The dot com research project was quite a challenging job. Indeed, lots of efforts were put in regular meetings, discussions, researches in libraries and over the Internet, contacting relevant companies, structuring the report and finally writing it up and editing it.  Indeed, lots of efforts were put in before we could produce what you are reading today.

Throughout the publication process of this research project, I seek to play an important role since I found the topic extremely intriguing and could not wait to research into it to reach a final conclusion.  Numerous meetings were organised and as one of the keenest members in the group, I attended over 90% of the meetings, during which I had always made constructive comments, which were later adopted by my group members.

Since I am taking Managerial Economics this year as one of my Humanities Options this year, my link with Dr Stefan Syzmanski of the Management School of Imperial College had been a great asset to the group.  Together with Alan and Ada, we had met with Dr Syzmanski to discuss the fluctuations in the dot com market.  Our topics of discussion ranged from what an economic bubble is, what volatility means, whether the bubble in the dot com market has already burst, etc. Dr Syzmanski’s insightful comments from an economist’s perspective, coupled with Dr P DeWilde’s patient and detailed guidance, enabled us to incorporate lots of interesting ideas into our report, which I hope you would enjoy reading.

Besides seeking advice, personally, I also did lots of researches myself.  My area of research was mainly centred upon a particular dot com company: Amazon.com.  In the first place, I obtained the latest Annual Report from them and read through the whole document line by line so as to get a glimpse of the strategy Amazon.com adopted.  Then I turned to the Internet for professional financial analysts’ comments on the Company’s performance.  Yet, I thought that was not enough to fairly judge the potentials of the Company.  In order to verify the validity of the analysts’ criticisms and other parties’ opinions concerning the Company, I spent hours and hours on trying the service delivered by Amazon.com via the Internet by myself.  For example, Amazon.com is famous for its wide product range and that was why I tried searching for some very outdated or rare titles on the site to see if its product range was really like what it claims.  Other areas of the web site were also looked into, for instance, speed for downloading the homepage, technology over security payments, user-friendliness of search engines and relevance of the found results by the search engines.

All of the above are summarised and succinctly presented in the section “The Internet Legend – Amazon.com” of the report.

On top of all of the above, I also worked closely with Per, Ada and Alan on the General Part and wrote the introduction for the whole report.