Jacqueline Jones, Guest Writer

Many of Jamaica's leading industries will be impacted by the ability of companies to innovate and create new business models via the internet.

For Caribbean businesses, the implications are enormous - the web will offer new avenues for marketing and revenue generation for local industries such as entertainment, financial services and tourism.

The conversation must be explored at the most senior levels of the company - this is no longer a dialogue limited to the IT department or the 'techies'.

The new Internet models directly impacts the company's strategy - it further lowers the cost of doing business, allows more avenues for customer engagement and paves the way for more competition.

The new Internet landscape centres around collaboration - by the millions, people are creating their own content using blogs, podcasts, newsletters, articles and photo feeds.

They are producing their own entertainment on video, social-networking, game, and photo-sharing sites such as Yahoo's Flickr. At MySpace.com, some 21 million monthly visitors spend up to several hours a day sharing their thoughts, photos, and music with friends on personalised home pages.

Through YouTube, Facebook, and MySpace, you can create your own multimedia content.

Web 2.0 represents an important shift in the way digital information is created, shared, stored, distributed, and manipulated.

In the Caribbean, there is vibesconnect.com network of sites and Caribbeanmassive.com the Caribbean social networking site.

"It's more about participating, socialising, interacting, creating, sharing, collaborating. They Google, Flickr, blog, contribute toWikipedia, Socialtext it, Meetup, post, subscribe, feed, annotate, and above all share," says Donna Menton, a senior consultant with POWERi Technologies.

The implications for the local music industry are significant. "Independent artistes are now able to market themselves and sell their music in the form of downloads on the Internet, giving the independent labels a means to compete with the major labels," says Carl James, an artiste/producer of R&B and reggae artistes in New York, who has worked with stars such as Mariah Carey and Third World.

"Music artists have even created their own blogs to communicate directly with their audience."

In the tourism industry, the internet will allow local hotels to customise and deliver targeted message to specific audiences in foreign markets, through ePostcards, blogs and newsletters. Organisations are taking action to educate their members on these changes in the internet landscape.

The such as the Jamaica Exporters Association, for example, is planning to host a conference on July 26 on how companies can take advantage of new opportunities provided by the internet at the Hilton Kingston.

All of this has major implications for the future for business and personal communications.

Not only does Web 2.0 create new ways for large groups of people to collaborate, it also allows consumers to access the web through a variety of devices the computer, phone, and music player, and such devices.

IMPLICATIONS FOR BUSINESS

Thanks partially to Web 2.0 technologies, the barriers between a company - including its CEO, board, managers, and employees - and the consumer are now razor thin.

Taking advantage of this reality will require a major attitude shift on the part of many companies and the people who run them. "Hierarchy and direct control are giving way to notions of collaboration, creativity, transparency, and mass participation, and the effects of this change are just beginning to make themselves felt," says Francis Wade, president of Framework Consulting.

According to Menton, Web 2.0 not only reduces IT costs, but makes it easy to deploy.

"As any IT manager will tell you, it's expensive to install, configure, maintain, and upgrade essential software on personal computers and company servers - and even more so if you have lots of employees with lots of different computing needs," she said.

"Web 2.0 tools eliminate much of this hassle and expense because Web 2.0 applications reside on servers maintained by the vendors themselves."

The application also allows groups of people in many locations to work on projects simultaneously, while in the background a computer keeps track of who made what changes where and when.

Businesses can also use the medium to integrate consumers into the business development process, which in turn, leads to more demand for the product. For example, in 2006, General Motors invited consumers to create their own commercials for the Chevrolet Tahoe SUV, using GM-supplied video and the creators' choice of music and text.

The effort generated volumes of online traffic, and plenty of buzz. Compared to a traditional ad campaign, the effort was inexpensive and it exposed the Chevy Tahoe to a new audience.

Philosophically, Web 2.0 is all about simplicity and collaboration. It uses common software protocols to foster free exchange of information between different tools and groups of users.

Lastly, because it encourages large-scale collaboration, Web 2.0 facilitates new forms of problem-solving that can provide business managers with valuable ideas and insights.