Product and Services
Authors: Andrew Tse, Bill Nazzaro, Marc Biessy, Peter Manos, and Ted Tabaka
The third piece of demographic information about the companies we visited is their current offerings of products and services. These three sections, Position, Strategy, and Product, form the basis of understanding each company–how they innovated to get where they are today–so we could begin to analyze their use of innovative practices.
LifeLock is a subscription service that monitors a customer’s financial accounts and watches for fraud. Using this information, they can detect unusual activity, such as opening bank accounts or using a person’s identity to acquire cars, lines of credit, or even new homes.
Our visit to Microsoft focused on IoT (Internet of Things) technologies, and developing hardware that works with software to solve business and consumer problems.
Joyus provides its customers with a huge selection of the best trending fashion, beauty and wellness products. The company also innovatively generates sales from video-commerce though not the way you would expect, in a new way not from ads but informational videos added to outside content and distributed by their partners.
Remind provides a web and mobile app that enables teachers to reach their students by text messages as well as to reach the students’ parents.
The teacher is able to choose whether they want to communicate to a single person a group or an entire school and will allow to schedule reminders. The messages can be sent to any type of phone and is accessible in 70 different languages.
It also helps to know who has read the message and who has not.
The service is free of charge for any users so far, which means that the teachers as well as the students and parents do not have to pay for any of the services.
Airbnb is a website and mobile application that allows people to list their homes as vacation rentals, and for travellers to view listings and rent rooms for their trips. It provides the platform for both sides of the transaction, and collects a fee from both the host and the traveller.
Gogobot provides two products, a mobile app and a web app. These products offer different services, from listing different activities, places and food to viewing and reviewing those different services. Gogobot offers quite a global and diverse number of things to do, which make them quite different to their competitors which usually do one of the section and not all as a package. The fact that you are able to make your research more personal makes it even more attractive. Also the implementation of the Artificial Intelligence makes it even more interesting in a user perspective where what you really want to do and all your interests are taking into account to provide you with the best experience possible.
The Handshake site is sold to universities as a platform to hold virtual recruiting fairs for their students, as well as allowing recruiters a platform for viewing the credentials of students from across the U.S.
LinkedIn is a social networking site that is catered to professionals. LinkedIn provides products to members and customers
Members
The three main products that LinkedIn offers to their members is identity, network, and knowledge. Identity would allow you to showcase your professional story to other users to attract job and/or business opportunities. Networking allows the user to connect with other professionals. Knowledge allows the users to share, post and read about news in professional world that could assist them with their professional career.
Customers
The three main products that LinkedIn offers to their Customers is hire, market and sell. These tools are used to help businesses succeed with recruiting the talent, marketing to professionals in the LinkedIn network, and assist in making cold calls a little warmer.