The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century Thomas L. Friedman Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005 Thomas Friedman is a widely-acclaimed journalist, foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, and author of four best-selling books that include From Beirut to Jerusalem (1989). His eminence as a journalist is clearly demonstrated in the way he prepared for The World is Flat. He traveled throughout the world, interviewing in depth the political and business leaders who have the most direct, hands-on knowledge of the truly incredible developments occurring in the business structures and technology of globalization. Only a journalist who moves freely at the highest levels could interview the likes of Sir John Rose, the chief executive of Rolls-Royce; Nobuyuki Idei, the chairman of Sony; Richard Koo, the chief economist for the Nomura Research Institute; Bill Gates of Microsoft; Wee Theng Tan, the president of Intel China; David Baltimore, president of Caltech; Howard Schultz, founder and chairman of Starbucks; Nandan Nilekani, CEO of Infosys in Bangalore - and many others, each of whom gave him the inside story of how, specifically, the barriers of time and space separating economies, workforces, sources of capital, and technical abilities are crumbling. The result of this unfolding story, already far along but with much farther to go, according to Friedman, is that "the world is flat." With some notable exceptions in sub-Saharan Africa and the Islamic swathe, everything is connected with everything else on a horizontal basis, with distance and erstwhile time-lags no longer mattering. Friedman describes in detail the galloping globalization that has unfolded in even so limited a time as the past five years. Under the impetus of a worldwide network of interconnectivity, the world economy is much-changed from what it was at the turn of the century a mere half-decade ago. Friedman quotes the CEO of India's Infosys: "What happened over the last [few] years is that there was a massive investment in technology, especially in the bubble era, when hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in putting broadband connectivity around the world, undersea cables," while (Friedman paraphrases him) "computers became cheaper and dispersed all over the world, and there was an explosion of software - e-mail, search engines like Google, and proprietary software that can chop up any piece of work and send one part to Boston, one part to Bangalore, and one part to Beijing...." Microprocessors today have 410 million transistors compared to the 2800 they had in 1971. And now, "wireless is what will allow you to take everything that has been digitized, made virtual and personal, and do it from anywhere." The effect on productivity is revolutionary: "It now takes Boeing eleven days to build a 737, down from twenty-eight days just a few years ago. Boeing will build the next generation of planes in three days, because all the parts are computer-designed for assembly." The most strikingly informative aspect of this book, however, is not about technology. Most especially, Friedman explores the rapidly evolving global business systems, each constantly regenerating itself to keep ahead of the others. These are systems that span the continents seeking the lowest-cost providers of everything from expert scientific and engineering work to the lowliest grunt work. Friedman points out that India produces 70,000 accounting graduates each year - and that they are willing to start at $100 a month. It is no wonder that Boeing employs 800 Russian scientists and engineers for passenger-plane design when "a U.S. aeronautical engineer costs $120 per design hour, a Russian costs about one-third of that." Friedman describes a call center in India where outbound callers sell "everything from credit cards to phone minutes," while operators taking inbound calls do "everything from tracing lost luggage for U.S. and European airline passengers to solving computer problems for confused American consumers. …

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century

Virtual worlds, where thousands of people can interact simultaneously within the same three-dimensional environment, represent a frontier in social computing with critical implications for business, education, social sciences, and our society at large. In this paper, we first trace the history of virtual worlds back to its antecedents in electronic gaming and on-line social networking. We then provide an overview of extant virtual worlds, including education-focused, theme-based, community-specific, children-focused, and self-determined worlds - and we analyze the relationship among these worlds according to an initial taxonomy for the area. Recognizing the apparent leadership of Second Life among today's self-determined virtual worlds, we present a detailed case study of this environment, including surveys of 138 residents regarding how they perceive and utilize the environment. Lastly, we provide a literature review of existing virtual world research, with a focus on business research, and a condensed summary of research issues in education, social sciences, and humanities.

Virtual worlds - past, present, and future: New directions in social computing

https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/asu/f/Spaulding_Trent_2010_Virtual_Communities.pdf

How can virtual communities create value for business

As research into customer involvement and Web 2.0 in new service development (NSD) is limited, this study investigated the exploitation and the implications of Web 2.0 for enhancing customer involvement in NSD in tourism. Studies analysing the following fields were reviewed: the concept, the benefits and the risks of as well as the empowering role of Web 2.0 for customer participation in NSD. The review is organized around a framework summarizing the following issues that need to be considered for Web 2.0 exploitation: the drivers, the degree, the management issues and risks, and the benefits of customer involvement. A model measuring the use of Web 2.0 was also developed and used for surveying the level of Web 2.0 exploitation for NSD purposes by Greek tourism firms. The survey findings were also complemented with a qualitative study exploring the perceptions of professionals regarding the benefits, the management issues and risks that they face when exploiting Web 2.0. Finally, the practical and the theoretical implications of the findings are discussed. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Exploiting Web 2.0 for New Service Development: Findings and Implications from the Greek Tourism Industry

ERP systems became popular with large organizations in the 1990s. In the 21st Century, these products were expanded by addition of supply chain management (SCM) and customer relationship management (CRM), as well as access through the Web, creating the ERP II concept. Efforts to increase the market led vendors to serve not only large organizations, but also focus more on small-to-medium sized enterprises (SMEs).Open source software has become a player in the field of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. While it is still unclear to what extent it has diffused among organizations, it is clear that opportunities exist. New ways of delivering ERP software, such as software as a service (SaaS) have appeared. Some smaller vendors utilized a free distribution system (Free/Open Source ERP, FOS-ERP) for their source code, relying on various business models for corporate success. There also have been attempts to generate FOS-ERP components found on sites such as SourceForge.com that are not only distributed freely, but also were developed through community participation much as Linux has been developed. Some ERP vendors use community developed components for various purposes to support their proprietorial software. Thus one dimension of ERP systems is based upon who directs the development process. Proprietorial ERP refers to systems with closely held intellectual property rights, such as the leading market products by SAP and Oracle as well as many smaller proprietorial competitors. FOS-ERP can be community based, or sponsored by some organization.In this paper we present a framework that aims at analyzing FOS-ERP business models. Goals include discussing the differences between FOS-ERP and their proprietary equivalents (P-ERP) in terms of business models, selection, customization, and evolution. We will discuss challenges and opportunities that they offer to adopters and vendors. Description of open source ERP options.Framework of open source ERP models.Identification of tradeoffs in open source ERP options for small-to-medium enterprises.

Open source ERP business model framework

Virtual worlds may be enabling technologies for the next generation of business models, practices and innovations in service. We situate our research within the field of service science and aim to evaluate service innovations. Because of Second Life's visibility as the de facto virtual world for commerce, we apply an immersive business evaluation framework against existing and hypothetical Second Life innovations. We then develop a framework based on Media Richness and Task Closure Theories to evaluate these cases. We thus progress toward theories of immersive business and concomitant evaluative frameworks for immersive business models. We posit the following characteristics of potential Second Life innovations based on our analysis: 1) feedback and interactions between users are not dissipated; 2) tasks that are profitable enough to support can be started and closed by users within Second Life; and 3) users are compelled to form a social presence, which is then leveraged.

Towards a Framework for Evaluating Immersive Business Models: Evaluating Service Innovations in Second Life

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Towards a Framework for Evaluating Immersive Business Models: Evaluating Service Innovations in Second Life