Internet world has its own characteristics. One thing is that the marginal cost of internet business is closed to zero. And this bases on the numbers of users or subscribers. And we call this power. If many people use a certain service, it means that the service has enough method to make money. So many internet companies try to make this user-based information more profitable.
As many people know, Google is crawling many kinds of data from various sources. Through these abudant pool of database, they provide a highly targeted information to users. And there are several options for strengthening their power to improve accuracy and richness of information. And Google are pleased to accept the sacrifice of many business model. The representative case is Google’s gmail. They are providing this service for free. Recently many other firms recognize the power of customers’ information which is not a source of CRM but an origin of business model itself.
How can make a chance to gather data and process those thngs for improving productivity or making money? I don’t know how to handle it. But there are some smarter guys that try to implement many methods to produce some meaningful results. Normally those things are related the advertisement business model. I think Facebook is the one of highly performed web-services. They open APIs and those things attract many services. This cycle helps accumulating power of users.
How to collect and how to utilize, it’s the key question to move up to the next growth.