Gluing ideas

We had a meeting today, and in order to support my idea of creating value and use the client/server technology as opposed to peer to peer I proposed to the group to use a computer simulation program called Stella, that we used in E-Commerce as a tool to express systems dynamics. They really like it and they think it is going to be very effective in the presentation.
I also presented a brief of my research so far:

Virtual communities

A virtual community is a Web site which sells some product or service. In this respect
there is no difference from an e-shop. The feature which distinguishes a virtual community
is that the operator of the Web site provides facilities whereby the customers
for a product or a service interact with each other (“We want students of the world to ‘own’ the site’), for example by pointing out ways
a product can be improved. Technologies used for this interaction include mailing
lists, bulletin boards and FAQ lists. The theory behind virtual communities is that
they build customer loyalty and enable the company running the Web site to receive
large amounts of feedback on the product or service they sell. A typical company that
might run a virtual community would be a software supplier. Customers for software
products manufactured by the company might post bug reports, bug fixes and
work-arounds on a set of FAQ pages. Staff from the company would participate in
the bulletin boards and also organise the FAQ lists.
Customers are often attracted to companies associated with virtual communities,
particularly those that are maintained by companies that sell complex products, in
that they see them as readily accessible stores of experience and unbiased advice.
A company can make profits from virtual communities in a number of ways. They
can charge for participation in the community, and they can beneft from increased
sales to customers attracted by the knowledge base held by the company and from a
reduction in support costs.
The virtual community model is usually associated with another Internet business
model, for example the Amazon Web site is primarily an e-shop; however, the fact
that it contains facilities for users to submit reviews and questions to authors and
artists gives it the favour of a virtual community.

On the other hand, they came up with the idea of using Java Applets as interface to upload and download films from client computers. This cannot be accomplished since the Java specification for creating applets is explicitly restricted to realize this kind of operations due to security concerns. Anyway….they will carry on.