Marketing and the Internet

Assignment 3
Tracing One Technology's Impact

Professor John M. McCann
Fuqua School of Business
Duke University

This assignment is to be completed by a team of not more than four students. Teams may be composed of students from either section of the course.

Overview of Assignment 3

The goal of this assignment is sharpen your skills at understanding 1) the forces that are creating and shaping the digital era, and 2) how these forces will influence how we live and work, our media, and the practice of marketing. The following list provides the assignment details.

Pick one technology that is important in enabling or driving the digital era, either from the list I have provided in my Technological CyberTrends document or another technology of your choice, such as ISDN, low-orbit communication satellite systems such as Teledesic and Iridium , asychronous transfer mode (ATM) switches, digital camcorders, virtual reality, etc.
Research that technology via online search, using the Internet, Nexus, ABI Inform, etc.
Write a section that describes the technology, discusses the variants and suppliers, and projects a likely path for its deployment.
Apply the course's conceptual model (technologies enable the digital dawn, which impacts our media and the way we live and work, which impact marketing) to the technology:
- What role will it play in the digital dawn?
- How will it affect the way we live?
- How will it affect the way we work?
- How will it affect our media?
- What will be its possible and probably impacts on marketing?
Develop a frame-based HTML document that contains your report.
- There will be a "master page" that has two or more frames.
- There will be (at least) six separate HTML documents, one for each element of the conceptual model (technology, work, live, etc.)
- One of your frames should contain the conceptual model in a table format, with each cell containing either an element of the conceptual model or an arrow that connects the elements and thus forms the model. Those cells that contain an element of the conceptual model (e.g., Digital Dawn) will contain a link to the corresponding document. When the user clicks on that cell of the table, the corresponding document should appear in another frame. I have prepared the document Using a Table as a Substitute for a Clickable Image Map that elaborates on this use of tables.

Each team will present their report in class during one of the last four class sessions.

Sources for this Assignment

The course site contains considerable material that you should find useful for this assignment, including links to other sites. Class lectures will focus on each of the conceptual elements in the model (technologies, digital age, etc.) The CyberTrends Web pages have been copied and distributed to you. The Marketing Topics and the Information & the Web sections of the online course material are of particular relevance for this assignment.

Assignment 3 is a Team Assignment

The point value is 100.
It is due at 5:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 11. Five points will be deducted for each 24 hour period the assignment is late.
It must be accessible from the team liaison's Duke acpub account in the public_html directory.
It must be named assign3.htm
It must be accessible using the following URL - http://www.duke.edu/~acctname/assign3.htm where acctname is the acpub account name of the team liaison.

Team Liaison and Membership

As part of this assignment, you must inform us of the following:

The team’s liaison person,
The account address where the Web pages will reside (e.g. bek3) and
The members of the team,
The technology your team has selected.

Send an email note to mccann@mail.duke.edu with the following lines

For example: