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"Dealing with the Digital Divide" by Mr. David Drescher, Principal of Highgate International. This short talk will be about 10 minutes followed by brief discussion before our featured talk Thursday evening. The divide is defined followed by a discussion on the current policies to reduce it and what the speaker's organization is doing to help reduce it.
Mr. Drescher is a Principal of Highgate International, an interactive media incubator in Washington, DC. He is also the co-founder and Chairman of thesilentauctioneer.ORG, a non-profit charity fundraising and Internet seminar organization. As the Chairman of thesilentauctioneer.ORG, Mr. Drescher has been actively involved with the Digital Divide, developing, organizing and conducting seminars for small businesses in underserved communities around the greater Washington, DC area. He has organized partnerships with Tim Draper's Bizworld.org, The Burns School of Leadership at the University of Maryland, Riggs Bank, Ruder Finn, the Anacostia Economic Development Center and the City of Bladensburg to facilitate the Internet seminars. CBS News featured Mr. Drescher and his initiatives to bring technology leaders into underserved communities in an effort to help bridge the Digital Divide.
This talk identifies emerging software business models and explores their implications for the industry. Traditional mass-market and custom business models are suited to building one-size-fits-all and one-of-a-kind products. Two other models are emerging that represent new approaches for software-based businesses. An application-services business model is an adaptation of the mass-market model, based on the capability for remote execution afforded by the Internet, to present a software product as a service offering. Under this model, producers provide server-based access to their products, enabling them to charge users incrementally or based on actual usage. Companies such as Microsoft, Sun, and Oracle are adopting this model. A mass-customization business model is a hybrid of the mass-market and custom models in which the producer creates a product that can be rapidly tailored at low cost to meet the specific needs of each customer in a particular market. The economics of this model approximate that of the mass-market model while still allowing for customized products. Companies such as Rockwell, Lucent, and Thomson-CSF are adopting this model. The talk will compare the benefits and limitations of each of these idealized models and discuss likely variations.
Grady Campbell has 25 years experience in the theory and practice of software engineering. He started Prosperity Heights Software (www.domain-specific.com) in 1996 to promote the adoption and use of Domain-specific Engineering [tm] by industry worldwide. Mr. Campbell is also a Visiting Scientist with the Product Line Practice Initiative of the Software Engineering Institute. Prior to this, he worked at various software-related businesses including the Software Productivity Consortium and Template Software. |