Hooked On Speed
Provide Functionality
Ron Stein, 33, and Michael Herzig, 27, know all about the
challenges of starting a site geared toward this group.
"Because the technology in the college space is evolving so
quickly, you have to move fast to get onto their radar
screen," explains Herzig, co-founder of UConnections.com, a
New York City-based university network site. "If you don't
offer them the products they want and make them available very
quickly, someone else will." In order to provide the functionality needed during their
start-up period, the UConnections founders have partnered with
other online businesses that already offer student-oriented
services, such as eCampus.com, Gamegate.com and major food
suppliers. In many cases, UConnections diverts traffic to its
partners' servers, which can better handle the volume and
transactional requirements. The key, says Stein, is to choose
partners that give students the speed and site quality they
expect. "For now, we've managed to do this much by finding
partners who already have the technology up and running,"
Herzig adds. Eventually,when more resources are available and more
of the basic network has been completed, UConnections will move the
technology and traffic back to its site. Content Continues Below
At the same time, speed isn't your only consideration. A
recent Forrester survey found that 73 percent of young adults said
their technology usage decisions were primarily
entertainment-motivated, compared with 36 percent of older adults.
That means ample opportunity for entrepreneurs like Michael
Moroney, 32-year-old CEO and co-founder of ArtistOne, a San
Francisco-based musical artist community that features sound
downloads, video interviews and more. ArtistOne, which started off
with much more funding than UConnections, takes a different
approach to ensuring speed and performance. All its e-commerce
operations occur on its own dedicated servers. "We've
created a unified e-commerce system," says Moroney.
"Whether users are purchasing MP3 downloads, CDs or
merchandise, it's all happening on our servers, so we're
able to control the bandwidth output." Moroney and his colleagues have also paid heed to speed in the
design of the ArtistOne site, using fast new-media technology such
as Flash and ensuring that users are no more than one or two clicks
away from the songs they want to hear. Remember, when it comes to keeping up with young consumers,
flexibility is the name of the game. Moroney and his team designed
a scalable backend system that would enable them to expand with
additional servers without having to change the basic architecture.
ArtistOne also uses a variety of sound formats, including
QuickTime, MP3, Windows Media Player and RealNetworks technology,
and is prepared to accept any improved formats that come along.
Says Moroney, "We're not betting the farm on just one
sound or video format, and as new systems are developed, we can
easily plug it in to our existing architecture."
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