ssful Telecom Business The Portal Role 'A portal is an access point for services to the end-user, provided over Internet/Intranets'. There are many different types of portals from more specific horizontal to broader vertical ones, serving the consumer as well as the business market. The access point offers a collection of hosted or linked content items, applications, customer groups and services. The portal role is a very diffuse role in its present form. Most of the players that have an end-user interface/site might also offer and play a portal role. A concrete example would be Amazon.com. Amazon.com is an e-tailer but in order to provide services it has its own site/portal. One can, however, argue that some players have a more pronounced portal role. Such an example is Yahoo! With that in mind, we can say that there is a kind of 'pure portal role', that would be the 'main entrance' to communications and services in the Internet. The portal role is situated between the end user and the content provider. The cus- tomers are: End users, such as enterprises and consumers Content providers, suppliers Advertising and information brokers See Figure 4.21. Portals can be regarded as competing 'information switches' and content aggregators between the end users/networks and the content. Many portals have been suffering from the gloomy development within IT at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Enterprise content (Possible Operator content services/Portals brokers) services/Portals content Service and Telia portal connectivity Customers Trans- provider content Retail Service and Tele2 connectivity Customers portal provider Reuters content Service and connectivity (Customers) portal Tickets provider Example of value chains with portals Figure 4.21 The position of the portals Telecom Business Application Service Provider The terminology is not quite clear regarding application service providers. For example, sometimes the content provider role is combined with a very general application (service) provider role. Some