May, 2002 | The Wiglaf Journal

Attacking Markets: Agent Based Systems, Energy Markets, and Adica

By Tim J. Smith, PhD | May 31, 2002

When new ventures begin, they take one of two courses. Along one path, the venture identifies a promising market opportunity then builds a business to attack it. Along the second path, the venture tinkers with an idea then discovers a business opportunity to exploit it. Identifying a known market opportunity then building a business to…

Mobile Telephony and Computing: Moving Down the Product Lifecycle

By Tim J. Smith, PhD | May 29, 2002

At the Mobile Wednesday event last week, the speakers approached at mobile telephony and computing with distinctly different viewpoints yet both were clearly in the maturity phase of the product lifecycle. AT&T’s Rod Nelson encouraged us to purchase more features that would make our mobile phone our own in his personalization campaign, while FedEX’s Ken…

Advanced Computing, Part 2: Markets and Cash

By Tim J. Smith, PhD | May 23, 2002

If there is anything this economic downturn has taught me, it is the importance of cash. Businesses rush to cash opportunities and employees seek the highest bidder within acceptable constraints. While I am impressed with the new technologies that are finally coming to market, we have to ask if they will bring the same economic…

Advanced Computing, Part 1: Markets and Skill Sets

By Tim J. Smith, PhD | May 22, 2002

For years, the major advance of corporate computing has been the dissemination of OO programming or ERD and relational databases. When it came to advanced computing, firms would turn to SAS to do a little statistical analysis. Data warehouses came on board with means to slice and dice data for decision making, yet their cost…

Customer Lifecycles

By Tim J. Smith, PhD | May 13, 2002

Much to their detriment, many businesses in B2B markets consider issues of consumer buying behavior theory irrelevant. While much of customer lifecycle theory originates in B2C marketing, it can be profitably mapped into B2B marketing and sales. The basic sequence according to consumer buying behavior can be listed as follows: Goal Activation, Awareness, Attribute Learning,…

More on Website Design

By Tim J. Smith, PhD | May 7, 2002

While some design firms produce nice looking sites using Flash, these same techniques force limitations that call their value into doubt. Specifically, the limitations affect search engines, multi-windows, and CAP technology. On the search engine front, web crawlers and search engines have difficulty finding text within web sites that rely heavily upon frames, Flash, and…

Texture of a Site – Norman Inc.

By Tim J. Smith, PhD | May 1, 2002

Websites are an evolving creature. Initially, they were simple informational sites. They contained gobs of content describing the corporate venture, the principals, products, and other aspects of a business. As time has gone by, firms have moved from an information posting viewpoint to a brochureware viewpoint, and now beyond. The future of websites appears to…