SubscribeWeb 2.0 + e-commerce
Comments Written by angus September 13th, 2006 . Tags: e-commerce, HKU, Hong Kong, research, Web 2.0.There is this Web 2.0 project dealing with e-commerce in Hong Kong that the University of Hong Kong just started working on. This program is funded ($983,000HKD) by the HKSARG, short for the Hong Kong Governement. They have a funding scheme mentioned in the newsletter, which I plan to go over in the near future. As for their project, here are their aims:
This project aims to extend Web 2.0 technologies with electronic transaction capabilities and demonstrate the application of Web 2.0 for e-commerce services. In particular, its objectives are in three-folds:
(1) to study the potential of implementing e-commerce services using Web 2.0 and the areas to extend Web 2.0 to support B2B (business-to-business) and B2G (business-to-government) requirements;
(2) to extend existing Web 2.0 technologies, e.g., RSS (Really Simple Syndication), Atom (syndication format and publishing protocol), and Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), with security and reliability mechanisms; and
(3) to prototype a Web 2.0 e-commerce engine to demonstrate the use of Web 2.0 to conduct electronic transactions in proof-of-concept projects.
Their planned deliverables include:
1. Research report on e-commerce services delivery with Web 2.0
2. RSS and AJAX extension modules for e-commerce applications
- Business Document Composer
- Business Document Feed Publisher
3. Proof-of-concept project to demonstrate the use of Web 2.0 to implement e-commerce services (1)
4. Project webpage to disseminate project progress and results
Web 2.0 and e-commerce is nothing new. You look at companies like Amazon, eBay, Craigslist, Netflix, they can be tagged with being Web 2.0 e-commerce companies. They all have provided some sort of framework for the new web; user recommendations, user ratings, comments, reviews, feedbacks, the Long Tail and the likes, mostly the social aspect side of these businesses. The technical side, the AJAX, is rarely used with the transaction itself. I’ve seen some AJAX/AJAXy shopping carts out there but the concern is with the security. This is the one thing that they said they will focus on in this project and I haven’t seen any live AJAX shopping carts used out there at the moment. Anyone know of any fully secure AJAX-based transactions out there?
Really, this topic is up for discussion. Honestly, I am lost, and still trying to disect their use of “Web 2.0 technologies” and “Web 2.0 e-commerce engine”. Anyway, it will be interesting to see what will come from this research, a fast and more important secure transaction made through AJAX? There are just too many questions you wonder about this because they’ve left so much out about the details of this project, at least on the newsletter.
This, to me, is far from being a groundbreaking research because there are so many developers out there already, trying to make the same things work. But education and research is a beautiful thing and I can’t argue with that.
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