T 3.6

Widespread use of live chat in e-commerce websites is a fairly new interesting part of today’s electronic businesses. Live support (chat) is a Web service that allows businesses to communicate, or chat, in real time with visitors to their Web site. [1] Live chat basically looks like an obvious chat window on a website where you can only type in a message and hit send.  I see more and more websites displaying live chat boxes as soon as their website loads. Live chat can be considered a Web 2.0 technology since you can communicate with someone else on a website.

Live chat technology is more sophisticated than I thought.  A well-known live chat company coincidently called LiveChat offers a software as a service chat window that can be initiated manually by the operator or automatically by LiveChat system as soon as the visitor meets the predefined criteria (i.e. searched keyword, time on website, encountered error, etc.) [2] Personally I don’t think that live chat windows are annoying as long as the window doesn’t move from the side of a website.

The big question for an electronic business is whether they will lose money by hiring people to operate the live chat.  However, with a live chat you would assume that your business will get fewer phone calls. To me, just seeing a live chat box means that they’re not a small company and I trust them more. In fact, In 2008 Wells Fargo used online chat to gain high customer satisfaction scores and a double-digit increase in converted shoppers. [3] Also, Northridge Developments found that putting a live chat service on their builder website helped increase their conversion rate by a whopping 260%. [4] It seems obvious that a well implemented live chat system would increase sales, and with LIveChat you can try out their service month to month starting at $36 per month. There are also free and open source live chat programs available such as http://mibew.org/.

Almost every live chat study I look up says it improves customer satisfaction and/or sales. A (expensive ) study showed that 44% of online consumers say that having questions answered by a live person while in the middle of an online purchase is one of the most important features a Web site can offer. [5] In conclusion, it would be very unwise for an e-businesses company not to consider at least testing a live chat solution on their website.

Sources:

1.       http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/L/live_support.html

2.       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveChat

3.       http://blog.kissmetrics.com/live-chat/

4.       http://buildertarget.com/blog/home-builder-website-analytics/case-study-home-builder-increases-website-conversion-by-260-with-live-chat/

5.       http://www.forrester.com/Making+Proactive+Chat+Work/fulltext/-/E-RES57054?objectid=RES57054

T 3.4

Web search engines [1] such as Google are now used by everyone on the internet, but some people (me) think that they collect too much information about us. Web search engines simply work by storing information about many web pages, which they retrieve from the HTML itself. [2] The most popular current search engines in the United States are Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Google currently has about 84% [3] of the current web search engine market share. Basically companies like Google use computer software called spiders [1] to follow every link on every website and then store each webpage’s HTML in their database. I will be talking only about Google’s web search engine since it is by far the most popular search engine right now.

With more than 4 billion indexed web pages stored on over 500,000 computers [1], it is amazing that Google can instantly display search results. Not only does Google display website results for keywords that you search for, they also display images, products, local businesses on a map, and more. Also, Google owns Youtube, and Youtube is its own search engine just for videos. Amazingly, 20% of Google search queries are ones we haven't seen in the past 90 days. [4] How Google determines what results show up for a search is a secret and complex. They are always tweaking their algorithms to display better results. Google recently announced that they make about 500 changes to their algorithm annually. [5] Matt Cutts, the spokesman for Google’s webspam team, admitted that Google uses over 200 signals to determine search rankings such as the speed in which a webpage loads. [6]

Google logs all the searches we make. They probably store them for forever. This is a huge privacy concern for some people, especially since a lot of people use their Gmail. They know too much about us. However, Google claims they anonymize the IP addresses in their search logs after 9 months and anonymize their stored cookies after 18 months. [7]

Facebook has a built in search engine, too. The owner of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, has said that privacy is dead. It appears that Facebook is tracking every single thing you do on their website for forever including your last known physical location, with latitude, longitude, time/date, altitude, and more. [8]

In conclusion, Google is the best example of a useful web search engine, but they are looking more and more like Big Brother [9] every year with all the information they are collecting about us.

Sources:

1.       page 189 of the book (ISBN 1-111-53165-X)

2.       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_search_engine

3.       http://www.karmasnack.com/about/search-engine-market-share/

4.       http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/this-week-in-search-121809.html

5.       http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303505504577406751747002494.html

6.       http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/site-speed/

7.       http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/faq/

8.       http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2114059/Your-Facebook-Data-File-Everything-You-Never-Wanted-Anyone-to-Know

9.       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Brother_(Nineteen_Eighty-Four)

T 3.3

Squidoo.com, the approximately 158^th[1] most viewed website in the United States, is a perfect example of a Web 2.0 website, and users can also earn money with it. Squidoo allows users to make blog posts for free called “lenses”. It is a prime example of a Web 2.0 website with the sole purpose of supporting user-generated content and user feedback. [2]

When you sign up to Squidoo, you become a “lensmaster.” You then can make unlimited lenses that will be hosted on Squidoo.com/lens-name. Each lens is only one page and can only be on one topic. Other users can comment on the bottom of each of your lenses. You can also view the most popular lenses in different categories which businesses could use to see what niches are popular. Like blogger, you don’t have to know any coding or HTML to make posts, and you can embed pictures and videos.

Squidoo allows content creators to earn revenue from referral links to sites like Amazon.com and Ebay and 50% of all revenue goes to the lensmasters. [3] Squidoo automatically places ads in your lenses, and if people click them (Google Adsense [4]) or buy something from an Amazon link on your lens, then Squidoo will split the commission money with you. With well over 1.5 million [3] lenses, it’s not that easy to get rich quick with Squidoo. There are people earning $2000 [5] per month though. You have to remember that Squidoo’s lenses show up in Google’s search results. Thus, if you write a long unique article on a niche topic, it’s possible to get a lot of visits from Google searches alone. There are courses you can buy that teach you how to make a lot of money with Squidoo lenses, such as squidooserpcrusher.com. I admit that I haven’t created any Squidoo lenses yet, but now I’m interested since I could make some extra income with it.

With millions of websites being created every year, only a few get a lot of visitors. I think Squidoo made the cut mainly because the famous marketer and author Seth Godin is the founder, and users can easily earn money with it. When researching Squidoo, a saw a lot of people comparing it to a similar website Hubpages.com. In conclusion, Squidoo is a perfect example of a Web 2.0 website since it only allows user generated content and feedback, and as a bonus you can earn money from each of your lenses.

Sources:

1.       http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/squidoo.com

2.       Page 195 of our book (ISBN 1-111-53165-X)

3.       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squidoo

4.       http://www.squidoo.com/Squidoo_Payday

5.       http://www.androdigit.com/top-3-squidoo-earners-2000-per-month-earners-club.html

T 2.7 Zoho Database

https://reports.zoho.com/ZDBDataSheetView.cc?OBJID=793985000000003023&STANDALONE=true&privatelink=710b2d12cf2a735a531a948e74e0e6d7&ZDB_THEME_NAME=blue&DATATYPESYMBOL=true&REMTOOLBAR=false&SEARCHBOX=true&SHOWHIDEOPT=true

1. I watched the Zoho database video
2. Went to https://reports.zoho.com
3. Created a Blank Database and named it and clicked create
4. Clicked "Enter Data Right Away"
5. Labeled the Columns except profit column and clicked Save
6. Entered all my data
7. Went to an empty column and clicked the "Add" button then clicked "Custom Formula"
8. Named the formula "Profit" and entered in the formula "Revenue - Cost" and clicked Okay
9. Clicked "Publish" button then clicked "URL / Permalink for this view..."
10. Clicked "Click Here" next to "To access this view/table without login ," and saved that link to Notepad
11. Clicked "Publish" button then clicked "Embed In Website/Blog..."
12. Clicked "Click Here" next to "To access this view/table without login ," and saved that link to Notepad and replaced all single quotes with double quotes
13. Went into my blogger account and clicked the Layout tab on the left then "Add a Gadget" on the right
14. Clicked on "HTML/JavaScript" in the popup and pasted in my iframe code and clicked Save

I didn't have problems this time

T2.5. DB Research

A few years ago I made a blog website with Wordpress. It required that I use the MySQL database to store all the information such as blog posts and comments. “The MySQL database has become the world's most popular open source database because of its high performance, high reliability and ease of use.” [1] I had no idea what MySQL is and how it worked. To setup MySQL to use with Wordpress, I followed my hosting provider’s instructions and through their graphical interface I made a MySQL username and password.

After making a few posts in Wordpress and clicking around, I was curious how MySQL stored its information. I did some research on MySQL and ran the phpMyAdmin application that my hosting provider had installed. “phpMyAdmin is a free and open source tool written in PHP intended to handle the administration of MySQL with the use of a Web browser.” [2] phpMyAdmin intimidated me and I had no idea what to do. I did click on the tables used for Wordpress and saw that the data was stored similar to a spreadsheet.

Although I eventually lost interest in my website and deleted it, I learned for the first time what a database was and I Iearned about some MySQL basics. When researching MySQL I found many tutorials on it and it seems like the most popular database for simple websites. I was shocked to find out that “Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire MySQL AB, an open source icon and developer of one of the world's fastest growing open source databases for approximately $1 billion in total consideration.” [3] I didn’t know that an open source program could be worth that much money.

Answers to Questions:

1. Although MySQL is considered the easiest full-featured RDBMS, if there was any database error inside of software like Wordpress then I’d be clueless on how to manually fix it. I didn’t have a problem with MySQL, but I’ve been to websites that aren’t working and just display a MySQL error. I would have no clue how to fix an error unless I restored a backup of my database or contacted my hosting provider.

2. MySQL is open source and free. It has many books and training classes that also include other subjects like programming. Oracle owns it and they have the resources to improve it greatly. It can be used with not only small websites but for big websites. “MySQL is also used in many high-profile, large-scale World Wide Web products, including Wikipedia, Google (though not for searches), Facebook, and Twitter.” [4]

3. I suggest that MySQL makes a built in visual editor of tables and a point and click way of making search queries. For beginners like me, typing in queries to search through tables in a command line is intimidating. Third party applications that make MySQL tables visual such as phpMyAdmin are too complex for me.

Sources:

1.       http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/

2.       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phpmyadmin

3.       https://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/sun-to-acquire-mysql.html

4.       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysql

Student Info Task

Private Information [:

T 2.3 Hardware and Software

There are many different types of hardware and software that will allow a small business to expand the use of information systems into the mobile world. I have listed some below that I think are vital:

Android OS

Without a sophisticated mobile operating system like Android, smartphones and tablets wouldn’t be able to provide businesses with advanced features they need. Businesses can use Android’s API to make custom applications that are useful just for their business.

Tablets

A tablet computer running the Android operation system can be used to write reports, show sales presentations, and provide full access to every website. A company could install VPN software on the tablet to “allow individual users to connect to a remote network, such as salespeople in the field connecting to their company's intranet.” [1]

Mobile printers

Mobile printers are essential for a mobile business. They are small, print full sheets of paper, and can run on batteries. They could be used to print revised contracts at the client’s location. They can fit in a large laptop bag.

Smart pens

“The Livescribe paper-based computing platform consists of a digital pen, digital paper, software applications, and developer tools.” [2] The Livescribe smart pen could be used for taking notes on a train or at a random sales meeting in a restaurant. It combines hardware and software to intelligently record handwritten notes in its solid state memory.

Bluetooth headsets

These headsets are essential for a mobile business because in some states it’s the only way to legally talk and drive. The headset can also take voice notes with your smart phone while driving so you don’t forget a great idea.

Sources:
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vpn
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livescribe