PCS TP-3000 ($399). Here is a cell phone no larger than my Nokia that includes a PDA and provides Internet and E-mail access. I left my Nokia at home and ran off to Buenos Aires with the Sprint PCS. I checked my E-mail during a stopover in the Miami airport. There were six E-mail messages waiting for me. It was beautiful. Then I set about composing my replies. To do that you use a stylus and an alphabet keyboard that you tap, just as you would on a Visor. (A Graffiti-like handwriting-recognition function isn’t available on this model.) The difference is that the Sprint phone doesn’t provide the Visor’s reassuring chirp to acknowledge your selection. So half the time, you’ve moved on to the next tap when you realize the last one didn’t take, and you have to backtrack. To speed things up, you find yourself talking in license-plate shorthand. I actually caught myself writing “4 U” instead of “for you.” PU! After composing two or three messages, I gave up on capital letters and completely abandoned punctuation. The other problem was that everything — calendar, alphabet keyboard, E-mail display — was maddeningly small. Plus, I had to press fairly hard, not just tap, to have my pokes register. By the end of the third reply, I was bringing down my stylus like an ice pick, and people were starting to stare. A little Argentine girl wandered over to watch. “Es una telÉfono cellular con E-mail,” I explained. She giggled and ran away. You should, too. By the time I got to the fourth E-mail, I’d had all I could take. It was taking me a good 15 minutes to compose each reply. It was as though time had gone at once forward and back: suddenly I had the capacity to send E-mail messages through thin air, but I had to revert to Morse code to write them. On the fifth and sixth messages, I decided to just call the senders and leave phone replies instead. I shut down the browser and began dialing the phone. “Battery low,” said the TP-3000, and within minutes it shut down completely. Sending and receiving E-mail eats up a phone’s battery charge surprisingly swiftly. And I had forgotten to bring along the charger. So with a paragon of wireless-communication innovation in my pocket, I went to stand in line with the Argentines at the pay phones. And get this: the TP-3000 is apparently the best of its class. CNET.com named it the Best Web Phone, and Etown.com voted it Cell Phone of the Year. It seems it’s not simply the individual product that’s lacking but rather the entire breed. For now anyway, a cell phone can’t double as a satisfying PDA or E-mail-composing device. But what if you went in the other direction and tried to get a PDA to function as a cell phone and a wireless E-mail device? That is exactly what Handspring has set out to do. You can now buy a VisorPhone module ($299) that slides into the back of the Visor Platinum model ($299) and turns the popular PDA into a cell phone. You can then buy an OmniSky Minstrel S Wireless Modem ($299), which slides into the back of that same Visor Platinum (once you’ve removed the phone module) and lets you send and retrieve E-mail and browse the Internet. That’s what I tried next. My husband, Ed, and I took the Visor and its two sidekicks around town with us one weekend while we ran errands. The phone module worked nicely, though speaking into an organizer and tapping on pictures of phone buttons lacked the considerable aesthetic charm of using an actual cell phone. Plus, you tend to press the gadget into your cheek as you speak, which leaves smears of sunscreen, makeup, sweat, and what have you on your PDA screen. You also press buttons you don’t mean to press. Ed was checking our home phone messages and pressed the 3 key with his cheek, inadvertently erasing the message he was listening to. I have faith that one day soon there will be a single gadget that does it all, does it all well, and does it all well for a modest sum. Here’s the big reason I wouldn’t go this route: it doesn’t really cut down on your total gadget load. The VisorPhone module weighs three ounces. Ed’s new cell phone weighs about that much and is about the same size. The only real advantage to using a Visor PDA with a VisorPhone module — as opposed to a PDA and a freestanding cell phone — is that your address book is right there in your phone, enabling you to look someone up and call that person at the same time, on the same device. (That’s a function you can already perform on some existing cell phones, but I digress. …) I also tried out the OmniSky Minstrel S (the wireless modem). I started by trying to call up Web search engine Google. When I hit the Visor’s “ABC” icon to bring up the tappable alphabet keyboard, it kept giving me something else, a Go To menu. I finally figured out that the sync between the icons on my screen and whatever lies beneath them was off in some places by a couple millimeters. Hitting the E anywhere left of the center of the key gave me a W; hitting the A gave me a Tab. I imagine most Visors don’t have such a problem. I must have had a lemon. What I would rather have is a BlackBerry. The BlackBerry RIM 957 ($499) is a combined PDA and wireless E-mail and Internet modem. (It doesn’t function as a phone.) It has a three-inch-wide keyboard with real keys that you actually press, which makes writing E-mail and calendar entries relatively painless. (I said relatively.) It’s so well designed that using it is almost intuitive. I rarely had to consult the instructions. And the combined weight of a three-ounce cell phone and a five-ounce BlackBerry is four ounces lighter than a Visor with its separate E-mail and phone modules. Alas, unlimited wireless E-mail and Internet service on the BlackBerry costs $49 to $59 a month (prices vary according to the device used), which is a little steep for yours truly. (The monthly fee for the Visor’s E-mail module, by comparison, is $29 to $39, depending on whether you prepay.) I have faith that one day soon there will be a single gadget that does it all, does it all well, and does it all well for a modest sum. In the meantime, I am back with my Nokia and only occasionally indulge in BlackBerry fantasies. When she’s not queuing up with Argentines at pay phones, Mary Roach can be reached at roach@sfgrotto.org. Please e-mail your comments to editors@inc.com.

About 4556 days ago E-Commerce

How Entrepreneurship and Democracy Affect Internet Development

Rarely has a technology had a greater effect on the spread of the global marketplace than the emergence of the Internet. Many businesses have adapted their marketing and distribution strategies to accommodate a world of commerce that is spelled with three W’s. But doing business in other countries is not always as seamless as the click of a mouse might make it appear. The speed at which the Internet develops can vary from country to country, and this has serious implications for the way in which a company manages its e-commerce approach. Mauro F. Guillé n of the Wharton School and Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and Sandra L. Suá rez of Temple University’s Department of Political Science explore the economic and structural factors that affect the growth of the Internet in different countries in their paper “Developing the Internet: Entrepreneurship and Public Policy in Comparative Perspective.” The professors analyze data on public policy as well as the conditions for entrepreneurship in 142 countries, and then take a more in-depth look at these components in Singapore, Ireland, Spain, and Argentina. “The paper essentially argues that the Internet has not diffused throughout the world in a random way, but rather that there are systematic patterns to its spread,” explains Guillé n. “We found that those systematic patterns don’t have to do with privatization or competition in the telecommunications sector, but they do have to do with entrepreneurship and with how democratic a country is. The better the conditions for entrepreneurship and the more democratic freedoms exist, the faster the Internet develops.” Guillé n and Suá rez start with the numbers. According to their research, the percentage of the population that regularly uses the Internet ranges from more than 50% in Scandinavia to less than 1% in many underdeveloped African, Central American, and South Asian countries. The number of computers linked to the Internet is also uneven, ranging from more than one for every 10 people to less than one for every 10,000. Through detailed analysis of four countries, ranging from Singapore as the most successfully wired, to Ireland, Spain and finally Argentina, where the Internet is the least developed, Guillé n and Suá rez’s paper, in part, confirms conventional wisdom. “We found that the richer the country, the greater the accessibility of the Internet,” explains Guillé n. “And the more developed the telecommunications infrastructure, the more developed the Internet.” But the authors’ conclusions regarding public policy are more surprising. Most people would likely argue that the more competitive the telecommunications environment, the lower the prices would be, leading to more widespread Internet use. but Guillé n and Suá rez discover that’s not necessarily true. The four countries studied differ in terms of the nature of public policy towards telecommunications and the Internet. Ireland and Argentina, for example, are liberal and procompetition, while Singapore and Spain have been more interventionist. Even so, Argentina is the least Internet-savvy and Singapore is the most. Internet development in Singapore, states the paper, has been very fast even though the government has implemented less-than-ideal policies. “For example, state intervention in the forms of regulation and content censorship has had detrimental effects on Internet use.” Argentina, on the other hand, has full privatization and government deregulation. But while the systematic patterns of public policy don’t always matter in the development of the Internet, Guillé n and Suá rez discover that conditions for entrepreneurship, such as the ability to raise capital and whether or not the environment is risk-free, do have a consistent effect. The country comparisons reveal that Singapore and Ireland have strong conditions for entrepreneurs, even though, especially in the case of Singapore, the state has assumed the role of leading entrepreneur. Meanwhile, the conditions for entrepreneurship in Spain and Argentina are weak. Telecom firms and other large domestic firms and business groups play a prominent role there. Guillé n and Suá rez conclude, “Internet development benefits from institutional and legal conditions favoring entrepreneurship.” Adds Guillé n: “I think this confirms conventional wisdom, but it’s still useful because nobody has demonstrated this before for a large number of countries.” Guillé n and Suá rez argue that the statistical and comparative analyses reported in their paper indicate that Internet development is “a complex phenomenon shaped not only by public policy and conditions for entrepreneurship but also by specific contingencies in each country.” More research is needed, they say, to document and interpret how the Internet has developed in different countries. Guillé n says he is already moving ahead with further research on Internet development and related issues. To start with, he is building a better database of information on the 142 countries over several years as a way to capture change in their circumstances. “I’m also looking at how specific companies go about selling their products in other countries,” Guillé n explains. “I want to understand how Internet markets develop in different parts of the world and then see how companies should react in order to be profitable.” All materials copyright © 2000 of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.