On Saturday, January 27, Jason and I will be speaking at Villanova University’s Beyond Ideas: The Art of Entrepreneurship. Here’s what we are speaking about:

Introduction

• Our Story
  Jason, Kim, and Stranger Studios
• Winelog
  Background on the idea and development and an overview of what WineLog is.

Types of E-commerce Businesses

• E-commerce as an extension of an existing business
  Best Buy: Buy online, pickup in store. Negative point: Best Buy has different online and in-store prices (confuses customer).
  Gap: Fully integrated with in-store shopping.
• Pure E-commerce
  Examples of purely e-commerce businesses (Amazon) and a discussion of the benefits and weaknesses of doing business online.
• Other hybrid models?
  Examples of web businesses that later moved in bricks and mortar businesses: EBay shops that sell your stuff for you.
• Netflix vs. Blockbuster
  How a bricks and mortar store can get a leg-up on a purely e-commerce company.

Starting up an E-commerce Business

• The Long-tail
  Why online businesses can take advantage of the long-tail in ways that traditional businesses cannot. (Hacking the Long Tail)
• Getting free help
  How to immerse yourself in the community you are hoping to break in-to and build up a support network. (BarCamp, Co-Working) 
• The role of planning in online ventures
  When do you need a plan and when is a plan a hindrance?
• Your online business is getting some attention, now what?
  Comments about the different paths you can take with your *potentially* successful online business. Taking VC money vs. boot-strapping, etc.

Making Money Online

• Brokering information on the web
  New web ventures base their revenue model on selling information, rather than what we traditionally think of as a product or a service. A discussion of blogs (Techcrunch, GigaOm) and other information-engines (Epinions, CNET).
• Growth Before Dollars
  Don’t think dollars first: web destinations that are useful to people will grow. So make your site, application, or service useful first. Once you’ve got a lot of people’s attention, then it should be easy to make money.
• Your idea doesn’t have moneymaking potential…so what?
  Don’t lose sight of the other benefits of your online venture – like learning new things, gaining a posse, credibility and popularity, enlarging your network and just HAVING FUN (Interactive 8-Ball, Mobilicio.us).

We are getting ready to release mobile access to WineLog. I wanted to pose a question around this, and I hope to get at least a few responses. So here goes…

What should we make the address for the WineLog mobile site?

Here are a few options. Feel free to come up with your own.

• http://winelog.mobi
• http://mobile.winelog.net
• http://mob.winelog.net
• http://winelog.net/mobile

We picked up the winelog.mobi domain a little while ago “just in case”. I’m not really a fan of the new top-level domain. Creating a separate subdomain for the mobile version seems much more elegant to me. Although, keeping the mobile site and regular site on different domains will help with traffic tracking and the such.

The effect on Google juice should also be taken into account though. By using a different top-level domain, we’ll be losing the Google ranking we’ve established. But maybe a .mobi address will help with mobile search engine ranking. I doubt it though since Google themselves aren’t using the .mobi domain. http://www.google.mobi redirects to http://www.google.com/mobile.

“mob” is quicker to type than “mobile” or “mobi”, so I’m pretty fond of mob.winelog.net. But I also want to keep to any standards that have been developing. My only experience with this so far is http://mobilicio.us, where we made the base site the mobile site and use http://mobilicio.us/www as the “project site” meant to be viewed from a larger screen. The mobile application was what people would want, so we put it right there at the root level. We did use the funny .us top-level domain to stay hip and remind people of the interaction with http://del.icio.us.

So I’m really looking forward to everyone’s opinions on this. Thanks in advance.