Ex.8 Translate the following into English.

1.Завдяки телекомунікаційним технологіям люди можуть працювати з дому та підтримувати зв`язок з офісом через Інтернет.

2. Бездротовий зв`язок дає можливість використовувати всі можливості Інтернету в точках Wi-Fi доступу.

3. Зараз розробляються такі новітні технології, які дозволяють дивитися телебачення на вашому мобільному телефоні.

4. Виробники мобільних телефонів планують встановлювати навігаційні чіпи в кожний мобільний телефон.

5. Цифрове телебачення дозволяє передавати сигнал високої якості через необмежену кількість каналів.

6. Мікропроцесори зазвичай виготовляють з силікону.

7. Майже всі сучасні мобільні телефони обладнані опцією, яка називається Блакитний Зуб.

8. Існує думка, що одна третина всієї роботи може бути виконана на відстані, що дає можливість роботодавцям суттєво економити витрати на створенні та підтриманні робочого місця.

9. Незахищені лінії зв’язку мають ризик бути атакованими вірусами, або ж хакери можуть вдертися до вашого компьютеру та вкрасти конфіденційні дані.

10. Багато сайтів мають вбудовані аудіо та відео файли. Якщо ви хочете прикрасити вашу вебсторінку чимось особливим, ви можете використати, наприклад, Adobe Flash, щоб додати інтерактивну анімацію або звуковий контент.

Virtual Markets

Before you read

Discuss these questions.

1. How have new communication technologies,especially the Internet, expanded the traditional marketplace?

2. What is the impact of the marketspace on business strategy, particularly on the interaction with customers?

TEXT B

From the Athenian agora to the mall of America, the places where buyers and sellers negotiate their transactions have for thousands of years been just that: places. But over the past two centuries, and espe­cially since the advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web, technology has given rise to an alternative to the marketplace: the virtual marketspace.

More and more transactions that once took place only in the marketplace now occur in the marketspace, largely free from the bonds of space and time. As a result, there are exponentially greater oppor­tunities—and expectations—for deeper, more frequent interactions between companies and customers. With the growth of a service-based economy in which products are in­creasingly commoditised and differen­tiation ever harder to achieve, successfully managing company-to-customer inter­actions is not just advisable—it's critical. Indeed, there is a dialectic between the rise of the marketspace and the growth of the service-based economy: each feeds, and feeds off, the other and they must be considered together.

Thus, the marketspace presents both challenges and opportunities. Companies that either underestimate or overestimate its significance stand to suffer. Those who have underestimated have not realised that the Internet is overhyped; nothing much has changed. Others do not know that all the old rules of business are obsolete. On the other hand, firms that understand that the marketspace demands creative new strat­egies, yet relentlessly test those strategies against fundamental principles of service management, are likely to prosper. Even in the technology-enabled, marketspace, using service to manage relationships with cus­tomers will only become a greater virtue.

From Marketplace to Marketspace

A marketplace consists of three basic components:

• sellers, offering something of value
(goods, services or information)

• buyers, offering something of value in
return (cash or any of the above)

• a physical location (store, exchange)
where the two come together

In the marketspace, buyers, sellers, and the value they exchange remain the same, but the time and space constraints disappear. In the marketspace, their transactions take place virtually any time, anywhere, thanks to a variety of technology-mediated inter­faces (not just the Web) such as the tele­phone, wireless device, and personal com­puter. If a transaction takes place and you cannot say with confidence where it occurred, it happened in the marketspace.

One could say that the marketspace was born more than 150 years ago, the first time that a lone Morse code operator telegraphed an order to a supplier. Succeeding gener­ations of communications technology - telephone, fax, pager, mobile phone, even fast-food drive-through microphone-expanded the universe of transactions that could take place outside of the marketplace.

The marketspace as we know it today is chiefly enabled by the kind of 'screen-to-face' interactions offered by the Internet in general and the Web in particular. It should be noted, however, that the first (and still one of the most successful) screen-to-face technology predates the Web by more than a decade in the form of the humble ATM. In ‘spitting out cash' at more and more sites around the world, the automated teller machine performed first, on a widespread basis, what many marketspace interfaces are doing today: it represented a substitute of capital for labour, thus threatening to make bank tellers an endangered species.

Banks originally positioned ATMs as a service channel for their least profitable customers, assuming that account holders with substantial means would continue to talk with live tellers. They soon discovered, however, that customers of all stripes enjoyed banking at the machines—and the number of machines, networks linking them and services they provided mush­roomed. The result of retail banking's shift from marketplace to marketspace was nothing less than a transformation of the entire industry's competitive dynamics. As the ATM became the dominant interface between customer and company, consumer loyalty to individual bank brands eroded. The network trumped the brand as the locus of both customer relationships and economic value, which is why we are more interested in spotting Link or Visa on the side of an ATM than a placard for our particular bank.

By the early 1990s, even before the emergence of the Web, virtual channels were beginning to transform businesses and industries and create significant new sources of value. This is why, in 1992, Harvard Business School professor John Sviokla convinced that the old para­digms for teaching the first-year marketing course were increasingly outmoded and hatched a new term (and a new course) to describe the brave new business world: marketspace.

Since that day, bubble economies and Wall Street manias have come and gone. But today, no doubt, the marketspace is a very real and powerful phenomenon—one that is here to stay.

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