DRM

My group for BIT 411 researched E-Commerce and the music industry a few months ago. We predicted that the industry was moving away from DRM. Now Songy BMG is getting rid of DRM.

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jan2008/tc2008013_398775.htm?campaign_id=rss_daily

The Music Industry and E-Commerce

Executive Summary

Presentation

References are at the end of the Executive Summary and the Presentation.

Music Industry and E-Commerce Executive Summary

http://andurn.googlepages.com/TheMusicIndustry.doc

SOA

SOA the Microsoft way

One of the key benefits of SOA is a "Stronger connections with customers and suppliers". I imagine a company such as GE that sells such a wide range of products and has many different divisions and departments. If GE were to collect customer data such as purchasing habits and demographics they would easily be able to data mine for opportunities to sell different products to existing customers. Having a service that pulls customer demographic information and purchasing habits would be of great use to a very large company. The marketers for each product line would be able to work quickly with their IT people to get the data they need without having to pay for the entire searching feature every time.

For example, say that the microwave oven marketers were looking for new people to sell microwaves to. They could do some data mining and find out which demographic of people who buy other GE products also buy microwaves. But using an already written service the microwave oven marketers would not incur a huge cost to set up a very customized data mining operation. Once they had the right demographic it would be easy to use the service to get the personal information and send advertisements and promotions to the right people.

"Answer to 6b"

I was totally blown away by Ruby on Rails.

Rails seems to be all about the fast and easy development, it creates everything you need automatically as you go. It seems extremely powerful for project that utilize services, I have not seen how hard it is to create services on Rails.

Axis2 on the other hand, from what I have seen at least, seems to be more geared to creating and managing services. Axis seems very powerful for quickly linking applications that already have services written because it does all of the transport work, you just have to tell it where stuff is.

Rails seems to have everything prebuilt for displaying and interfacing while Axis seems to focus more on facilitating communication, security and reliability. I am not sure how large rails is meant to be, but Axis is definitely up to enterprise level abuse.

I felt so far behind when watching the first two screencasts but it was amazing to see something usable be put together so quickly.

"Answer to 6a"

Web Services Middleware: All Grown Up!
by: Sanjiva Weerawarana

I enjoyed watching Sanjiva's presentation on the history of web services and the new Apache Axis2... "Working with XML in java especially is absolutely crappy"

It was really amazing so see the way web services have evolved. Web service technology has evolved from being complex RPC calls into very simple send some data get something back. The depth of the open source Apache Web Services Application Server is amazing. SOAP has dramatically evolved from its original form. The Axis2 Apache Web Services Application Server allows ease of deployment of web services and allows for easy deployment on the WS-* Framework.

I do have to admit that a good portion of the details discussed, but the ideas are amazing. I was looking at the website http://ws02.org and you can get the entire WS package, the Axis2, a Enterprise Service Bus, and a Mashup Server and there are tons of materials available for doing it yourself. I would like to try it out when I get some time.

Network Neutrality

I am very torn on the issue of network neutrality.

I hold very dear to me the idea of government nonintervention. I know there are a few horror stories of abuse, but I do not see cause for such regulation. Now I know, I favor an open internet, but I am not sure congressional legislation is the key. I do think the FCC is the right administrative body to control these few and far between abuses. Even handsoff.org, which sits on the non regulation side of the fence, supports the FCC and their four principles.



While the 'openists' which I like to call the regulationists are promoting SaveTheInternet



I like the idea of keeping everything neutral, don't get me wrong, but I believe this is the wrong way to do it. I do not think the need is great enough to get congress involved. I would prefer to see less government regulations and let the market drive itself. The market should be able to correct and balance any sort of unfair practices. There are already laws regulating the telecom industry, and the internet is not this crazy place where ISPs decide which information you get to see or not.

I might change my mind on this later, as I used to be on the net neutrality legislation side of the argument, but now I am sitting firmly on the non regulation side.

PowerPoint and Lawrence Lessig

Lawrence Lessig on Network Neutrality

When I first watched Lessig's presentation on Network Neutrality I was blown away!

In my whole educational experience I have never seen PowerPoint used in such a way. For me, PowerPoint has always been about putting up bullet points and pictures. Presenters will usually read off the short bullet points and then expand on them if they are any good. Lessig seemed to use PowerPoint not as a crutch, but as an additional tool for his presentation, I believe he could have done the whole speech without PowerPoint. His use of PowerPoint was amazing, I highlighting special thoughts and phrases instead of massive amounts of bullet points was great. You really listened to him speak and focused in on the words on the screen.

I would really like to try this style out for myself, but I will definitely need to get the timing part down to the T. Lessig's presentation has given me new hope for PowerPoint presentations.

Social Networking trial

I seem to be the only person in class who is a actual user for both Myspace and Facebook...

When I was in high school Myspace was the cool place to be online, all of my friends could not wait to get on Facebook when we got to college however...

Oddly enough, that seems to be exactly what Danah Boyd is saying in the article
http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html

I had two rather distinct circles of friends in high school, finding someone who is the captain of their school's football team and is in all advanced placement classes is somewhat rare as I understand it...

All of my football buddies have stayed on myspace, while my AP class friends have moved on to Facebook. While many of my friends maintain accounts on both sites, you can definitely see who favors which site.

Being somewhat OCD and weird, I always kept my Myspace page very bland, almost as vanilla as I could get it, I too was bothered by the extreme 'editableness' of myspace. People who had no web design experience would just grab chunks of HTML from 'Myspace customizer' sites and chuck it in their pages. I was never really into browsing through peoples profiles, but after I graduated I really found Myspace a useful tool for keeping up with friends. As we all moved out of high school and stuck our foot in the real world many of my friends dropped their "WLFootballer, or CheerHottie" email addresses for something a bit more adult. Instead of keeping track of email addresses I could always find them on Myspace. I never did much searching for people, just about all of my friends found me, but none the less I still keep my Myspace page up and check in every day.

When I started working at OCC as a student worker I received an @oaklandcc.edu email address, I was able to get on Facebook before nearly anyone else at OCC. Facebook used to just be for college students, until they wanted a piece of the Myspace market. I really enjoy using Facebook much more than Myspace, my favorite feature, which oddly enough caused quite an uproar, was the news feed. Facebook always used to track when people updated their profile, and you could search your friends list for the most recently updated profile, but the news field aggregates all of the changes onto your main page so you can log in and within minutes see all the changes and pictures and notes your friends have been busy creating. Facebook is very good at searching for friends, people (used to) feel safe putting full names on Facebook because it was a college student only website. My wife has found dozens of friends as she has the most amazing memory for names and faces. Again, I had most of my friends find me, but I did browse through my friend's friends list to find other friends on mine. I am not a big fan of the recent opening of Facebook to these custom written applications.

I use both Facebook and Myspace and probably will continue to use both for quite some time. Even if I can just send emails, this is slightly more fun...

Who doesn't want Chocolate Rain to play when they try and send me an email anyway!

http://myspace.com/andurn

"But tools and processes on their own are stupid things." - Jonathan Kohl

For Assignment 4 we are to compare and contrast these two articles.

http://www.kohl.ca/articles/ExploratoryTesting_MusicofInvestigation.pdf
and
http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_evaluation.html

I have a hard time comparing the two articles because the exploratory testing article is about breaking away from automated tests and allowing tests to 'go with their instincts'. The Heuristic evaluation article is about using testers to determine interface flaws according to standard heuristics.

I really enjoyed the exploratory testing article, even though I find the analogy of musical improvisation being similar to exploratory testing a bit of a stretch...I love the quote that I used for the title of this post, you can have the best automated scripts and tools and processes, but you need talented testers to be able to properly apply those tools and processes to get real results. While the standard automated tests are a good start, it does make a lot of sense to free your testers to investigate and play around with anything they can come up with, after all, the human mind is very powerful as Jonathan mentions. The test scripts will only find errors they have been programmed to find...

The Heuristic evaluation article was interesting, but not quite as much fun to read I have to say...I do like the charts showing the effectiveness of a single tester to multiple testers, it really shows how different people approach things differently. Jakob Nielsen does a great study on how many errors multiple testers find and shows how many errors that were found overlap. He recommends 3-5 testers for medium size projects to find the most errors with the greatest cost efficiency. It makes sense to me to have people go off the list of usability heuristics to analyze a program, that way everyone has the same foundation, but each person may interpret the interface differently. What is easy and seems logical to one person may not be the same to another.

Exploratory testing is very much different from Heuristic evaluation, but both testing methods will provide great results for projects. It is interesting to think of someone making a career out of software testing, but it is easy to see how valuable a talented tester would be to a project.

Opera

For those of you who have not had a chance to play with different browsers I would recommend Opera.  I just started playing with it a bit more today and I really like it.

Plus WebAdvisor looks fine in it =)

http://www.opera.com/

Assignment 3

I chose to research uninterruptable power supplies, specifically for computer and communication systems. http://www.thomasnet.com lists 30 companies as supplies for Computer and Communication System UPSs.

Sadly, I must admit that I thought I would be getting an easy topic, but I am definitely not an electrical engineer. From all thirty websites I am inundated with detail specifications that are way over my head. I had always thought UPS were pretty easy, just a big battery, but I am sadly mistaken. If I may quote http://www.staticpower.com/pdf/Product%20Overview%20SG.pdf “The secondary windings of the output transformer form a zig zag pattern from neutral cancelling triplen load harmonics.”

I don’t have the slightest clue what that means…

Anyway, the market for industrial UPS is huge. There are so many choices it is crazy. There is a pretty good range of ordering styles available. Some websites allow you to order right online while others require you to fill out a quote request and then a sales representative will contact you. Some companies will send catalogs and other do not even have websites registered with http://www.thomasnet.com. In fact, only ½ of the companies listed have websites, and those with websites range from very well thought out and designed websites to the simple plain and boring sites of the old internet.

In terms of e-commerce, the market seems to be fairly sizable with plenty of competitors. It was hard to find prices on some websites for the heavy gear, so I imagine the sales model is differentiation based. GE’s product guide has an entire section on service and how easy they are to service. Another quote from http://www.staticpower.com/pdf/Product%20Overview%20SG.pdf “GE is committed to the highest standards of quality and customer satisfaction. It is not enough to simply sell the best products. That is why GE also strives to help its customers realize the full value of the products they purchase by providing value-added applications and maintenance services.” http://www.advizia.com/tripplite/ is an entire web based application that lets you input your current equipment and run time needs and it will recommend a UPS from Tripplite that will meet your needs.

I do think the web has enabled consumers to better find the right product for them, that is, if they can understand the jargon. Some companies have embraced e-commerce for business while others seem to be just following along so they can say they have a website. The general B2B e-commerce availability does seem to be lacking however.

My PowerPoint presentation

Assignment 2

Frictionless E-Commerce

The idea of a Semantic rich web is a noble idea. The World Wide Web Consortium has many different projects going on to enhance different aspects of a semantic web. Giving the web the ability to describe itself in standard forms would allow for greater ease of machine searching. Utilizing Uniform Resource Identifiers and Extensible Markup Language provide the language in which the Resource Description Framework standards rely upon. The RDF utilizes common vocabulary to describe resources on the web. The goal is to build a vocabulary rich enough to be utilized by automated tools.

E-Commerce on the web is envisioned as near perfect competition for sellers as identical goods can be compared between sellers instantly. With a single click a potential buyer can see the range of prices for goods across not only the country but the world. However, in the studies done by Erik Brynjolfsson and Michael D. Smith they found that the lowest price sellers did not have the highest sales volume (5).

While semantic web technologies has the ability to affect e-commerce, consumers have still been fairly brand loyal. I myself have had good experiences with purchasing from Amazon.com and I continue to purchase from them even if froogle.com or pricegrabber.com shows them as slightly more expensive. Even in the world of globalization I still have some loyalty to the sites that have proven service to me. I rely very heavily on the Amazon.com customer reviews when I am looking to purchase a product. I do not think that e-commerce is frictionless; there might be less boundaries to new competition and easier access to competitors for the buyers but that does not make the market frictionless.

I suppose though that I have only been looking at large scale operations, a small easy and cheap to operate business such as a T-Shirt store would be rather frictionless to open online. The kind of product would also affect the amount of friction on the market. Buying a car online is probably one item very few people purchase online, while nearly every college student buys text books online. By utilizing auction sites and other store hosting sites like Amazon someone could get into selling little items very easily.

I remember when the X Box 360 was first released, a friend of mine got a free trail of the EBay store. He and his friends bought 10 X Box 360’s and he was able to sell them all through EBay and he claimed he had a net profit of over $2,000. Now, I suppose reselling hard to get game consoles is not quite a real business but it is a great example of a frictionless market.

I have just totally flip flopped on my idea of frictionless e-commerce, but I do think it depends on the item and the market. As we begin to see more common use of semantic web technologies I do believe that entering markets for low prices easy to produce items will be easier. Thinking not just of the technology side though, being able to do more efficient searches and get relevant price data might lead to less price competition and more of a focus on the differentiation of products. In the rather mature beverage market, prices for Coke and Pepsi have been the same for as long as I have been alive, I can see this same sort of thing happening in other markets eventually. The manufacturers might realize that trying to compete on the cost basis will result in a much lower profit margin and they would not be able to make the margins they want.

I am very excited as a consumer to see what further advances come about in the e-commerce field. I already heavily utilize Amazon.com and other online retail sites, I have even bought a few items that Amazon had suggested to me through their ‘Other people who bought this item bought this as well’ ads. I had read about how Google wants to start collecting more and more personal data and do something very similar to that for all kinds of products. I know some people worry about the security of such personal information being out there, but I think the potential benefits outweigh the risks of someone finding out what kind of things I commonly shop for and what not…

I wonder if I will see true globalization in my life time, we are already getting closer and closer every year. What happens after China runs out of cheap labor?

Assignmnet 1

1) Describe Porter's Five Forces model and describe how it's relevant to issues in electronic commerce. - I don't know...

2) What is a PSP (Payment Service Provider)? Give three examples and explain how they operate. I don't know...

3) What are some common security threats that a typical E-commerce site might face? What are some risk mitigation strategies for dealing with these issues? Denial of Service Attack, Distributed Denial of Service Attack and ???. There are many ways to defend against these attacks, I'd have to go back to my IS Security notes...

4) Describe what is meant by the Semantic Web. What are some technologies that make use of this theory. I don't know...

5) What are managerial process plans? How are they relevant to software requirements specifications? Name and briefly describe an example plan. I don't know...

6) Describe three distinct E-commerce revenue models. I don't know...

BIT 411

I start this class tonight.

Walsh College's Course Descriptions

BIT 411 - Internet/Web/E-commerce - 3 Credit Hours
Prerequisite: BIT 331

This course emphasizes web architecture, connectivity,
applications, and services. Topics include Internet protocols,
middleware, peer-to-peer architecture, and Web services
enablement using XML. Additional topics focus on the
delivery of Web services to meet strategic business objectives.