Questions to guide commercial scan

Note:  these questions are only meant to help you structure your investigations and presentations.   Focus your efforts on the topic of the day ("Ubiquitous Data Access", "Exploiting Virtual Machines", and so on). You are not required to rigidly follow this sequence of questions, but a good presentation will implicitly address most of them.   Not all questions may be relevant to a specific topic.   Plan for roughly a 30-minute presentation, with 15  minutes of questions/discussion.   You may also find it useful to also look at the evaluation form for these presentations.

  1. What are major companies that supply products (e.g. software, hardware, etc.) or services (e.g. cloud services like Amazon EC2, training, etc.)  relevant to this course topic?   Are these well-established companies or statups?   Who are the primary customers:  individual users, small business, large enterprises, etc.?    Briefly describe these goods and services.

  2. How is the marketplace segmented?   What is the basis of the segmentation?  In each segment, which are the major and minor players? 

  3. What is the business model?   How do the companies make money?    What are the major costs involved?    Do these business models trigger any significant policy issues (e.g. privacy)?

  4. What are the major standards in this arena?  Are these official standards or informal standards that have evolved? 

  5. Are there capabilities discussed in the research papers for this topic that are missing from the marketplace?   What might be the reasons for this gap?

  6. Does commercial practice reveal important unaddressed research topics?   Why have these topics not been investigated?

  7. Are there significant unmet needs in this space?   Why have these needs remained unmet?