Introduction to E-commerce 2

Introduction to E-Commerce

Intoduction to E-commerce lecture by Dr Ian Mackechnie.
Excellent material for students

E-business Ideas! A Millionaires Perspective

Collaboration In E-Business

Collaborating is essential to service delivery and effective business managment.

Securing Your E-Business

E-business is a powerful tool for business transformation that allows companies to enhance their supply-chain operation, reach new markets, and improve services for customers as well as for suppliers and employees. However, implementing the ebusiness applications that provide these benefits may be impossible without a coherent, consistent approach to e-business security. Traditional network security has focused solely on keeping intruders out using tools such as firewalls. This is no longer adequate. E-business means letting business partners and customers into the network, essentially through the firewall, but in a selective and controlled way, so that they access only the applications they need. To date, organizations have controlled and managed access to resources by building authorization and authentication into each e-business application.

This piecemeal approach is time-consuming error-prone, and expensive to build and maintain. Emerging technology provides a new role-based access control infrastructure for all of the enterprise’s e-business applications. For Example: Ebusiness shopping cart softwares like GoECart equipped with latest security featuresa are making online shopping experience safe and secure. With this infrastructure, developers no longer need to code security features into each application. This can greatly speed up and simplify the deployment of new applications, cut maintenance costs, and give organizations a consistent security policy. This new access control infrastructure also lets organizations implement consistent privacy policies and ensures that authorized people are denied access to sensitive business information sources. In addition, a centralized security solution lends greater flexibility to supporting new technologies such as mobile Internet devices, which are expected to proliferate over the next few years. Besides controlling access, organizations also need to monitor security events across the enterprise so that suspicious activities can be quickly pinpointed. This is becoming critical as enterprise networks grow rapidly in complexity and strategic importance. New monitoring technology lets organizations consolidate data from all their disparate security sensors—firewalls, anti-virus software, host systems, and routers— and provides a coordinated single image of potential intrusions for effective incident response.

Security concerns are bid issues for worry, businesses are however better off preventing rather than curing.

Harnessing ICT: A Pre-requsite for Growth.

 
Informationtechnology is the use of computers and software to manage information. In some companies, this is referred to as Management Information Services (or MIS) or simply as Information Services (or IS).

Internet connectivity on the African continent lags far behind that of the rest of the world. Although rapid progress this year (1998) will fully connect all but one of the capitals of African countries to the Internet (see Figure 1 below, and this comprehensive overview). Where full Internet access exists, it is generally restricted to the largest cities and its cost is far beyond the means of public sector users. At the same time, more and more countries are also providing full access to remote areas, and prices are seen to drop significantly over time. However, still about 70% of African's population does not live in reach of Internet access points. Both inadequate telecommunications systems, the socio-economic situation, as well as lack of human resources in some countries are the main reason for Africa's low connectivity.

Technical roadblocks are also important in efforts to stimulate access to the information highway for development in Africa at both the national and individual levels. Five of the major ones in many African countries are:


the small number of potential users having both the skills and equipment to benefit from access to electronic information networks;

the scarcity and high costs of equipment, software and information compared to situations in the North;

lack of reliable and accessible physical telecommunications infrastructure;

telecommunications monopoly, associated with overly restrictive regulations and high costs, and

lack of interregional networking and cooperation.

Currently several initiatives are under way to improve connectivity and networking on the African continent, an example is the one-laptop-per child.

The growth of ICT will mark a rise in electronic businesses and functions, this can only transform into technological and econnomic growth. Third World countries must play catch up , to move up.

Google's World of Books

When Google announced a couple of years ago that they were going to digitize the world's books, a few eyebrows were raised. They began with all the books whose copyright had expired. Copyright laws vary, but in most countries, copyrights expire after a period of time, like 50 years, at which time they become part of the public domain. There can be exceptions, but this depends on the actions of the individual authors, if still alive, or their estates, or other interested people. So digitizing the books in the public domain is not really a big deal.Then Google extended their realm to obtain the specific permission of copyright holders for books not in the public domain. Again, this was not too big a deal because it at least respected the rights of the authors.A big change took place, when they proposed to digitize all books, and pay the authors part of the proceeds, with the provision that the authors could opt out if they wish. This was a significant change, because it put the onus on the authors to opt out rather than seeking their permission. It was a negative assurance approach to copyright law.Although some groups support the idea because of the perceived advantages of having digitized books, many opposed it. One of the main arguments against it has been the fact that Google is essentially claiming full digital rights to these books, thus taking away a significant part of the copyright benefits of authors and publishers.Of course it has been challenged in the courts and in a class action suit settlement last year, Google was granted the rights to digitize all out-of-print books, which covers many not in the public domain. The settlement essentially gives Google a monomoly over the digitization of books and tramples over the rights of authors, their heirs and traditional publishers. The US Department of Justice, which monitors things like concentration of economic power and monopolies, is concerned and has launched hearings. Most recently the head of the copyright division in the US has voiced opposition to the settlement.This is a vastly important case. The attempts of Google to corner the market for digital books needs to be curtailed. The field needs to be left open to competition and competitive market forces. This is in the long run interests of everyone.Information wants to be free. The internet makes that possible to a greater extent than ever before, but it must be recognized it will never all be free. Free market forces remain relevant. Placing a significant chunk of that information under the control of one large company is the absolute wrong way to go.


Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo, and multiple library associations have joined forces with the non-profit Internet Archive to challenge the Google settlement and are pushing for revisions.
 
According to The Wall Street Journal, the coalition was organized by Internet Archive because it believes there are huge antitrust implications that the settlement poses. They argue that the agreement also doesn’t do enough to protect user privacy. They’ve spoken with the Department of Justice, which is currently investigating the matter.

Here are the companies and organizations that are said to be on board or likely to be on board:
- Internet Archive

- Microsoft

- Yahoo()

- Amazon()

- Special Libraries Association

- New York Library Association

- American Society of Journalists and Authors

It’s apparent why some of these organizations have an issue with Google’s settlement. Microsoft, Yahoo, and Amazon are all involved in the related ebooks market, most notably Amazon due to the Kindle.

Interestingly enough, the coalition will be co-led by Gary Reback. You probably know him best as the one of the most prominent lawyers involved in the huge Microsoft antitrust investigation that occurred 1990s. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, it seems.

Wave bye-bye to FB, Wiki and Yahoo!Google Wave Debuts

Google Wave is "a personal communication and collaboration tool" announced by Google at the Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009. It is a web-based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking. It has a strong collaborative and real-time focus supported by extensions that can provide, for example, spelling/grammar checking, automated translation among 40 languages, and numerous other extensions.

 Initially released only to developers, a "preview release" of Google Wave was extended to 100,000 users in September 2009, each allowed to invite twenty to thirty additional users. On the 29th of November 2009, Google accepted most requests submitted soon after the extended release of the technical preview in September 2009, these users have around 8 invites to give.


Active session of Google Wave inside Google Chrome browserGoogle Wave is designed as a new Internet communications platform. It is written in Java using OpenJDK and its web interface uses the Google Web Toolkit. Google Wave works like previous messaging systems such as email and Usenet, but instead of sending a message along with its entire thread of previous messages, or requiring all responses to be stored in each user's inbox for context, message documents (referred to as waves) that contain complete threads of multimedia messages (blips) are perpetually stored on a central server. Waves are shared with collaborators who can be added to or removed from the wave at any point during a wave's existence.

Waves, described by Google as "equal parts conversation and document", are hosted XML documents that allow seamless and low latency concurrent modifications. Any participant of a wave can reply anywhere within the message, edit any part of the wave, and add participants at any point in the process. Each edit/reply is a blip and users can reply to individual blips within waves. Recipients are notified of changes/replies in all waves in which they are active and, upon opening a wave, may review those changes in chronological order. In addition, waves are live. All replies/edits are visible in real-time, letter by letter, as they are typed by the other collaborators. Multiple participants may edit a single wave simultaneously in Google Wave. Thus, waves can function not only as e-mails and threaded conversations but also as an instant messaging service when many participants are online at the same time. A wave may repeatedly shift roles between e-mail and instant messaging depending on the number of users editing it concurrently. The ability to show messages as they are typed can be disabled, similar to conventional instant messaging.


The ability to modify a wave at any location lets users create collaborative documents, edited in a manner akin to wikis. Waves can easily link to other waves. It is in many respects a more advanced forum.

Google has been actively collecting feedback with a user survey that was distributed via email through random sampling of Google Wave sandbox users. The survey results were posted on Google Waves blog on November 27th, 2009 and I must say I was really confused at how the results turned out since they seem to contradict one another. Here is a rundown of the survey results:




3 things most liked about Google Wave:

1) The concept of the wave

2) Ability to collaborate with others

3) All communications and documents can be integrated



3 main issues with Google Wave:

1) No one to wave with because friends or contacts don’t

have accounts

2) The platform is too slow

3) Integration with other tools such as email



The second and third likable feature for Google Wave should be a sub category under the first listed like feature “the concept of the wave”. If users are complaining (and this is the number one listed issue) they have no one to wave with because of limited invitations, how can they list their second most likable feature as the “ability to collaborate with others”?

The second contradiction to the survey results is the third listed liked feature “all communications and documents can be integrated”. Now if you look at the third listed main issue with Wave you see that “integration with other tools such as email” was requested. These results have left me really wondering what’s so great about Google Wave anyway? Sure the concept is great, most of us can agree on that, but I’m sure the concept of a $2 bill was great at one time also.

Google Wave has noted that they are organizing a team to work on the core issues and complaints users have pin-pointed in the survey such as trying to make Google Wave faster, integrate Wave with email, and trying to scale their systems to make it less complex. What can i say, Google has done it again