Mobile TV

Image Taken from www.ebay.com

I was reading an article on the Internet discussing the future potential of cellphones. One day “Mobile Phone TV” might be possible, according to China Daily. However, this would require the cooperation of network providers and everyone needs to be on the same page. This could be a lucrative market as there are 430 million phone users in China.

One problem is that different manufacturers or operators might be creating their own propriety software, when they should all use one software platform so that the streaming video can be broadcast on different phones and can communicate with one another. Standardization in technology is necessary to achieve this.

The mobile TV, would be very useful and could apply to all age groups, as cellphones are used across different generations. In emerging markets, it is sometimes cheaper or more viable to have a cellphone than a landline as it is more expensive to lay down cable in every part of the country. This is especially seen in African countries such as Nigeria.

In the end, the main success factor in making mobile tv a reality, is if manufacturers and network providers work together on the technology. Secondly, there needs to be public acceptance, which may arise if the technology works and people can appreciate the convenience of watching tv remotely. It can also provide a good source of ad revenue income.

Article from : http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/bizchina/2006-11/02/content_722517.htm

Monetization of Social Networks

Image Taken from http://www.holograms.cc/stock_images/promotional/photopoly/Dollar%20Sign176%2070-up.jpg

Many email sites such as yahoo, gmail, and hotmail have not been able to generate a significant revenue base for offering such services. Likewise social networking sites such as facebook and orkut may find it difficult to generate sizeable income from such ventures. Microsoft’s takeover bid illustrates the point that Yahoo may be failing to adequately profit from its online services. Some may argue that founder and CEO of Yahoo, Jerry Yang, was crazy not to accept Microsoft’s $44 billion dollar offer, because there are many challenges to earning a decent revenue base from certain online sites. Once facebook becomes too commercial with an abundance of online advertisers, viewers may move on to the next best thing. Charging people to use the service, is also a deterrent and so ad revenue is a more legitimate way to monetize social networking websites.

Providers of social networking sites find it a challenge to offer the service and yet profit from them. As soon as they start charging for services, people move on to a competitors network. It would be interesting to see what is in store for the future of social web sites, web portals and Internet Technology. If Microsoft takes over Yahoo, I fear that this would be anti-competitive and not to the benefit of Internet Users. Microsoft has a trend of being too business savvy and concentrating on their bottom line, then on the best interests of society.

Mobile Technology & Me

Image taken from apple.com
I have learnt my lesson of being too connected. Sometimes when I’m with friends and in a social setting, I feel I should value the time I spend with them and try to resist always checking my iphone (or blackberry or mobile device for some people), for email messages. I think I have gotten over, being fascinated by the Internet, especially in terms of being connected to people via IMing, chatting or facebook. I use it as a way of communicating and keeping in touch with people, but I feel it is not my primary interaction with people. Using the map function on my iphone allows me to reduce the chances of getting lost in DC. Mobile technology definitely has its function, but it only enhances our lives but does not supplant it.

Some people use mobile technology to tell people what they are doing every second of their lives. They use mobile phones combined with web technology to upload live stream videos and pictures of the things that they are doing. Also through GPS, people can track their friends. I believe if people want to share their lives in such a way, as with what is happening with facebook, then so be it. Their might be someone out there who is interested and has the time to check out your webpage. As for me, I would not post on facebook, for example, if I just ordered “pizza from Bertucci’s” or am “napping,” for the whole world to see. But I guess some people feel more comfortable in sharing every little mundane detail about their lives.

The Internet and Politics

Image Taken from Yahoo News. The popularity of blogs and the Internet have provided a new avenue for political candidates to have their voices heard. I subscribed to Hillary Clinton's and Barack Obama's listserv and I regularly get personalized emails regarding their campaign and requests for donations. However, they probably know what the other is doing, and therefore I get similar emails from each one, as one tries to combat the others attempts in fundraising.

However I do feel that the Barack Obama website is much more simple and user friendly than the Hillary Clinton website. He must of employed a better web developer. It seems more sophisticated and less cluttered than Hillary’s website. This creates a better impression of Barack Obama and makes it seem that his campaign is more organized.

In terms of policy, I do like Hillary Clinton’s policies such as making the Government more accountable, her take on renewable energy sources and so on. Perhaps through the Internet and blogging, people’s voices can be heard and this is consistent with her policy of making the Government more accountable and to give people what they want rather than the Government dictating what is good for the people. The Internet can definitely make the Government more customer-oriented if used properly.

Effort into Online Postings –Extra time into your postings, can payoff.

Image taken from fnux.theuseless.com

I think its interesting how employers post ads on craigslist. The way employers write their employment ads, need to be realistic and also need to sell their company as much as the requirements they look for in a candidate. Employers have the responsibility to place appropriate ads, that don’t take advantage of potential employees, and post impossible requirements for potential candidates. Just as an employee has to present a cover letter and a resume, to sell themselves, employers too, should craft their postings, to create interest and enthusiasm in the business they’re in.

I read a cover letter posted on the Hong Kong craigslist by a person interested in a finance position. She graduate from Columbia University with an MBA in Finance, and seemed very eloquent and qualified for a trading job. If I was a hiring manager, seeking new graduates hires, I would have definitely contacted her for an interview. What impressed me was the long and detailed cover letter she provided and the specific skills and classes she took that would be applicable for the job. She highlighted all her main talents and achievements, such as being a scholarship recipient in Gaungzhao, China and achieved an impressive GPA at Columbia University.

I believe, through the Internet, you can make connections to potential employers, depending on how impressive your resume and cover letter looks. Spending the extra time in crafting your cover letter and resume, and customizing them for the job that you seek, can pay huge dividends. Likewise, employers posting job ads, can receive more responses from the right candidates, if they put more consideration into the audience they are reaching out to and the level of information on their ads.

Social News Websites

Picture taken from www.perezhilton.com

I believe there is great potential in social news website, where people can view stories they feel are most interesting and read other peoples comments and leave back their own. An interesting take on such a social news website is the celebrity gossip columnist, Perez Hilton's website. Its interesting how he digs up dirt on celebrities and posts it on his blog, with readers being allowed to add comments, which they are no shortage of. Its all in the name of fun and is often hilarious, yet surprisingly, the website is a good source of up to date and speedy information on celebrity gossip.

I think some of the things he posts, can sometimes go a bit too far, and is just aimed at creating shock. However, you could say this is in line with the trashy celebrity gossip business and that he is satisfying the market.

In some way, Youtube could be another social news websites, since it allows people to post their own videos and you can see how popular a video might be. People search for whatever interests them, and the most talked about news, hot topic or media figure may get the most searches. For example, when Britney Spears did a poor performance on the VH1 Music Awards, I tried to search it on youtube because I missed the show.

Some social news sites may have more integrity and discuss more serious topics, while others are more for entertainment. However, they have provided a useful means of accessing information and provide greater interaction and feedback from readers.

Virtual Meeting

Over spring break I visited San Francisco, CA and had the opportunity to visit reputable companies in the Silicon Valley. One such company was Cisco Systems. They are at the forefront of video conferencing, where they have developed meeting rooms with audio systems, plasma screens, and video cameras to simulate a board-room meeting, yet with counterparts in remote locations. They called their system “Telepresence.”

Although the package costs $300,000 USD to buy, it would serve large corporations very well, as they could gain huge cost savings from having managers being able to save time and money from traveling to far off locations for meetings. I was able to experience the video conferencing where fellow students were placed in separate meeting rooms. The desk, seating 10 people, were equipped with speakers and microphones. They were three cameras placed in different directions and three plasma screens next to each other, to create the platform. It worked surprisingly well and you could make eye contact with people across the screen.

You can watch a video about it from YouTube:



Video taken from www.youtube.com and provided by Cisco Systems

The disadvantage of such a live and realistic video-conferencing solution, was that you know if a person is not paying attention if they are reading emails, checking their blackberries etc, which you would not know over teleconferencing. In some ways, the meetings are too real and too transparent.

Also in some ways, it cannot overcome face-to-face meetings because you lose the personal touch, there is less trust and camaraderie and it cannot go that extra distance to close the gap. For example, we met a secretary through a plasma screen, and he looked very real. We did not realize he was on TV, until we came closer, as he could see us through video and therefore we could interact with him. It was a very funny experience. However, while on the tour of the Cisco building, we met him on the second floor, and he physically looked very different and seemed more approachable.

There are huge advantages to virtual teams and using the web to conduct meetings, which can create convenience, with possible time and cost reductions. However, for certain meetings such as meeting new clients, face-to-face contact may still be necessary to build trust.

How to network in a conference

Image from punchstock.com

There are a lot of useful tips that we can gain from the web about networking in a conference. For example some useful tips from blogger Chris Bogan, is that if there is a blog of an event or a conference, it is wise to upload a picture of yourself and blog with other members to make a connection. During the conference you can try to identify the people you blogged with and it could be an ice-breaker.

An aspect that I found noteworthy is the degree of information you give when you introduce yourself. Giving too much information, can bombard a person and seem too serious. For example giving your full name and the company you work for, can be too much information as a conversation starter. Alternatively, it can be a good conversation starter if somebody is interested in the company you work for.

People also develop an impression about the company you work for, from the impression they get from you as a person. Therefore impressions count and you could be a good spokesperson for the company or could give a bad reputation to the company, if you don’t give a good impression. I felt this personally, when I attended a career fair and conference, where a female recruiter from Ernst and Young was giving interviewing advise. She sounded very critical of interviewees, yet she dressed shabbily, her hair was messy and she wore no makeup. It didn’t give me a good impression of Ernst & Young, and made it seem like it was a stern place to work and employed strange people. I didn’t mind that she had high expectations from applicants about etiquette and dress, yet she sounded hypocritical when she didn’t seem very put together.

Another area of social networking that we should all take note of is card-giving: that it is more useful to receive than to give. This selfish mentality has a purpose from a seller’s perspective, as you can contact potential customers to offer products for example. However, in trade fairs, booths are very inclined to give out brochures and name cards as a form of promotion and advertising. In the end of the day, from experience, you can realize which strategy works best for you and which approach to take based on the situation.

Moving from paper based systems to online documenting

Increasingly, we are moving from paper based systems of documenting things such as papers, reports, and creative works to digital and online forms of storing such data. For example, we are moving from printing out physical photographs from our cameras to having most of our pictures saved on our computers and shared online. It is definitely becoming cheaper as well, to store information online and it conserves space.

I remember my Dad having stacks of photo albums and videotapes of family videos and events. Much of the pictures I take today are stored in my laptop, yet my parents are not so tech-saavy to view online social networking sites to view uploaded pictures. However, it is becoming more expensive to print pictures, and therefore it is a definite cost saver by storing them digitally.

Even when I create papers and personal works, most of them are stored digitally in my laptop or servers. This definitely saves space and provides another storage method that could reduce the risk of physically storing material such as losing it through a fire, theft or misplacement. When I was in my early years of high school, I wrote some English papers, that I found amusing when I read them after I graduated high school. Unfortunately, those papers got thrown out, when my family was spring cleaning. Therefore, in some ways, digital storage can be a back-up to physical storage of information. In addition, the images or information would not get physically damaged or destroyed such as old photographs.

Is Second Life going too far?

In this online community, it mimics real economic-based society where you can buy clothes to keep up with trends and amass wealth to enjoy a better standard of living.

There is growing commerce and people work just as hard in their Second Life (SL) jobs as in their real jobs, in order to generate income and have the lifestyle they want to lead. But are people taking Second Life a bit too seriously? I haven’t tried out the online community myself, but from what I’ve been reading, it sounds kind of addictive and I don’t want to be devoting time and money to something, which I should be doing for my real life.

Even land buying and selling can be carried out by speculators in Second Life. Catherine A. Fitzpatrick , a Russian translator in New York city owns several properties in Second Life, and charges between $1.50 and $150 in rent. Ironically she takes profits made in a virtual reality life to pay for real-world bills.

Second Life sounds interesting and fun and is a microcosm of society as we know it. In some ways, it could let us live our fantasies and do things that we couldn’t do in daily life such as the characters people choose in SL and the unusual trends and fashion they follow such as butterfly wings. It just scares me how people take things quire seriously and indicates there is a big potential for virtual reality.

Has the Internet made us stupid?

I don’t think so! Some argue that the Internet has made people more antisocial and more connected with an electronic box which they devote a significant amount of time to. With the aid of the Internet and the useful applications that go a long with it such as email, teleconferencing, and information gathering for example, some may argue that we are becoming more anti-social.

I disagree with the 90 plus year old Nobel Laureate, Dorris Lessing, that the Internet phenomenon has been a step back for society. It just changes the way we do things. Hard-working people tend to spend hours gathering information or doing their job by reading books or other written material and processing and transferring information to hard copy documents. With the aid of the computer, however, many of these activities can be done in one terminal, processed, stored and disseminated. It makes us more efficient as many things can be done through a single medium. Such activities tend be anti-social anyway, regardless of whether your using a computer or not.

There are several disadvantages for being so connected, as the syndrome of always wanting to check your email, can cause people to be more paranoid and restless. It becomes difficult to take a vacation without having Internet access. Sometimes you have to discipline yourself, and restrict accessing the Internet to a certain time and for a certain period. Checking your email multiple times a day, while on holiday can be excessive, but it tends to be a habit.

I believe the Internet has made our lives easier, and made us smarter by being able to access more knowledge. People who are resistant to change tend to favor things being done the old way. However, if they use the system they can slowly learn the benefits of it and appreciate different ways of doing things. This is one thing that I learned from living in different countries and having to adapt to different ways of doing things and the logic behind it.

Carolyn's Blog

Carolyn's Blog discusses Windows Vista and all its disadvantages. Also you have to check out the picture of the dog she put on her postings -its quite cute!

Link to her Blog

Who knew that the human mind is still superior to the computer.

One would believe that in today’s world, computer intelligence would be very advanced and almost anything can be accurately carried out by computers. However, some actions that human’s find easy such as identifying images, are very difficult for a computer to recognize.

The computers are only as smart as the people who build them. It has greatly improved our lives, and we can shop online, check our bank statements, perform complicated calculations, and it has made it easier and cheaper to communicate with people from around the world.

However, there is still room for expansion, and as programmers and IT developers continue on their path to making more intelligent systems, we could get better functionality from the Internet.

In a way, there is some benefit to having computers being unable to recognize images or carry out certain tasks, as it can rule out Bots. Bots have become very common on the Internet and they can be a nuisance.

There are several websites that pay people to perform tasks, that a computer would find very difficult to do, such as “Mechanical Turk” and “ChaCha.com.” I was requested to carry out tasks on the Internet such as surveys. However it did not pay very well, and it offered coupons or free gifts where you would have to spend a certain amount and then you would receive a discount or a free item. I felt this was not a big incentive enough for me, and the amount of time it took and the reward I was getting did not match up.

Therefore, from that particular experience, I became skeptical about doing these online tasks to earn money. Perhaps sites such as Mechanical Turk or ChaCha could be more financially rewarding since they pay you in monetary terms instead of coupons or vouchers. One would have to weigh the opportunity cost of doing such tasks and the amount of time they have on their hands to consider performing those online tasks.

When you shop for products online, do you seek the opinion of others?

For me, when I shop for things online I like to read the feedback of what other people thought of the product, customer service or seller. Even when you choose a restaurant or decide where to get your haircut, you tend to ask your friends, family or colleagues, for recommendations on where to go. Similarly, shopping online is no different and therefore blogs and feedback comments are ever so important in equipping the online shopper.

When I shop for textbooks online, I read others comments on the seller, to determine if that seller is reliable or not. Even to shop for electronic items such as digital camera’s the comments people place on the products are invaluable, to determine whether that camera might be right for me.

Example of Best Buy User Comments on Digital Cameras

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?type=product&tab=7&id=1170290185792&skuId=8266208&childSku=null&count=null#headerCustomerReviews

The simple ratings, for example, out of five yellow stars for a camera on walmart.com, are not enough as it does not provide the detailed feedback of what makes the camera special and who would it be suitable for eg. a leisure picture taker or professional.

Walmart Link: http://www.walmart.com/search/browse-ng.do?ic=48_0&ref=125875.137971+500566.501090&catNavId=3959

Blogs are greatly improving the information available on products out there. It makes companies more accountable and customers can provide their input on how to improve a product. By discovering the opinion of others, we can better gauage whether a product might be suitable for us. For example, a comment like the one below reflects on the product bought as well as on Best Buy:

Customer Rating: 1
Not good... 01/23/2008
By amyd Read all my reviews

Cons: Batteries
"I bought this camera and as soon as I got it I put in the batteries and immediately a low battery signal appears. The camera shortly turned off. I sent it in to get repaired not one...but TWICE! Canon sent me back the camera without anything changing. I tried 4 brand new sets of batteries and rechargable batteries...no change. I reseached and found that others are having the same problem. Luckly Best Buy refunded my money. Good Luck!"

However, I believe that some aspects of e-tailing cannot mimic shopping at physical stores, especially for products such as clothing, where you want to feel the texture of material or to try the clothes and see if they look good on you. However with blogs, it provides more information on products and services from actual users, and so it gives us extra sets of eyes and opinions to help us in our decision-making process. Through an online community, we are able be more knowledgeable about the things we buy. Thank goodness for blogs, as it makes shopping online so much easier.

Social Networking, Six Degrees

The articles I read were the “Six Myths about Informal Networks” (Cross, Nohria & Parker) and “IT Conversations” (Stephenson).

The first article highlights the importance of informal or social networks in the work place. The writers emphasize that it is crucial for managers to realize that when people work collaboratively and use their networks, they perform better at their jobs. Yet an emphasis on individual performance sometimes goes against the benefits of synergy within a group.

It was interesting to see how network diagrams could be drawn on how decisions or information is disseminated between different people in a group or organization and who depended on who for information. From the diagrams you could also discover if bottle-necks exist which may reduce efficiency or may increase control of the work performance. For example, one individual who has too much decision-making power and exclusive access to information can cause major inefficiencies. Therefore, as the article was alluring to, empowering workers by making resources more available and letting them make their own decisions, can improve productivity.

The other article I read which was written by Karen Stephenson, is also about human social networks. I found it very interesting to learn from both articles, that the study of human networks can be applied to solve problems in the corporate world, the medical field, to hunting down terrorists by understanding the terrorist network.

A major issue touched on by Karen Stephenson is that of trust-based networks as oppose to hierarchal or authoritative networks. I can imagine that a network based upon “trust” is more long-lasting and sustainable simply because stronger bonds will be made and there may be more open lines of communication. On an organizational level, I understand that a lot of turnover is due to interpersonal reasons. As many human resource managers may tell you, this is highly the case. Compensation may not be the only factor in job satisfaction, and similarly from what I understand from Stephenson’s discussion about trust, the social aspect plays a great factor in human social networks.

My First Blog

I am student at American University and I am doing this blog post as part of my course.


“On my honor, all posts on this blog are my own”