Buyer- or person-centric commerce is opening up a wide range of new business opportunities at many levels.

Take the analogy of mass production. The business opportunities it generated worked at the level of infrastructure provision (e.g. electricity supply), enabling building blocks (e.g. machine tool manufacture for mass production factories), component supply (e.g. for use in final assembly), and product assembly itself (e.g. the mass production moving assembly line).

The same goes for buyer- and person-centric commerce. It's opening up opportunities in the field of:

• basic infrastructure (e.g. the technology and tools of personal information management),
• enabling building blocks (e.g. specific uses of these personal information management tools such as personal knowledge banks),
• component services (e.g. 'reverse tendering' or 'reverse marketing),
• final, top-level service assembly (e.g. added value buying services or solution assembly services).

Here are some examples of these different level of business opportunity.

Added Value Buying Services: services which helps individuals go to market - 'shop' - more efficiently and effectively. Component services: needs clarification, search, comparison, advice, negotiation, payment, fulfilment.

Buyer/Issue Guides: 'knowledge sharing services' which provide easy to navigate access to collected and codified expert and peer-to-peer knowledge on specific subjects so that, when faced with a new problem or issue, the individual does not have to waste hours of time and effort 'reinventing the wheel'.

Problem Solving Communities: 'Living', customised buyer guides, where individuals input their own specific questions and recieve specific answers to these questions, but where the resulting knowledge is codified and stored to create an ever deeper, richer knowledge base for future reference. Together, buyer guides and problem solving communities massively reduce the 'unit cost' of information usage.

Personal Knowledge Banks: Personal 'databases' which individuals use to collect, store, secure and protect, access, cross-reference, analyse, use and share information relating to their various life activities and departments.

Personal Information Logistics: services that help individuals access the right information, in the right form, at the right degree of detail, at the right time, via the right channel.

Reverse Marketing: services that help individuals trade and sell personal assets such as information and attention to corporate buyers.

Reverse Tendering: services that help individuals signal their wish to buy products or services to sellers, and procure competitive tenders for their custom - a sophisticated 'module' of Added Value Buying Service.

Scenario Planning: services that guide individuals through all the main steps of an unfamiliar process, providing relevant expertise, access to suppliers etc: a sort of 'buyer guide' for important life events.

Specification building: services that use a combination of expert and peer-to-peer advice plus carefully designed Q&As to help individuals clarify exactly what they want to achieve in a specific activity or project, and to articulate this desired outcome to relevant suppliers.

Solution Assembly: services that help individuals manage life departments such as 'my money' or 'my home' more efficiently: providing necessary expertise, access to supplies, coordination and integration of different component services etc.

Supplier Relationship Management: services that help individuals manage their interactions, transactions and relationships with their many suppliers. The buyer-centric version of 'customer relationship management'.

Another way of cutting the cake is to define business opportunities in terms of how and where the service improves the individual's economics (see 'Another way of cutting the cake'.