The University of Texas at Austin

Center for Research in Electronic Commerce

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CREC in Action

The Center for Research in Electronic Commerce (CREC) is surpassing all current research techniques and proposing a new approach to blending business and academia. The CREC developed several projects withing social networks such as Facebook and Twitter which, while exploiting the underline of social networks will allow for the exploration of radically new ideas that are shaping tomorrow's business environment.

UTrend

 UTrend is a market research site that allows companies to use chatter on Twitter to predict future product sales. This project was recently featured in the Wall Street Journal in collaboration with MITSloan Management Review. 

 

bRkthRgh

 *bRkthRgh* (pronounced "breakthrough"), a Facebook application will study concepts such as the influence of word of mouth and herding on purchasing decisions and will examine hot topics such as Digital Rights Management and co-creation.

The application, is built within the oh-so-popular Facebook as an application will give emerging musicians the opportunity to diffuse their music, communicate with already existing fans, and captivate new ones. For music lovers bRkthRgh will be a great tool to discover new music that has not yet hit the mainstream. The idea is to allow musicians and fans to come together and meet new people with similar musical tastes in a spam-free, easy to navigate space where they can interact and benefit from each other.

Take a look at bRkthRgh on Facebook!

The bRkthRgh Team (in no particular order):

  • Xianjun Geng
  • Huaxia Rui
  • Markus Sammallahti
  • Andrew Whinston
  • Elizabeth Winkler