Week 11 Post

Exercise - select five applications that you have not heard of before from Popular URL's Web 2.0 awards or the Web ware awards and describe on your blog page how they could be useful to a business.

About.com is a webpage that provided useful information on almost everything. This webpage allows people to discuss topics through forums and discussion pages.About.com could be useful for a company if the company wanted to know an answer to a question. It also lets recognized companies to write about topics on this site.

Hulu.com

Hulu.com is one of the most popular video hosting website which allows viewers to upload/view videos. Youtube is one of its major competitor although in Hulu the contents gets deleted after a certain period of time. It is of great use to advertisement companies who can advertise their products.

www.grooveshark.com

Grooveshark is an online free jukebox service, which offers free music to users. The music can be played using online audio player. It also lets users download music from the webpage or save a song as a favorite

Mint.com

Mint.com is a website which provides assistance for small companies to manage their financial situations. They interact directly with the company's bank account and provide assistance

Dimdim - This website helps business professional to host meetings online without having to meet up in person. This website helps professional and businesses save a lot of time and money.

Week 10 Post

1) What does this meant by the following statements?

Trust is not associative (non-symmetric):

Trust is not associative because the trust between a buyer and seller cannot always be the same. The seller might have higher trust thinking the buyer might buy the goods with the money agreed pon or the seller might have a lesser trust on the buyer if he is providing the right products.

Trust is not transitive:

Trust is not transitive because it is not easy to achieve the trust of a buyer. The seller needs to work on this and prove that he is trustworthy with a certificate. For eg, we can look up for the feedback given to that seller

Trust is always between exactly 2 parties:

Yes, the trust between the buyer and the seller is the most important thing.

Trust will involve either direct trust or recommender trust

Direct trust is the trust of the consumer he has on the seller himself because of his previous experience whereas recommender trust is the trust obtained from other people with their experiences with the same seller.

a) Have a look at the following websites. What are some of the elements that have been incorporated to increase your trust in the sites? If there are also some aspects, which decrease your level of trust, describe them as well.

http://www.eBay.com.au:

When doing the payment on bay, it opens up as a secure site which is trustworthy. In terms of seller, there are feedbacks from people all over the world that you can look up before buying stuff

http://www.anz.com.au:

The home page itself is "https" page, which is a secure page. Before logging into ANZ, it gives warning about recent threats, which are helpful.

http://www.ozrural.com:

While not unto the standards of the above two websites, this is a local website which is trust worth as long as major transactions don't take place

http://www.paypal.com.au:

Paypal is one of the most secure sites, which allows people to pay for items purchased online with a guarantee for the money.

2b) Find a web site yourself that you think looks untrustworthy

http://www.how-to-clear-acne.com/how-to-get-rid-of-acne-scars.html- this website looks like a spam website to me.

Week 8 Post

Q1: eBay is one of the only major Internet "pure plays" to consistently make a profit from its inception. What is eBay's business model? Why has it been so successful?

EBay is an online auction and shopping website in which people and business buy and sell a broad variety of goods and services worldwide. EBay business model is the broker model. EBay has been rather successful because most people have a rather good experience. EBay is a website which tries to ensure that people are being genuine. If and account seems to be fraudulent then eBay would delete their account. EBay has safety measures to ensure that people are not being ripped off.

Q2: Other major web sites, like Amazon.com and Yahoo have entered the auction marketplace with far less success than eBay. How has eBay been able to maintain its dominant position?

EBay dominates when compared to Yahoo and Amazon. The main reason behind this is, EBay allows users to sell items up for auction. If item is sold the seller gets the benefits and eBay gets their commission. Whereas, with Amazon and Yahoo, sells their product which they do have it their stock. This is the reason why eBay dominates when compared to Yahoo and Amazon.

Q3: What method does eBay use to reduce the potential for fraud among traders on its site? What kinds of fraud, if any, are eBay users most susceptible?

EBay website provides security tips to the buyers and the sellers to reduce the risk. EBay recommends Pay Pal for all money transaction, as it considers this is the safest way. But if the eBay users uses any other payment method other than Pay Pal, they website consider that as a risk. The most important benefit of using Pay Pal is, if the buyer is not happy with the item purchased or if the sellers think the seller is fraudulent, Pay pal refunds the money back to the buyer. EBay users cab be exposed to Identity theft, Buyers fraud and Sellers fraud.

Q4: eBay makes every effort to conceptualize its users as a community (as opposed to, say "customers" or "clients"). What is the purpose of this conceptual twist and does eBay gain something by doing it?

EBay does make every effort to conceptualize its users as a community as it would prefer their users to visit again. EBay offers promotional deals to attract users and make them a active user by making them to buy and sell, so it benefits the user as well as the Website.

Website offers many items that are hard to purchase in a physical store. Buyers can buy products from other countries without traveling.

Q5: eBay has long been a marketplace for used goods and collectibles. Today, it is increasingly a place where major businesses come to auction their wares. Why would a brand name vendor set-up shop on eBay?

Online shopping is getting popular, recently. People prefer doing online shopping rather than going to a shop physically. Online shopping saves time, saves money and there are so many options. Brand name vendors would set up shops on eBay because there are countries where physical brand stores would not be available, so by selling it online it would benefits the buyer as well as the brand.

Week 7 Post

Write a one paragraph describing the Turing test and another paragraph describing an argument against the Turing Test, known as the about the Chinese room.

Turning test:

The turning test is a approach which determines a machines capability to demonstrate thought. This demonstrates a computer/system operating without the need of a user (operator). The turning test, tests “whether or not a system is intelligent” (University of Alberta, n.d). When looking at turning testing Alan Turning came up with the test and described it as when a person/human is having a conversation on the computer/system. If the person/human cannot “distinguish the machine from a human” the system would be deemed as intelligent. This can be interpreted as when a person is on a computer and receives replies the person does not know it is a computer not another person replying to their instructions.

Chinese room:

The Chinese room argument shows that if the system uses Chinese symbols then the system would pass the turning test. This argument shows that if the system replies with Chinese symbols the user may think it’s another human, which it is not. This in theory would be a successful turning test but the system might just send out Chinese symbols but the symbols do not make sense with the question or conversation. Searle states that a Chinese speaker communicates with the system can the system responds in Chinese the person might think it is another person but the system might not actually be intelligent. This demonstrates that the Chinese speaker may think it is another speaker who may not know how to read the symbols properly.

Can virtual agents succeed in delivering high-quality customer service over the Web? Think of examples, which support or disprove the question or just offer an opinion based on your personal experience.

There are different things to be considered for a virtual agent to succeed in delivering high-quality customer service over the Web. There are few companies, which have virtual agents to provide customer services. Most of the virtual agents scan the keywords present in user's question and provide an answer. Sometimes the response will be relevant but most of the time, it would be not relevant to the question. In my personal experience most of the time virtual agent responses are not relevant which sometime useless.