Business Models for Peer to Peer Initiatives

Ian Macinnes, Junseok Hwang

Description

Business Models for Peer to Peer Initiatives

Informations

• Publié par: ulijefes
• Nombre de lectures: 140
• Langue: English

Extrait

16 th Bled eCommerce Conference eTransformation Bled, Slovenia, June 9  11, 2003

Business Models for Peer to Peer Initiatives   Ian MacInnes Center for Business and Government, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, United States [e-mail] 

Junseok Hwang Center for Science and Technology, School of Information Studies, Syracuse University, United States [e-mail]

Abstract This paper examines recent peer to peer initiatives in the context of the business models literature. There are three types of studies on business models: focused studies on success factors, multifactor studies of success and failure, and studies identifying the components of business models. The most common factors used to analyze business models are: revenue sources, potential benefits to actors, enabling technologies, security, and behavioural changes. Of the four cases analyzed the collaborative model of Groove and the distribution and caching model of Kontiki appear to have greater commercial promise than the file sharing model of KaZaA and the distributed processing model of SETI@Home.

1. Introduction The explosion of optimism generated by the initial use of the Internet as a commercial platform, led to many innovative business initiatives. The original euphoria led many companies, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists to develop plans in enterprises that, due to weak business plans, among other factors, eventually ended in failure. In spite of this, innovative initiatives based on peer to peer (P2P) technologies have generated new optimism. What are peer to peer technologies? According to Camp (2002) peers in a P2P network are multipurpose machines that can share computing resources such as processing power and storage, as well as files. These peers have equal stature and are autonomous but can collaborate with one another in order to obtain services or to complete large computing jobs (Triantafillou, et. al. 2003). This differs from the client server paradigm in that it 44