International Journal of Information Management 36 (2016) 591–598

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

International Journal of Information Management

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijinfomgt

Web 2.0—The past and the future

Russell Newman a,∗ , Victor Chang b , Robert John Walters a , Gary Brian Wills a
a
Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK
b
Xi an Jiaotong Liverpool University, China

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Although it has been around for 11 years, it is still not clear where Web 2.0 will lead. This paper presents
Received 24 March 2016 a general discussion of past and recent trends that may positively influence the direction of Web 2.0,
Received in revised form 25 March 2016 including cloud computing and other emerging business models. In order to move forward, Web 3.0 is
Accepted 25 March 2016
proposed for the next generation of work that integrates Cloud Computing, Big Data, Internet of Things
Available online 6 April 2016
and security. We also present criteria and future direction for Web 3.0 to allow all services and people
can stay connected with each other.
Keywords:
© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Web 2.0
Web 3.0

1. Introduction by universities to provide students virtual learning environments.

Murugesan (2007) presents the overview, content and tools for
Based on our previous work (Chang, Newman, Walters, & Wills, Web 2.0. Hwang, Dongarra, and Fox (2013) explain that the Inter-
2016), the main objective of this research is to determine to what net of Things can be the next generation for the Web. Whilst novel
extent the ecosystem of modern Web companies represents an in 2005 and exhibited by just a handful of ground-breaking ser-
economic bubble. To that end, this paper explores the drivers of vices, many of these characteristics have become commonplace in
modern Web companies, their practises and business models, and most services and software. Such rapid adoption has been possi-
what that means for the sector as a whole. ble due to a series of low-cost emergent technologies, which are
The term “Web 2.0” was defined by Tim O’Reilly in 2005, explored later in this paper. In order to discuss the past and future
amongst other definitions, as sites and services that rely upon the of Web 2.0. This paper is structured as follows. Section 2 presents
generation of content by their users, as opposed to editors or ded- the Social Web to review the definitions and past contributions.
icated content creators (O’Reilly, 2005). O’Reilly’s list of acid test Section 3 describes Cloud Computing services and its impacts to
characteristics for a Web 2.0 service defines the sector quite well: Web 2.0. Section 4 discusses whether Web 2.0 enters a period of
stability and presents examples that can decode the future trends.
• Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability. Section 5 illustrates the next generation of Web 2.0, the Web 3.0
• Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer and discusses the features required to make Web 3.0 functional and
as more people use them. successful. Section 6 concludes this paper with future work.
• Trusting users as co-developers.
• Harnessing collective intelligence.
2. The social Web
• Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service.
• Software above the level of a single device.
Following O’Reilly’s definition, Web 2.0 was later characterised
• Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business
by introducing online “links between people” in addition to the
models. established Web’s links between documents (Murugesan, 2007)
that characterised the web up to that point.
Apart from O’Reilly (2005), Andersen (2007) explains the def- Social Web 2.0 services have flourished by enabling people
inition, scope and services for Web 2.0. He focuses on ideas, to connect not only with friends, family and colleagues, but also
technologies and implications for education which have adopted with events, interest groups, companies, brands and other entities
(Rainie & Wellman, 2012). Enabling people to connect with friends
and other entities enables them to receive multimedia updates
∗ Corresponding author. from those connected entities. It also permits people to freely
E-mail addresses: [email protected] (R. Newman), [email protected] associate with any other entity they wish, perhaps publicly, and
(V. Chang), [email protected] (R.J. Walters), [email protected] (G.B. Wills). build a persona or profile.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2016.03.010
0268-4012/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
592 R. Newman et al. / International Journal of Information Management 36 (2016) 591–598

Berners-Lee (2010) argues that social Web 2.0 services tie their subsequently been unable to serve some or all of their users. A
users into their product offerings. That is, users are prevented from couple of examples exemplify this problem.
using their existing data on other social Web 2.0 services with ease,
thus creating closed “silos” of users’ social data. This is achieved by 1 UK 1901 Census Website Launch
ensuring that users’ data on a particular service can only be seen
and utilised from that service, and not exported to other services On 2nd January 2002, data from the 1901 census of England
(Berners-Lee, 2010). Users are encouraged to depend upon the ser- was released online (BBC, 2002a). Demand for the site was high, as
vice as a means of social interaction, as moving to another service it provided a tool that anyone could use to look up information on
becomes prohibitively difficult. their ancestors, with ease. News of the launch was also widespread
This “user tie-in” may also be generated as a side-effect of the in the media. The first three days of release saw an average of
level of use of a social service and the breadth of facilities that it 32 million visitors per day, which was 27 times higher than the
offers. For instance, customers are less likely to switch to a com- designed capacity (BBC, 2002b). Being unable to cope with this peak
peting social service if all their friends and connections are using of demand, the site failed completely, and had to be taken offline.
their current one. Given that a social service cannot operate prof- Eight months later, in September 2002, the site had been improved
itably without users, generating tie-in is an important component to cope with the higher levels of demand and was undergoing test-
of social networks’ business models (Berners-Lee, 2010). ing. However, the media and public interest in the site had passed,
Berners-Lee made these statements in 2010. In the time since, and the site never saw the same levels of popularity (Sfetcu, 2014).
many social Web 2.0 services have developed methods of inter- Under-provisioning of server capacity effectively condemned this
operating and integrating with other services. These are often project, at a time when predicting demand and providing capacity
manifest in: was difficult.

• Federated Authentication (Jøsang & Pope, 2005) 2 Nectar Loyalty Card Launch

The ability to log into Service B using one’s credentials from When this loyalty card scheme launched in 2002, it was backed
Service A. by email and TV marketing, with exposure to an estimated 10 mil-
lion households. Those signing up online were given bonus loyalty
points, in an effort to reduce demand on telephone and postal reg-
• Cross-service publishing (Muller, 2007; Murugesan, 2007)
istration systems (BBC, 2002c).
Despite media coverage of 10,000,000 households, the Nectar
Allowing Service B to publish or re-publish some manner of website crashed on the first day of service with just 10,000 visi-
update on Service A, on behalf of the user, with their consent. tors per hour (BBC, 2002d). The objective of the Nectar Card was to
These abilities represent some opening of the silos that were amalgamate individual loyalty schemes for different retailers into
described by Berners-Lee (2010). However, they may also be seen a single scheme. An expensive marketing campaign raised public
as generating further tie-in. The use of Federated Authentication awareness sufficiently. However, the failure of the website meant
increases users’ dependency upon the originating service, which that Nectar were unable to issue loyalty cards to thousands of peo-
serves as their federated identity online (Buyya, Ranjan, & Calheiros, ple at the most opportune time to do so.
2010). Cross-service publishing is another means of amplifying the The problems created by capacity provisioning leaves both
effect of user-generated content, by allowing it to be re-published Technology/Information and Finance Directors in an embarrassing
on multiple services. position, where their investments can be incapable of effectively
The nature of marketing for both products and services has performing their core business operations at the most oppor-
adapted to capitalise on the network effect of user-generated con- tune time. Thus, traditional server farms represent a large capital
tent. Marketing campaigns now typically direct people to campaign expense that must be paid even before a service has begun func-
materials on social media sites, whereupon they are asked to post tioning, and may not be capable of scaling adequately to demand.
an update to their connected friends regarding the promotion. Such Storage and computing capacity can now be automatically pur-
updates appear as a recommendation from a friend, rather than an chased from a Cloud service reseller as it is required, providing
unsolicited recommendation from the product owner. This encour- a cost-effective solution to the problem of usage spikes. Capacity
ages people to trust the materials, and pay attention to it. may be allocated almost instantaneously at peak times, and then
released when it is no longer needed (Buyya, Yeo, & Venugopal,
3. Cloud computing services 2008). Companies are billed according to what they use, usually by
the hour (Armbrust et al., 2010).
The usage level of many social Web 2.0 services is dependent Customers using Cloud services are offered the advantages of the
upon cycles of human activity and real-world events. The peak server capacity, and spared the tasks of purchasing and maintaining
usage level of a social service, from a given geographic area, may the physical hardware, land, cooling, and power. These tasks are the
be many times higher than the trough (Stone, 2008). responsibility of the Cloud service, liberating customers from such
This creates problems for enterprises running social web ser- overheads and setup costs (Armbrust et al., 2010).
vices; the differences in demand between peak and trough traffic Some of the most popular Cloud services are run by famil-
can be great, and providing capacity for both in a financially- iar companies. In addition to their other operations, Amazon,
effective way can be challenging. Microsoft, IBM and Google all run competing Cloud service plat-
In the past, companies requiring high serving capacities often forms. Some companies, such as Rackspace, perform only Cloud
addressed this problem by employing a farm of dedicated storage service operations and have no other business offerings. Cloud
and computing servers, capable of handling a given level of peak services remain a growth area, with market revenues growing year-
traffic. However, the full capacity would only be used at peak times, on-year.
resulting in increased costs during normal operating load. For companies operating popular social web services, this
Furthermore, such great investments sometimes fail to perform removes the overhead of a server farm, converting it into a flex-
during the most critical of times; companies have experienced traf- ible cost that is adjusted according to the usage of (and therefore
fic peaks above the designed capacity of their server farm, and have the revenue generated by) the product. The Cloud service profits
 R. Newman et al. / International Journal of Information Management 36 (2016) 591–598 593

from this arrangement by signing many customers to their com- speculative investment by increasing numbers of Investment Banks
puting platform and sharing the capacity between them (Armbrust (IBs) and private investors (Braithwaite, 2011; Das, 2011a, 2011b;
et al., 2010; Chang, Walters, & Wills, 2013). Dembosky & Demos, 2011; Gelles, 2011a). Given the demonstrable
Cloud services have lowered the barriers to entry for web start- risks of investing in unstable Internet companies, it is understand-
ups. Fledgling companies benefit by spending less of their limited able why these investors may be focusing on only the companies
capital on costly land, hardware and connectivity. These capital emerging as stable and dominant.
expenses, which are typically large and paid up-front, are converted By analysing the same articles, it can be seen that Facebook
into monthly payments, scaled according to usage of the product. and Twitter are two of the largest private Web 2.0 companies tar-
Some modern Web companies effectively resell cloud process- geted by IBs (Braithwaite, 2011; Das, 2011a; Dembosky & Demos,
ing or storage capacity, adding value in the methods of use and 2011; Gelles, 2011a). It can also be seen from these articles that
application they offer to customers. One such example is Drop- investment proposals by IBs have become more generous over
box, which resells capacity on the Amazon S3 storage Cloud service, time, in terms of amount invested for the company share received
adding value by providing a file synchronisation and sharing service (Braithwaite, 2011; Gelles, 2011a). This is illustrated in Table 1
through their software. This is marketed to end-users as a Cloud- using Facebook as an example. Also shown is a recent valuation
based solution to access and share one’s files anywhere. A version of Facebook, according to public trading. The example from Face-
of the service with more fine-grained security features is marketed book shows that its valuation has grown from 65.7 billion in July
to businesses. 2012 to $253 billion in July 2015, nearly close to 4 times of its values
Cloud services may have emerged earlier, were it not for these in three years of time.
two enabling factors: Facebook is largely supported by advertising revenue and
micropayments from social applications, while the majority of
1 The commoditisation of virtualisation technology Twitter’s finance appears to still be sourced through venture capital
(Sharespost, 2011). As explained in Section 2, the desired outcome
Virtualisation has enabled Cloud services to operate by remov- scenario for a venture capital investor is that the portfolio com-
ing the need for a single physical computer to run just one operating pany becomes public, serving to increase the value of the venture
system. One physical computer may now run multiple virtual oper- capital investment (Cochrane, 2005). This places Facebook ahead
ating systems simultaneously, allowing customers to transparently of Twitter in terms of company development, with a negligible
share hardware (and all the associated costs). This means that a dependence upon venture capital support and income from multi-
Cloud computing customer can “start-up” virtualised servers in ple revenue streams.
seconds, boosting their computing capacity according to demand. Fig. 1 shows the Facebook’s share performance between IOPs
The provider of virtualisation services must balance the load of in May 2012 and March 2016. The lowest price is close to US $20
virtual servers across physical hardware, in a way that ensures per- per share and the highest is close to $120 per share, with about
formance, availability and profitability (Foster, Zhao, Raicu, & Lu, 6 times as the maximum percentage on return on investment. In
2008). comparison between July 2012 (around $20 per share) and July
2015 (around $90 per share), the valuation has increased 4.5 times.
Although more quantitative results are required to identify the cor-
2 A global improvement in bandwidth
relation between the share performance and valuation value, the
overall valuation confirmed by both share market and market val-
Cloud services represent a move from websites storing high- uation does agree with each other that the net values on Facebook
volume content on their own servers to a distributed model (hence are up. Facebook is a great example to represent the success of Web
the “Cloud” name), where high-volume content is stored “in” a 2.0, as it has billions of users worldwide, with billions of updates
Cloud service. The physical location of a Cloud service is largely and interactions between users happened on the daily basis. The
insignificant, but bandwidth availability is paramount for ensuring success behind Facebook’s venture is to blend the connectivity,
that customers have a reliable connection to the service. Such high- popularity, user community and market valuation altogether.
volume content often requires high bandwidth. The bandwidth During the dot-com bubble, many companies offered their prod-
of residential and business Internet connections has improved in ucts as a loss-leader to incentivise people to use the service, funded
many countries, enabling many more people to consume rich inter- by venture capital until a revenue-generation strategy was devised
net content. Conversely, this means social Web 2.0 services can (Chang, Newman et al., 2016). Some Web 2.0 services similarly offer
make their offering available to a greater number of people in a vari- services for free. The following section examines the novel business
ety of geographic locations (Telegeography, 2009; Chang, 2015). models that are emerging within the social web, and investigates
whether they are more sustainable than those employed by com-
4. Is Web 2.0 entering a period of stability? panies in the 2001 dot-com bubble.

As of 2009, “powerful players” had emerged in several Web 2.0 4.1. Emergent business models
service markets according to Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly & Battelle, 2009).
O’Reilly further reinforced this in his keynote to the 2010 Health Various business models are in use by Web 2.0 companies. One
2.0 conference (O’Reilly, 2010). This could perhaps mark the end of such model is “Freemium”, a portmanteau of “free” and “premium”.
competition for market dominance in these sectors, and a stage of In this model, a base service is offered for free and enhanced ser-
stable dominance by a few companies. vices and products (so called “premium” facilities) are offered for a
The emergence of these powerful players contrasts with previ- fee. This model is particularly suited to companies that can trans-
ous technology bubbles, which collapsed before powerful players form their users’ individual data into a larger dataset that is useful
could emerge. For that reason, “stability” is defined here as the commercially (McGrath, 2010). The Web (and Cloud computing in
outcome of a dominant Web 2.0 company emerging in a particular particular) offers sufficient economies of scale to run a company
service sector of Web 2.0. under this model. LinkedIn is one such example, which allows users
Following O’Reilly’s acknowledgement of emergent dominant to create CV-like profiles for free, but charges for access to the
companies, articles appearing in the financial press suggest that various tools which can assist in recruiting and head-hunting, by
stable and dominant Web 2.0 companies are becoming a target of analysing users’ underlying CV data (Johnson, 2010).
594 R. Newman et al. / International Journal of Information Management 36 (2016) 591–598

Table 1
Valuations of Facebook, indicative and otherwise.

Source Trading Type Date Valuation ($bn)

Secondary Market (Gelles, 2011b) Private Indicative 24/08/2010 33.7

Goldman Sachs (Braithwaite, 2011) Private Indicative 04/01/2011 50.0
Google Finance Public Market Cap. 13/07/2012 65.7
Google Finance Public Market Cap. 12/07/2013 52.9
Google Finance Public Market Cap. 11/07/2014 135.3
Google Finance Public Market Cap. 13/07/2015 253.0

Fig. 1. Facebook’s share performance between IOPs and March 2016.

Social “marketplaces” are an alternative business model, which enable website publishers to dynamically embed adverts on their
enable users to make purchases through the network whilst being websites. Publishers are paid for impressions (the displaying of an
able to link people who have made purchases and notifying cus- advert) and/or clicks. Prior to the widespread use of social web ser-
tomers’ connection in the network. This has been demonstrated vices, Advertising Platforms would select adverts for a particular
extensively on Facebook, through the purchasing of competitive webpage based largely upon the page content.
advantages in casual games. The data-centric nature of modern web-based services and the
prevalent use of user accounts enables Advertising Platforms to
create a detailed profile of their users’ interests, likes, dislikes,
4.2. Advertising habits and other characteristics (Guha, Cheng, & Francis, 2011). This
is greatly facilitated by the widespread offering and usage of indi-
The delivery of advertising online is one of the oldest and most vidual user accounts, so that most traffic on a website can be traced
prevalent methods of sustaining an otherwise revenue-less ser- back to a particular user. This has created widespread concern and
vice online (Crain, 2014). Advertising companies run platforms that
 R. Newman et al. / International Journal of Information Management 36 (2016) 591–598 595

debate on the meaning of privacy on the web, and how it conflicts applicable to all Google products, states: “Our automated systems
with the advertising industry’s business models (Hoofnagle, Urban, analyse your content (including emails) to provide you with per-
& Li, 2012). The growth of smartphone usage, with the associated sonally relevant product features, such as customised search results,
increase in GPS/location information, has enabled Advertising Plat- tailored advertising and spam and malware detection.” (Google,
forms to capture even more profiling data, such as users’ geographic 2014)
locations and regularly frequented places (Dhar & Varshney, 2011). • Developing various products and services that facilitate the
Advertising Platforms compete on two main factors: growth of rich advertising profiles. For instance, a single Google
account ties together data from email, YouTube, search queries
• Accurate targeting and results clicked, and the Google+ social network.

Advertisers typically plan and identify the target market(s) for 4.3. Microtransactions and social/casual games
their products and advertising materials. By profiling users, Adver-
tising Platforms enable advertisers to display their materials to the Microtransaction Platforms are payment systems created to
audience that is most likely to respond to it. Advertisers often prefer allow users to make purchases, typically for low monetary trans-
to use Advertising Platforms that offer more fine-grained targeting, actions, hence “micro”. These systems have been implemented by
as this increases the effectiveness of each advertising campaign, various online services, social and otherwise, to enable products
and may reduce costs. For instance, the LinkedIn Advertising Plat- or services to be purchased with real currency. Purchases may be
form enables advertisers to target LinkedIn users by profession, made directly through the social service, or through any other prod-
seniority, job role, capabilities and interests. This makes it easy to uct that integrates with the online service. For instance, Apple offers
place adverts in front of receptive individuals, and/or those with a Microtransaction Platform through the retail of Apps and In-App
the authority to purchase the advertised product. Purchases. When a purchase is made, Apple automatically takes
30% of the value, and the remainder is passed to the developer of
• Prestigious placements the App. Microtransaction Platforms typically keep prices low to
incentivise purchases, and pool transactions together when billing
Advertising Platforms typically have a collection of websites them to a credit or debit card to minimise transaction clearing fees.
(a “Network”) where they may automatically display adverts. The Casual video-gaming gained popularity in the mid-2000s. Casual
characteristics and popularity of placements available to an Adver- video games are typically playable in short burst periods, allow-
tising Platform may appeal to certain advertisers. For instance, an ing play between other activities, and their lack of complexity
Advertising Platform may market itself as having placements on a means the games require little time to learn. These games are
number of the most-visited websites. Or placements on websites often provided free to the user, and derive their revenue from
of a particular focus, or with a particular type of audience. microtransaction-based purchases in the game. They may some-
By passively using a social web service (i.e. just reading updates, times require the player to wait an amount of time while operations
and not contributing), users are supplying data to an advertis- in the game complete. This differs from regular PC or console gam-
ing profile of themselves. By contributing to a social service, a ing, where participants may play for hours, after taking time to learn
richer profile may be created. This places social Web 2.0 services how to play (Kuittinen, Kultima, Niemelä, & Paavilainen, 2007).
in a powerful position, as they have particularly rich datasets and Social Web 2.0 services have built APIs that allow games and
advertising profiles. apps to be run inside their site, in the context of the social net-
Furthermore, social Web 2.0 services may employ the network work. For instance, Facebook allows games and apps to be run “in
of user connections in their service to deliver targeted adverts. Facebook”. Social games gained popularity on social networking
For instance, adverts may be displayed to a particular group of sites because the underlying network allowed players to play the
users because another user in their network responded positively games socially, with or competing against friends, and seeing one
to something online. another’s progress. Prior to this, social video gaming remained the
The use of Federated Authentication, mentioned in Section 3, purview of PC or console gamers as mentioned by Kuittinen et al.
also assists in developing an advertising profile. By tracking the (2007). Arguably, social networking websites have catalysed the
websites from which a user makes use of Federated Authentication, spread of these games, leading to the development of social games.
the social web service may identify what sort of online content the Social games permit players to engage in an individual game within
user consumes. a shared environment, facilitating competition, trade and other
Both Twitter and Facebook have large user-bases, with rich interactions.
advertising profiles automatically generated by users’ day-to-day A number of companies publish such games and Radoff (2011)
activity in the service. The fine-grained advert targeting that has identified several observations on these phenomena, notably:
this enables makes both sites popular advertising placements
(Facebook, 2012; Sinker and Stone, 2011; Twitter, 2011). 1 Exploitation of social connections
Google’s AdWords Advertising Platform exploits all the factors
described above. AdWords allows advertisers to target users based Games can exploit data in the social network to instil compe-
upon keywords from Google searches; geographic location; inter- tition, teamwork or co-operation between players. This may be in
ests; and demographic factors such as age; gender and parental the form of status updates on the network, notifying other users of
status. Adverts are then delivered as embedded HTML units in friends’ activities and interactions in-game, and enticing them to
Google Search result pages; and as placements on other sites; join in.
according to the targeting specifications of the advertiser.
Google have maintained their position as a successful online 2 Speed, competitive advantage or aesthetics—at a price
advertiser by:
Players may typically purchase an item in-game that provides
• Exploiting their position as one of the most popular search them with a competitive advantage, or speeds up play, through a
engines. real-world currency transaction. Some in-game purchases confer
• Encouraging users to create a profile, by offering free accounts purely aesthetic adaptations, allowing players to customise their
with email and other services. The Google Privacy Policy, which is characters in ways that are not permitted to free-play players.
596 R. Newman et al. / International Journal of Information Management 36 (2016) 591–598

Such aesthetic additions may adapt the appearance of an avatar only models means that games are free for anyone but advanced
image, provide rare clothing, distinctive millinery works, or acces- equipment and skills will require payment. Players can stay free but
sory items for the player’s environmental context (e.g. a dog for the trade-off is more time and effort will be spent on improving the
their farm). status of the gamers. Yao and Chang (2014, 2015) have conducted
The combination of Social Networks and Casual Gaming has in-depth case studies on the gamers based in Chengdu, Beijing and
produced several highly-performing companies whose products Shanghai, and have analysed the data based on their collected effort.
depend upon social networking services (Vascellaro, 2008). The They identified that there were four types of trusts among play-
parent Social Network typically benefits by automatically taking a ers and players in Chengdu have developed higher level of trust
proportion of any monetary transaction made through their Micro- in all aspects than players in Beijing and Shanghai. Cloud gaming
transaction Platform. can also establish active communities who can blend virtual real-
Companies producing social network games are highly depen- ity with physical activities such as sale of products, services and
dent upon the underlying social graph of their parent network, but interactions between players in real events.
at the same time capable of generating revenue at little actual cost.
While the games themselves are free and thus loss-leaders, the
4.5. Frameworks
one-off cost of creating purchasable items is low compared to their
sale price. Once the production of the original game is paid for,
Frameworks have been adopted by information systems, infor-
only operating costs need to be met. Furthermore, the games are
mation technology and information integration since all different
designed to scale with the growth of the social network, enabling
components, services, functions and business processes can be
millions of users to engage globally.
joined together under a conceptual domain. Services that have
Zynga is a company that produces various free-to-play social
adopted frameworks have been reported to have improvements in
network games that are tied-in to the Facebook platform. Their
efficiency, collaboration, team work and integration (Chang et al.,
revenue is based upon retailing purchasable extras for the games,
2013). Examples such as Cloud Computing Business Frameworks
according to the model described above. Zynga’s IPO occurred
(CCBF) has been designed to integrate four different major goals
during December 2011, valuing the company at $7bn, which is
for organisations that have adopted Cloud Computing as follows
lower than the $15bn–$20bn valuations generated during private
(Chang et al., 2013). Firstly, any organisations can define their
investment and funding rounds (Dembosky & Demos, 2011; Forro,
business models and use any combination of the suggested eight
Cauwels, & Sornette, 2011).
business models. Secondly, businesses can use Organisational Sus-
This is a risk for venture capital companies. When a venture
tainability Modelling (OSM) to evaluate their status of return and
capital company proposes a private investment deal with a com-
risk and risk that focuses on either technical, financial or user
pany, this gives an indicative valuation of the company. In the case
aspects of Cloud Computing adoption. Thirdly, businesses can pro-
of Zynga, investments made by venture capital companies valued
vide service portability to ensure that infrastructure, platform and
the company at $15bn–$20bn (Dembosky & Demos, 2011). How-
software as a service can be migrated from one to another with
ever, at floatation, the IPO price valued the company at $9bn (BBC,
the ease. Fourthly, business integration as a service allows differ-
2011; Google, 2011). The value at floatation is based upon what the
ent services to work together to jointly achieve the organisational
market is likely to pay for a share of the company, rather than the
goals. Another example is Cloud Computing Adoption Framework
indicative private valuations that Zynga had experienced before.
(CCAF) that focuses on organisations that can design, implement
This may indicate that the venture capital companies overvalued
and support services to users and their organisations. One exam-
Zynga during its time as a private company. Speculation surround-
ple is the illustration of security services, whereby Chang, Kuo, and
ing Facebook and the social networking sector could have been the
Ramachandran (2016) have designed a multi-layered security for
cause of this overvaluation.
defence.
Since social network games emerged, the rise in smartphone and
tablet ownership has created a change in the way such games are
delivered and played. Users can now be reached easily through the 5. Web 3.0
App Stores on their mobile devices, allowing play on a mobile device
at any time, instead of having to play through a social networking Web 3.0 is the next generation for the Web and has already hap-
website. pened while moving to the smart phone era, whereby billions of
These modern adaptations still encompass the social aspect of users can be connected to the internet by their smart and portable
the gaming—users are frequently prompted to post updates about devices that can connect them to different types of apps, services
their progress in the game to their social networking services. How- and communications. Users have much better access to the infor-
ever, since the games are now based on mobile devices instead mation they look for and can share with their peers. The use of social
of a social networking service, microtransaction revenue will pass network websites is another contributing factor that allows users
through the company that owns the App Store (i.e. Apple or Google), can stay connected with their peers and get updates about their
and no longer through the social networking site. networks, including news, events and interesting sharing. People
are more connected altogether in the globe and can work with
4.4. Cloud gaming communities outside their usual networks. Chang (2016) demon-
strates social network analysis to analyse the effects of networking,
Cloud gaming is another emerging model since billions of rev- including sharing, people who have clicked “like” and people who
enues have been generated worldwide. With the rise of Cloud have commented. The contributions allow users to study complex
Computing, gaming can be provided as a 24/7 service for anyone data within a matter of seconds since outputs can be presented in
to take part at any time provided with fast optic fibre network easy-to-use graphical interpretations.
and excellent computing resources. Cloud gaming offers businesses Web 3.0 connects all the people together with services in the
with these three models: subscription; pay-as-you-go and prod- internet (Fuchs et al., 2010). Internet of Things is another area of
ucts only (Yao & Chang, 2014). A subscription model is a model to specialisation that makes people connected together with all differ-
pay monthly to ensure players can access games. A pay-as-you-go ent services (Bandyopadhyay & Sen, 2011). All these devices include
model means players can play for the time and resources they use, mobile devices, sensors, Wifi and connectors can ensure all the peo-
similar to concepts delivered in existing Cloud services. Products ple can use the internet without paying the service providers. To
 R. Newman et al. / International Journal of Information Management 36 (2016) 591–598 597

ensure all the people can stay secure, security and privacy for Web References
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