Wrapping Up

During the first couple of classes of Info 3.0, we were asked to write a few sentences about technological gadgets we use, how much we rely on them, and what we anticipate on gaining from the course. I was, and still am, a "crackberry" addict, as I cheekily noted, and will remain so for awhile. I still go on Facebook from time to time.

So many of my perspectives on information and technology have changed since the beginning of this semester. I tried to update my Twitter regularly before, when I first had it about a year ago. This class got my interest back into it, and now I have been tweeting regularly, as a distraction from Facebook. What we have learned goes so much more beyond that, however. We regularly used Wimba, which was a high-tech alternative to traditional chalkboard classroom practices. Our instructor could pull up web pages directly on our screens for us to follow along with. People who did not physically attend class could still get credit by meeting on Wimba.

Something that we briefly discussed but did not really get to use as a class was Second Life. It is pretty groundbreaking to have a program where you can meet virtually and do business with people in other parts of the world, all over the internet with your own avatar that you created.

Using an iTouch to conduct interviews is also an extremely useful tool. It's easy to do on the go, and whatever findings you make, you can immediately tweet, email, whatever. So much can be done with the iTouch or iPhone in general; even entire movies can be filmed!

I also learned a lot about how our class is different from the traditional style of teaching and learning. It was, in part, an experimental course. I think that more classrooms need to integrate the use of technology into their field of study. Digital information is very relevant to our day and age because everything is available instantly and at the click of a mouse; there is literally no time wasted waiting. But even with this advantage in mind, there is an equal expense; information gets out so quickly and easily that if something is incorrect, reversing the damage can be disastrous and near impossible. It really puts the pressure on journalists to perform quickly to get their story out first, and accurately so that all of the information put out is correct.

Mainly, what I gathered from this class was the plethora of ways in which our everyday devices like iPods, laptops, and phones can be used. It goes so much further beyond generic social media websites and email. In a few years, what we use today will be considered archaic and all-new technology will prevail. The most we can do to stay on top of this is to at least gain knowledge of what exists today, and guess at what direction it will be going in tomorrow.

Future of Business Tech

Just looking at the plethora of technological advancements in a variety of industries will lead any businessperson to ask-- how has it affected the world of commerce? There are so many aspects to a business; e-banking to pay wages, stocks bought and sold using automatic programs, stock portfolios being organized, managed, and monitored on the internet... the list goes on. A lot of companies supply their employees with mobile tools, such as BlackBerry phones. With the 4G network beginning to pick up popularity, this will undoubtedly affect how people in a business communicate with one another, and will set new standards for speed of response, for example.


A good point brought up in the interview with my accounting TA, found here, is that companies will be more effective as far as the green initiative goes. This can include many things. LEED certification is one way for businesses to build green-certified buildings and to at least have environmentally-friendly structures, if nothing else. Another thing would be improved methods of recycling and using biodegradable products. I currently work for a UK-based bath and shower store called Lush, which has already accomplished many goals set by retailers, such as minimal packaging, recycling and reusing within the brand, ethical trade, no animal testing, etc. Companies working towards accomplishing these goals and others, like efficient use of utilities, as another example, will strive further to realize them in the near future.

(first ever LEED-certified parking garage, located in Santa Monica, CA)


Another important point is the advancement of e-commerce. In the 1990's, people did not fully understand how e-commerce worked, thinking that putting their business online would make them instant millionaires. Instead, however, it was merely another way for potential customers to purchase their product. Yes, the scope of individuals who had access to it increased, but it was definitely not a guaranteed success. After losing some faith, people and businesses became more educated on what e-commerce actually entailed. Today, most major retailers have websites selling their product. In the future, these sites will become much more user-friendly. New technologies, such as barcode scanning with cell phone apps, can be used by businesses to advertise.


The interpersonal side of business is bound to have some changes in structure, also. Right now and more so into the future, businesses are adopting less and less of a hierarchical pyramid structure, and more of a weblike interface. Employees support operations equally and managers help them work together more efficiently, rather than doling out tasks. This process of decentralization will undoubtedly revolutionize the face of tomorrow's business. For the past century, businesses have been focusing on expanding, being more efficient producers, and on industrialization in general. To say the least, goals have certainly changed. Mass production is easily achievable with currently-existing technologies, and the industrial revolution is well over. With new goals, a new type of management is needed. Rather than intensely focusing on the smaller operations of a business, which has mainly been taken care of by technological factors as far as production goes, the focus has switched to empowering employees. In the past, important decisions were left for top management to make. The goal, however, is to let other employees work in teams to come up with solutions themselves to better play a role in the company's operations. There is no set way to improve management, so risks must be taken. Some things will work, while others will not; this is the nature of the process. But in the end, better solutions will be found through this kind of trial-and-error, leading to a more efficient and ethical business culture.


One may ask, where does this process begin? In the classroom, of course. Here, business leaders of the future are learning the ins and outs of operations, structure, and management. If students are exposed more and more frequently to the variety of models employees and managers share in their interactions, they will be able to learn the benefits of equal input, rather than the traditional pyramid managerial structure. One must remember that as technology advances, as it has been doing astronomically so in recent years, consumer interest will change with it. Tomorrow's consumer will be more educated and aware; they will be interested in things like the green initiative and will be more critical of decisions made by firms, if they are not already. This will put pressure on companies to live up to consumer standards and will definitely change how businesses operate and present themselves to the public.

Mobile Broadband-- Will We Digress?

So much progress has been made in the past few years with cell phones. This is especially evident in mobile technology, where users have grown accustomed to using fast Internet for sending emails, checking their social networking websites like Facebook, the news, sending photos to one another, etc. But with all of the new iPhone and Blackberry converts from regular phones to such smartphones with Internet capabilities, will the tech side be able to keep up? Experts are worried that within the next five years, everyone will feel the effects of too many people on the mobile web.


Right now, a big part of why smartphones are so popular is that they are geared towards Internet use. If everyone uses a smartphone, then the broadband capabilities are overdrawn and each person gets a slower Internet connection on their phone. Smartphones will not be as necessary anymore. A big part of why people invest in them is to access their favorite sites quickly and easily-- something that is more of a task on any regular cell phone.


Thankfully, 4G and LTE are faster alternatives to the 3G network and could ease some of this traffic if more phone carriers decide to make the transition. But here another issue arises: only a select few cell phones currently have the capabilities of accessing the aforementioned networks. So first you purchase a fancy new BlackBerry or iPhone, in a year you realize that the service is slow because the 3G network is congested with so many users, so you are forced to buy another phone to use the 4G or LTE networks. It seems like a lot of trouble to go through, but it may end up being necessary at the current rate of new developments (not fast enough!).


It can also mean that some people will decide the costs outweigh the benefits, and to switch back to a simpler cell phone. Not everyone will deem purchasing a new expensive cell phone a necessity if there is no guaranteed fast service. In a way, the developments in mobile technologies will be eaten up by their own successes until something new and fast develops that is cost-effective for the average consumer. Because mobile broadband has been so wide and wildly popular, it is almost at the point of crashing (or at least becoming excessively slow).

Yes, we may very well be on the brink of an unsolvable technological problem, despite the fact that we are in the 21st century. The FCC's legitimate concerns will impact many people, obviously, since the fact that there are many is why mobile broadband will possibly be a lot slower in the near future. There will be things like the 4G network and it will work faster for a while, at least until everyone else catches on. Will we have the same problem again?


Perhaps this will be a good thing and people will become less dependent on their phones, and more dependent on real-life interactions. There are pluses to every drawback, and maybe the zenith of mobile technological advancements, at least in the (quite relevant) Internet aspect, will lead to unforeseen benefits.


Source: http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/mobile/11/05/gahran.mobile.spectrum.crunch/index.html?hpt=Sbin

Photojournalism in Global Business

A photograph can be the element that brings interest to a news story and captures the essence of a specific situation. Here are a couple of photos I took that illustrate various aspects utilized by photojournalists.

This is one of the newest commercial shopping malls in Vinnitsa, Ukraine. The first thing you notice when you look at this picture is the framing of the escalators. It draws the focus inward, where a brightly lit, orange-hued stand exudes a sort of warmth that makes one think of the holiday season (when this photo was taken). Throughout, there are many lines that your eyes want to follow: along the floor, the poles, and the escalators. There is a lot going on here, but at the same time, you know what the subject is.

Here we have a skyscraper in the financial district of New York City, taken earlier this year. It is first and foremost a portrayal of linear perspective; the building gets smaller and smaller as it approaches the sky. While the building is gray and the ones around it do not appear to have any interesting, out of the ordinary coloring, there are pops of vivid yellow in the brick. By juxtaposing a different building such as this one to ordinary-looking ones, and with the rule of thirds in play, there is nothing else here that you want to look at. The skyscraper dominates the image.

What does a picture really tell you?

Advertising is a huge part of how businesses convey the necessity of their product or service to a target consumer. Here are a few images of Lacoste clothing, each portraying it at a different point on the scale of explanatory or generic images:

In this first image, the clothing is shown on a mannequin. It was probably used on a website selling athletic gear because there is not enough enticement for it to have actually been used on the Lacoste site. Just the fact that the clothing is not on a real person, but instead on a neutral-faced mannequin, does not tie in any pathos or affect the buyer's decision. Again, this is a very generic picture-- what you see is what you get.

Here is a Lacoste ad featuring young, active, brightly-clad, happy models. All of them look athletic and graceful, and seem to be enjoying themselves in Lacoste clothing. This conveys how an individual who wears Lacoste will be equally carefree, ready to move, and energetic. These are among the adjectives that the brand would like to have associated with them, making the image slightly explanatory of the brand's ideologies.

 This is an image from Lacoste's website. Again, the model is young, full of energy, vivacious, and smiling. It correlates with the ad in what the message of the company is, and how it wants its consumers to feel in its clothing. Someone is more likely to be persuaded to buy the clothing by looking at this image than at the very first one. This shot is very explanatory. The merchandise is shown in great detail, complete with zoom capabilities to see the fabric. Colors are displayed and the fit on the moving model shows how easy the clothing is to wear, and that it looks good on real people. This is different from the top image, which only shows the clothing on an inanimate object. 


Clearly, there are differences in the scope of what you can learn from looking at an advertising image. It can either give you the basic facts, or personalized details of the product being sold. To go even one step further, the most generic would be a plain shirt and pants, not even Lacoste brand. The difference between that and the final image would be immensely obvious.

Mobile Security: Understanding Physical and Cyber Threats

This decade can easily be described as the “Mobile Decade.” Nowadays information is at the tips of your fingers no matter where you are in the world as long as you have a mobile device that can send and receive information. In this day and age you would be lucky to come across a high school or college student that did not possess a cell phone or any other mobile device. Also, now with the inventions of social networks, information is constantly being sent and received by different people all over the world. The problem with this is the type of information that is being transmitted all over as well as how it is being transmitted. There have been a lot of concerns about how private information is easily accessible through mobile devices. Since there was a lot of speculation about this topic, we did a survey to find out how people are using their cell phones.

The first question we asked was, “how often is your cell phone with you?” Out of 79 people that took the survey, about 63% said that they always have their cell phone with them. This can be a good thing and a bad thing, but in terms of mobile security this is a really good thing. If your phone is always with you there is less of a chance that somebody could steal your phone and get into things like your email or your bank account if you use mobile banking. It’s always good to have your cell phone with you or to know where it is.

The second question posed was, “does your cell phone require a password or passcode to be entered in order to access it?” Surprisingly about 75% of the people that we polled said that they do not have a password or passcode on their phone. With me, I have a Motorola Droid and I require a passcode to access my phone, especially because my phone is directly linked to my email and my Facebook page and anyone could just access them without any problems. I think it is important for people to have passwords or passcodes so that only they can access the information they have in their phone.

Our third question was not created to illicit any numeric data relating to who has what capabilities on their phone, etc. Instead, it was meant to better understand how secure people felt when using Internet capabilities on their phones. We asked how worried users were about cell phone viruses. A staggering 96.3% of the 79 people who took the online survey said that they were not worried or hardly worried (one bubble up from "not worried.") This led to our main digging for information to see how worried people should be. 

The following question was somewhat related to the aforementioned one, but asked if people had any anti-virus programs installed on their phones. Only 10.1% of 79 said yes, while the rest claimed to not know if they had it or not, or did not have any altogether for sure. Surely people should be more concerned with the state of their cell phones' vulnerability from a cyber perspective? We delved even deeper with the next question, trying to get to the bottom of this and see if our fears were unfounded (or relevant).

The fifth and sixth questions on our survey asked detailed questions regarding internet use on cell phones. Quickly jumping to the eighth, as a reference point, only 34 people in our online study of 79 had any Internet capabilities on their phones (smartphone or otherwise). Out of these 34, the distribution for how frequently people check their email was pretty spread out. The more you check your email, the more likely you would be to open something containing a malignant code, so that was the purpose of posing such a question. The next asked, more specifically, if anyone had actually been hacked through their cell phone's Internet. Only one person of our 79 online participants had ever been hacked through the Internet on their phone. This alone suggests how little people should be worried, if the chances are 1/79 in our survey (and possibly more if a larger sample was taken). 

Bluetooth devices can also create greater vulnerability patches for cell phone users, as their conversations can be intercepted and listened to through radio frequencies. Website Gizmoto gives specific, detailed instructions on how to eavesdrop on someone's conversation when they are using a Bluetooth headset. Looking at the Google results I got, it seems like a fairly simple task. What does this mean? Do not give out sensitive information on your bluetooth. Physically, this would make sense anyways, as you would not like a passerby overhearing your bank account PIN when you do mobile banking.

Another question we asked our population was if they owned a smartphone or phone with internet capabilities. According to the survey, the results were pretty even, although there were 9 more people who did not have a smartphone. I also found that to be a little surprising because I figured people nowadays want as many features as they can get on their phone. According to an article on lmk.girlscouts.org, only 28% of teens have web-capability on their phones and they only use it for email, checking the weather, sports scores, and social networking. This is really surprising because almost everyone I know has a cell phone that has web-capabilities. I guess this could be a good thing because that means you’re not using email or social networking or banking and you have almost no chance of being vulnerable to cell phone hackers.

The last 2 questions really tie into each other about sharing information with their cell phone. We asked, “how easily do you give out your cell phone number online,” and “how often do you give out personally identifiable information on your cell phone via text, calling, email, etc?” According to the survey, 60% of the population we polled gave their number out to a few websites online. I am part of that 60% because for instance, I use Facebook Mobile, Mobile Email, AOL Instant Messenger, and Skype on my phone, all of which require me to put my cell phone number on their websites. Forty-five percent rarely give out personally identifiable information via cell phone. I think that you have to be careful about what information you give to people and how you give it out.

Sources:

http://lmk.girlscouts.org/Online-Safety-Topics/Mobile-Devices/It-s-In-Your-Hands/Cell-Phone-Statistics.aspx 

http://www.marketingcharts.com/interactive/cell-phones-key-to-teens-social-lives-47-can-text-with-eyes-closed-6126/ 

 http://gizmodo.com/328664/how-to-eavesdrop-on-bluetooth-headsets

[Dwight Williams and Anna Nemchinova]

Security in Business Transactions

In present day and for the last decade or so, business transactions have been steadily moving from pen-and-paper dealings to Internet transactions. Everything, it seems, is done online. Businesses can sell stock to individuals, who then manage portfolios online. Retailers sell goods through their company websites and collect revenue from consumers. Even banks are largely digitized, allowing clients to check their account balances online. But how safe are all of these transactions?

This brings us back to the topic of web security and legitimate sources. Many a scammer has made money off of an individual who made a transaction through an unsecured website. Not only does the website have to look legitimate, but it should also have some sort of badge signifying that it has been tested for security. From personal experience, I realize that looking at the site is not always enough to know whether or not it is a safe place for monetary transactions. I purchased a plane ticket from a website and days later, my credit card was compromised. So from an online shopping perspective, purchasing from a reliable source is of utmost importance.


Another relevant point is online banking. As you can imagine, banks have some of the most secure websites around. And they have to, in order to keep their customers' money safe. If a hacker were to get into a bank's system, the damage could be irreversible and no one would trust online banking enough to use it. But thanks to online security, it has become a fast and efficient method of paying bills and managing finances in general.


Today's global businesses have access to the most sophisticated forms of communication-- all in one way or another related to the Internet. They use everything from virtual conferences to stock exchange news. As technology becomes more and more advanced, security breaches become a much more costly ordeal than what they were when the Internet was just beginning to develop. Companies are forced to invest increasing amounts of money into security measures, hoping that this will prevent damaging breaches from occurring.


Looking at companies in the UK, there has been a great increase in the number and severity of breaches from 2008 to 2010. In 2008, only 35% of companies reported having serious security breaches in their systems. But in 2010, this number exploded to 92% in large firms and 74% in smaller businesses. Money-wise, the most damage that was done in 2008 totaled to £170,000, compared with £690,000  in 2010. So not only is the number of security breaches on the rise, but so is the amount of damage that each one brings to its victim company.


Yes, it is obvious that the wired business community needs to be in touch with top security procedures, or else they are at risk of being hacked. But is any of this really so shocking? With the Internet developing at exponential speeds, it is not unlikely that firms will have to be quicker and quicker to stay on top of these alerts.


Source: Security Breaches