We had an interesting business case on the bild.li moblogging platform: The cellar of an Aroma Café burned, causing damage which had to be handled by several insurance companies.
Several pictures were taken to assess the damage and bild.li was used to communicate: From store manager to company head, to the owner of the house and his insurance company and to the business insurance of the café. As a bonus some café's employees started commenting the pictures, which was a nice way to keep in touch in the week the café was closed.
The primary advantage was the easy communication between the parties. Just point to a URL instead of determining receipients and then trying to get several MB of pictures through various mail servers.
Posted by seefeld at September 17, 2003 00:05Let's say it's a "use case", not a business case :) One reason that the bild.li platform was chosen is that registration is instant and use is dead easy. If they'd had to enter credit card information and stuff, they'd probably chosen e-mail. So I wonder how many of these business-oriented blogging companies will survive their first year ... and I feel so guilty ;-)
Posted by: Chris at September 18, 2003 05:46 PMYou're right that it is more a business case for the involved companies than for bild.li itself. I think this illustrates a change in the way this part of the economy works (see http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2003/09/mitstanford_ven.html ):
You don't sell top-down anymore, convincing upper management to spend big money and adopt their organization to your application, but rather convince the users bottom-up. They start using these tools like in this example, they find interesting uses without us.
And the opportunities to earn money are in helping them getting most of this technology (by consulting them, by selling higher levels tools), rather than by selling the basic tools.
Posted by: Bernhard Seefeld at September 18, 2003 10:17 PM