Online Distractions

Technology has been incredible in increasing efficiency for businesses. Blackberries and laptops allow people to do work from outside the office, the Internet has created a global market, and social networking sites have enabled people all over the world to communicate. And though these innovations are incredible, they have created plenty of distractions, for the average person.

I once heard that the combination of fantasy football and march madness have cost businesses billions of dollars in downtime. It would not shock me to hear that Facebook costs even more. It's interesting to see in an office, when you walk by computer screens, how many people are doing work and how many are on external sites.

Then of course, there is the worst distraction of all, porn. Pornographic sites occupy over one third of the Internet. And though there are plenty of spam and website blocking technologies, there are just way too many sites, and ways around the blockers.

Businesses have taken many measures to stop these distractions, by blocking certain sites, and even spying on a persons search history. Though that is very illegal and an invasion of ones privacy, a company should have the right to see what a person is doing with company property and on company time. Though one can't expect to have employees focused on their work for 8 hours a day without wanting to take a break, these distractions cost companies way too much in downtime and can cause a lot of harm to a company.

Scalping Online

The traditional scalper used to sell his tickets on the street corner before games. Now more and more, we see people being able to sell their tickets online, making event tickets a lot harder to come by. More and more websites are popping, like Stubhub and Ticketmaster, that purchase tickets directly from the teams and selling them online at a profit, some even getting exclusivity rights to sell all the tickets.

The big issue now is that more and more people are buying tickets for the sole purpose of scalping them online. What used to be just a few guys, has now turned into a huge business. Sites like eBay and Craigslist make it so easy for people to sell their tickets safely and securely. With sports organizations realizing that this is such a big trend, they launched their own websites allowing people to resell their tickets, giving the team a cut. While this makes it much easier to purchase tickets, it raises the prices, to the point where the average fan has a very hard time purchasing tickets.

With tickets purchased directly already being ridiculously high, having to purchased scalped tickets just makes it much worse. Having tickets available online is great, when you need them, but is it really fair to have people making a profit off another persons products?

Online businesses killing the retail industry

In the past, anything I order off the internet is usually something that is not available in Quebec or in retail stores. Usually they consist of items like NFL apparel, DVD collections, or computer software. However, the other day, I ordered a first book off Amazon.com, making my first online purchase of something that was available to me in retail. Turns out that even after shipping costs, the total ended up being the same (even less in certain places), than buying it at a retail store.

The main reason I believe people are starting to buy more things online, is convenience. The idea of having a good delivered directly to your house, for relatively the same cost is very appealing. I don’t particularly enjoy going out to shop for certain goods, so being able to make purchases online really appeals to me. I think I would still be uncomfortable buying high involvement products online, like cars or even clothes, but buying smaller items is a lot more convenient online.

Over the years, many people, myself included, were uncomfortable making online purchases, for security reasons. Now with secure web-based payment programs, like PayPal, people have become comfortable making online purchases.

With all the innovations in online retailing, many more industries are beginning to open stores online. Things like grocery stores and restaurants are beginning to do home deliveries, where consumers can make their orders online. We may soon see a much greater movement of companies creating central warehouses and just doing home deliveries. I believe that this is a good thing, but we could be taking lots of jobs a way from people, which may be harmful to society.

The Playbook

When RIM announced that it was creating a tablet (or as I put it amongst heated debate, it's own version of the iPad), I immediately knew that it was going to be a bust (and so did it's shareholders obviously). The main reason for this is that they are too late to hit the market. They also make such a big deal about how it beat the iPad in having an HD front and rear cameras, but it’s already widely know that Apple would be adding these features to the new iPad, which should be released around the same time as the Playbook.

This reminds me a lot of when RIM, came up with the Blackberry Storm, in order to compete with the iPhone. Blackberry users enjoy the fact that their phones have actual keys and anyone who is wants to have a touch screen would immediately go for the iPhone. We’ll see how things go with the new Blackberry Torch, as it is a hybrid type. Already I see a large movement towards it amongst people I know. Only time will tell if this is finally the real competition with the iPhone, or just another Blackberry Storm.

I do see that the Playbook will have some advantages, mainly due to the fact that you can link it to your Blackberry. RIM really needs to focus on their key attributes which are that they produce an efficient, reasonably priced Smartphone, which in essence can do all the same things, if not more than that of their competitors. And while the iPhone is trying to appeal to more business consumers, it will always somewhat be viewed as a toy. RIM should use this to their advantage, and instead of copying Apple, they should try and enhance their key features, and stop Apple from trying to reach their consumer base.