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Rachel Finley
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Brigham Young University
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prspecialist@byu.edu

CEO Describes E-Business Trends

E-business is rapidly changing the way the world works, says Jeremy Hanks, CEO of DOBA, a drop shipping web site that allows suppliers and retailers to exchange goods more efficiently, at the eBusiness Lecture Series this winter semester.

Hanks, a champion of many start-up companies and a member of vSpring Captial’s top 100 entrepreneurs list, emphasized the importance of taking advantage of e-business’ ability to make business cheaper and more efficient.

“E-business, the way I define it, is virtualization of physical things,” Hanks says. “Anything that can become 1s and 0s instead of what it is physically is e-business. It is very important that e-business stays in 1s and 0s as long as possible. The longer things stay in 1s and 0s until it becomes a physical product, then the more value you will have, the less cost you will have, and the more efficient things will be.”

Hanks gave many examples of how e-business has revolutionized the way products are bought and sold. He says that instead of print and mailing transactions, products are increasingly being bought and sold online. Hanks believes that the growing popularity of blogs, email, cell phones, text messaging, and online photo albums will quite possibly replace all forms of print communication.

“I think e-business is the most disruptive force since the printing press or the industrial revolution,” Hanks says. “Electronic things are now replacing physical things everywhere.”

Hanks also stressed the growth of the online marketplace. He listed many facts that proved business is making an electronic shift, such as:

1) iTunes has more products and selections than your standard electronics or department store.

2) Amazon.com currently has 4 million titles of books compared to Barnes & Noble’s 100,000 titles.

3) Blockbuster currently has 3,000 movie titles in its stores out of the 200,000 total movies Hollywood has cranked out since its inception, while NetFlix has more than 90,000 titles.

Because of these and many other facts, Hanks says that “a marketplace becomes more efficient when it is based on e-business.”

He also described how e-business will change in the future. He says the future of e-business will rely on mass customization, allowing consumers to select the products they want in exactly they way they prefer. In essence, this method will merge the efforts of both social networking and online business in a way like never before.

Hanks used the following examples of online companies that are at the forefront of these changes:

1) Shopstyle.com–A website where you can put up your own clothing profile and people can look at your profile and buy the clothes you wear. Hanks says this will even be more popular when famous movie and sports stars start posting their own clothing profiles.

2) NikeID.com – A place where you can create your own tennis shoe—colors, fabric, etc.

3) Beyond Fleece–An online market where you can select the fit and style of a jacket you want and the company will then make that jacket according to your specifications and mail it out to you. Hanks says he ordered a jacket from this web site and it was a perfect fit.

4) Good Storm–An online business where you can buy a T-shirt with a design on it of your choosing, one that is already made or one that you have created.

“E-business has already significantly changed the world,” Hanks says. “Things are changing faster today than when they were fifteen years ago when the internet went mainstream. It is something to think about when you are looking at your future career and when you are trying to figure out what you want to do because e-business is a serious revolution that is changing the way the world works.”