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August 1996, Week 2

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From:
Scott Peikin <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Wed, 7 Aug 1996 10:48:37 GMT
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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Note: Please Copy this file, as its contents, if they ever get out world wide
will seriously impact the global economy as we know it. Reducing profit to
companies and giving people world wide about 60% more buying power.
Governments will try to repress this information. It directly targets the
largest companies and profitable organizations and if any of these designs are
implemented, those companies are going to be crucified. If you see it get
pulled, please repost it to every news group in the world. Over and Over
again. And Mail it to all of your friends. The first challenge is to see how
powerful the net really is.
thanks, [log in to unmask]
 
Tomorrow..........
 
V.C.C.
 
Written and developed by Scott Peikin of DiverseNet Inc. Serious contributions
to Vcc from K.
 
Table of Contents
Aim ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 3
Background on Interactive Marketing Technologies ---------- 4
Introduction: The Virtual Storefront ------------------------------ 5
What Can the World Wide Web Do for V.C.C. ---------------- 6
The Competition ------------------------------------------------------ 7
Why not a Conventional "Virtual Business" -------------------- 8
Marketing Strategy: How will V.C.C. beat the competition -- 8
The United Consumers Club --------------------------------------- 11
Cost Analysis----------------------------------------------------------- 12
Year 1 Targets-----------------------------------------------------------14
Contact Information----------------------------------------------------16
 
 Aim: To create a "new" business the Virtual Consumers Club or V.C.C. which is
a virtual storefront on what is commonly referred to as the information
superhighway. It will be supported by the infrastructure of an existing
"suitable" company such as U.C.C. V.C.C. will have distinct advantages over
competitors. Profit will derive from a membership fee, not on profit margin,
which is the way that most other virtual storefronts generate income.
Operating costs will be minimal (without the overhead of the traditional
storefront), and most important, there will be complete access to the world
market without geographic, legal, or political barriers. These features in
conjunction with innovative marketing strategies, should allow V.C.C., to
quickly overcome its competition and become a world leader in its field.
 
Background on Interactive Marketing Technologies
 
Over the past several years new businesses that involve a small amount of
interactive marketing have appeared. Some of the larger names are The Home
Shopping Network and QVC (recently purchased by the Home shopping Network).
Their primary medium for conducting business is through the use of television
infomercials. This has been extraordinarily successful, to the point that the
industry is now worth over five billion dollars. While this new interactive
medium for conducting business has several serious advantages to traditional
storefronts, it still has some drawbacks. One of the drawbacks being
uni-directional communication. Customers cannot ask questions, causing them to
feel helpless and as a result many "hits" do not "bite". Another drawback is
that customers cannot choose what they would like to view, they must observe
what is being displayed. This is the primary factor that renders the
television medium useless for V.C.C.'s interactive marketing strategy
 
Introduction: The Virtual Storefront
 
The interactive medium described above would do almost nothing for V.C.C.
There is, however, a new interactive medium and it is developing at an
exponential rate, most importantly it is already available for V.C.C.'s use.
It is potentially the most prolific medium for conducting business, and as you
might have guessed already dominated by speculators from the Home Shopping
Network. The greatest advantage to this medium is that it is bi-directional,
making if the perfect medium for V.C.C. to reach the world.
The new medium is called the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web makes the
traditional storefront obsolete. It is based upon a network of computers that
operate around the world all the time and has grown at an exponential rate
since its conception three years ago. When lumped together the distinct
aspects of the internet are sometimes referred to as the information
superhighway.
 
What Can the World Wide Web Do for V.C.C. ?
 
Anyone with a computer can "log in" to the internet for the price of a local
phone call anywhere in the world. Once they "log in" the customer merely types
an address into a "dialog box" and hits the enter key. This brings the
customer to the business interface of the company with which they desire to
conduct business. At this point the customer can point and click with their
mouse and view different products, actually listen to how they sound, and see
how they look in better than photographic quality resolution. Then they can
place an order instantaneously with their major credit card. That's it! If
they have any questions they can merely click on a "button" with their mouse
to start a conversation with a help assistant. The customer can do this any
time of day, anywhere in the world, and do it all instantaneously. Setting up
a "virtual storefront" costs a fraction of what its conventional counterpart
costs, and with this investment comes access to the entire world market. Many
internet enthusiasts speculate the conventional storefront and retail store
will be all but obsolete in five to ten years. It may take a decade for this
to happen because thus far there is no effective marketing strategy that will
"open up" the virtual internet business interface sooner.
 
The Competition
 
The largest virtual storefront in existence today is call the Internet
Shopping Network. They are owned and operated by the Home Shopping Network.
Their Chief Executive Marketing Manager, told me recently that any marketing
strategy that would reduce his profit margin would not be feasible because his
company operates on minimal margins. I found this "situation" to be true of
all the firms that are currently major players in the virtual market.
I then decided that I would have to locate a company that possessed a highly
developed infrastructure in terms of suppliers. One that offered a wide array
of products, and also required minimal modifications to adapt to V.C.C.'s
"virtual storefront". I located and researched a few different possibilities.
 
Why Not a Conventional "Virtual Business"?
 
We decided not to go with a conventional virtual business because of the
competitive difficulties. Right now the world wide web, which is the platform
for running a virtual storefront is developing very quickly. This will lead
many companies to "set up shop" and "fight it out" for market share. V.C.C.
will sit strategically in a place all its own because of lower product price
and novel marketing strategies.
 
Marketing strategy: How will V.C.C. beat the Competition?
 
Running a company that does not make its money on profit margin, opens many
new doors in terms of marketing. I have developed three distinct marketing
strategies that when implemented will allow to V.C.C. realistically become a
major player in the market within three to six months. Furthermore, these
marketing strategies will "open up" the cyberspace business interface
prematurely, with V.C.C. in the lead.
 
Direct Marketing Strategy
 
We aim to direct market the virtual storefront through the use of diskettes
which would be distributed free of charge to the many customers identified as
being most interested in using the new sales method. When inserted into the
customers computer the program on the diskette will take them on a "Virtual
Tour" of V.C.C. Diskettes are an inexpensive form of direct marketing with
serious ROI. Look at Prodigy and America on Line. This method of advertising
is the only reason that they are still in business.
 
Incentive Based Marketing Strategy
 
We Plan to give incentives such as reduced membership fees to students and
faculty at major educational centers throughout the world, as long as those
schools agree to position our franchise in their "visit" list. A visit list is
a quick access list of sites to visit on the world wide web. Once a site is
positioned on a quicklist, even the most inexperienced users can access it. It
is important to note that students and educational institutions currently have
free and easy access to the World Wide Web.
 
Franchising Marketing Strategy
 
Not everybody has access to a computer today. Our franchising department will
target those who cannot afford to purchase or just do not want to be bothered
by purchasing and setting up their own computer. Franchises can be set up
anywhere because V.C.C will be controlled from a central location. Since
V.C.C. franchises will be controlled from a centralized location, the cost of
a V.C.C. franchise is much lower than our conventional counterpart (only the
price of an internet connection and a computer lab). Therefore V.C.C.
franchisees will have an absolute advantage over their potential competitors,
V.C.C also benefits from this advantage. The startup cost of a V.C.C.
franchise is approximately $30.000, while its conventional counterpart's
startup cost ranges from 100,000 to 118,500. This 70 to 88 thousand dollar
difference in the cost of a franchise will give V.C.C. another advantage over
its competitors.
 
More Compteition
 
U.C.C. is the ideal candidate for V.C.C.'s purposes. U.C.C. is headquartered
in Indiana. They are listed in the Million Dollar Directory as a private
company, having one subsidiary known as the United Consumers Club Franchising.
They have Sec Codes placing them in the mail order catalogue industry. The
most interesting thing about the company is the way in which they make their
profit. They do not make it on profit margin, but rather on a membership fee.
After paying a one time membership fee, members are entitled to purchase all
goods at cost for a year. The members can save thousands of dollars per year.
The idea is simple: What would have been put into the pockets of the retail
stores is instead put back into the pockets of the end consumers. Or as the
founder James L. Gagen says "everybody wins" both the consumer, and the
company. Eventually, U.C.C. got into the business of franchising. United
Consumers Club made approximately 11 million dollars from the franchising
corporation compared to 74 million from the parent company. Therefore, the
industry is operating at roughly a hundred million dollars. As of yet there
are no major competitors in UCC's field. One of the benefits of partnering
with U.C.C. is that the merchandise is of high quality and customers get
access to a complete line of manufactures goods. U.C.C.'s profit comes only
from the membership fee, thus there is no incentive to sell inferior goods
unlike Sam's Club which generates income from goods as well as a membership
fee.
 
Note: This version of the cost analysis is a little underdeveloped.
 
Cost Analysis
 
World Wide Web Site Setup:
ALR Q-4SMP Pentuim based Server--------------------------$Approx 25,000 f
Pentium Ported Unix software package------------------------$Approx 5,000 f
T-1 1.44 megabyte per second internet connection----------$Approx 1,000v,m
Hyper-Text-Markup-Language (HTML) Programmers-----$Approx 80,000 f
System Administrator (consultant)-------------------------------$Approx 20,000
f
W.W.W. Domain Name Registration----------------------------$100 v,2-years
Allowance for unexpected and hidden startup costs----------$100,000
Total Fixed and Variable Startup Costs--------------------------$231,100.00
 
Direct Marketing Strategy
 
Initial startup kit
design----------------------------------------------$25,000
Opportunity Cost on Initial Promotion-----------------------------$5/customer
Midwestern CD-ROM duplication estimate 100,000 copies-------$74,300
Allowance for unexpected and hidden costs-----------------------$50,000
Total First-Run Direct Marketing Costs-----------------------------$149,300+5x
 
Incentive Based Marketing Strategy
 
E-mail Promotion Associates-----------------------------------------$40,000
Opportunity
Costs-------------------------------------------------------$50/customer
Allowance for unexpected and hidden costs-----------------------$20,000
Total Incentive Marketing Strategy Costs---------------------------$60,000+50x
 
Franchising Dept. Marketing Costs
 
Salaries, strategy, and
supplies----------------------------------------$300,000 y
Year 1 Targets
Direct Marketing Strategy
3-6 months: distribute start-up media @ 100.00US per membership. Total
Possible Revenue 9,500,000.00
Real Expected Revenue 80% 7,600,000.00 Minus fixed and Variable startup costs
231,100.00
Net Profit 7,368,900.00
After First Pressing and distribution fixed costs are paid.
6-12 months: two subsequent pressings @ 100.00US per membership
Total Possible Revenue 19,000,000.00
Real Expected Revenue 80% 15,200,000.00 Minus Variable Costs 80,000.00
Minus Allowance for unexpected/hidden costs 20,000.00
Net Profit on second and third pressings 15,100,000.00
Incentive Based Marketing Strategy
3-12 months: Target and contact educational centers around the world.
Hire a full time staff member to do this @ 40,000 per year.
Memberships sold at $50.00 each with student faculty discount.
Break even point is 1,200 memberships sold in 1 year with 60,000 in costs.
Franchise Marketing Strategy
9-12 months: Initiate Franchising Strategy.
 
Contact Information
 
For further information contact Scott Peikin @ Diversenet by:
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
[log in to unmask]
http: www.op.net/~scott
Phone: USA (610) 278-9888
 
So much for the middlemen world wide.
 
Some Other Projects.......
 
Contributions to Mail Services and Company from BD, your a good man BD.
 
Mail Services and Company: Maximizing Case "A"
 
This is an interesting project, Basicly it revolves around Domain Names. For
instance if your name is Stan and you are an automobile dealer, then you might
want your e-mail address to be [log in to unmask] Cool huh, So if you
are the company that owns the rights to automobiledealers.com,then you can
offer a service providing e-mail accounts for people in that industry. Also
Domain names are the television stations of tomorrow. If you want to watch
science fiction, you will probably turn you browser on www.sciencefiction.com,
this will take you to the domain science fiction, based around the subject
domain sciencefiction. Just as if you want to get todaysnews, you might http
todaysnews.com, or if you want to listen to rock music, you might http
classicrock, modernrock, or alternative rock based on your music preferences.
This company will revolve around leasing domains from the internic based on
the subject, then leasing them to people interested.
Note: Registering some domains is a good way to start up a "small" business.
 
The Alternic. Minimizing Case "A"
 
Speaking of domians and dns and all of that good stuff. The internic is
currently offering dns service for 100 dollars for the first two years and $50
a year after that. To my knowledge they are registering about 10,000 a day.
Times $100 a domain that isn't bad. This number is only going to increase.
They are only offering dns service on a few extensions, like .com, .net, .org,
etc. If you have a few bucks to invest I would recommend starting your own
Alternic, offering domains that support special characters and multiple
languages. In order for a domain to exist, it only has to have service
provided for it. Providing dns is basicly spreading out fixed costs, and the
product only exists in cyberspace. So there is a large gap in the cost/profit
ratio. Some good ideas to provide dns on are taxicabs . with no extension, and
of course multiple languages, to the best of my knowledge we don't live in a
one language world. Also the .fam extension might be populair really soon
because people will want to throw out their mail boxes. If I were a University
trying to raise capitol to minimize educational costs I would go into this
business. Students can run it. And after all it is an investment in the
future.
The Govenrment will not like this, first because it will kill all profit
margin for the internic registration services and open them up to a global
economy competeing world wide prematuraly in their eyes. They have one major
way to prevent this, which can also be prevented. This is to create dns
jammers that jam all domains not registered with their "legitimate"
registration services. There can only be a one domain of each kind matched up
to each ip address world wide. So if they provide jamming services this will
jam the "illegitimate" domains right off the network with a flood stream. It
is important for people to design web browsers that filter out these jamming
services, that will seriously reduce their impact and comprimise their upper
case "A" abilities. Currently all domain are matched to an ip address. This
actually maximizes profit even more because they charge companies for an ip
address eventually this will be you telephone number as well. These ip address
go like this 255.255.255.255 why they don't go to 999.999.999.999 is obviously
to maximize profit by reducing the supply even more. Anything is possible and
999.999.999.999 ip addresses are definitly a possibility. A company or
schoolastic organizatoin merely has to develop software that will support
this, and distribute it to then begin providing services on it. Interesting
huh???? Another way around this is to make ip addresses alphanumeric to begin
with, then that will eliminate the need for ip addresses to begin with. There
are some other designs around this concept, let me know if you have millions
to blow and want to sink the next biggest ship.
 
my bigger nightmares, I think Phillip Zimmerman might agree............
It is possible to filter all e-mail and information through high speed filters
that search for key information, because all data transfers pretty much go
through the nick to begin with. The direct system overides the primary level
of central control. 10 years from now data security isn't going to be what we
think it is today, and if we are living in a placeblo to begin with, we don't
have anything now.
 
Taking out telecommunications and Cybercommunications (cybercomm) profit.
 
Everyone has heard of the iphone right. Thats a package that costs about 100
dollars to buy and lets you talk for free all over the world through the net.
Being as ip addresses and domain names are the telephone numbers of the
future, there is going to be serous amounts of profit by selling these
packages.
Some of them work through the irc proticol and other proticols. The telephone
companys want to make it so that every thing has to be standardized,
eliminating a strategy that I have developed that will kill profit for
telecommunications world wide. This is to make all packages free to end
consumers, and make them compatable with let say for example windows NT
plugins that act as the telecommunications server between two of the end
consumer client applications. This will kill all profit for AT$T in terms of
selling the client applications. It will also limit their ability to make you
use their services as the relay server, because you can use a relay server all
the way accross the world if you want to. Seriously increasing competition
world wide. This is good for us the end consumers. If they still compalain
that their stuff isn't compatable, then here you go. All the client apps will
be standardized to receive calls. That way you can initiate a call with any
server company and still have it completely compatable. This strategy will
seriously decrease global communications costs and allow anyone to start a
"mom and pop" business providing services. I reccomend educational
universities provide these services to offset educational costs.
 
Reducing Software Companies Profit world wide, minimizing software costs to
everyone and putting more in the pocket of software designers.
 
This entails souping up an os like Linux to be a shell like windows Nt or 95
or system 7, porting it to every platform and then setting up standards that
software developers can conform to to make everything very compatable. Next
software developers must form development guilds that are centralized around a
co-op development type system. This will allow them to design software around
their public domain oses. They can also charge much less to register the
software, and becuase they have a serious direct interest in the "company"
they will make the money that they are entitled to instead of being "forced"
to give it up in the interest of the company they developed it for.
 
NtP
 
You know you computer will be your tv soon. NTP (negeotiation transfer
proticol might be the start) If anyone wants to design it let me know.
Basicly you client automatically negotiates with the server root domain of a
domain. That way if the domain is a ftp site it automatically default to the
ftp proticol. And if the site you access by merely typing the domain name in
the box is a tv station, then it automatically defaults to the video stream
transfer proticol. Cool Huh????
 
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