Electronic currency

Electronic currency also known as e-currency, e-money, e-cash, digital money, digital cash, digital currency, cyber currency. It is the money represents a system of debits or credits used to exchange electronically, to exchange value with another system. It involves the use of computer networks, Internet and digital stored value systems.

We have 3 kinds of electronic money systems:


1. Centralised electronic money systems - Quite a number of parties use centralized system, such as PayPal, WebMoney, cashU and others. They use this systems to sell their electronic currency directly to the end users, but other systems sell through third party by using digital currency exchangers. Some community currencies work with electronic transactions, such as local exchange trading systems and Community Exchange System.

Example is the Hong Kong Octopus card. The electronic money deposits work similar as regular bank deposits. When users of Octopus card deposit money, the money is deposited into the bank. It is similar to debit-card-issuing banks.


2. Decentralized electronic money systems - It includes the Ripple monetary system, which is a monetary system based on trust network. Bitcoin is also one of the decentralized systems that is a peer-to-peer electronic monetary system based on cryptography. The last one is loom, a commodity exchange system that is digitally encrypted.


3. Offline 'anonymous' systems - when using offline electronic money, before accepting the money from users, merchants do not need to interact with the bank. Merchants can collect money that users spent and deposit the money later. This could be done offline,which the merchant can go to the bank with his storage media to exchange e-money for cash. E-cash is usually refers to anonymouse e-cash in cryptography. The first offline e-cash system was proposed by Chaum and Naor.


Reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_money

Green E-commerce: How can you contribute?

In today’s world, online shopping is every useful and common for every consumers. Consumers using e-commerce to reach everything they needs or wants. But, did e-commerce go green? And, how can users contribute to it? Before answering the two questions, we would like to explain “what is green e-commerce” actually meant? Green e-commerce means that people buy and sells products through some effective ways which is not polluting the environment.

First of all, we can contribute e-commerce go green by moving towards the paperless society. While not completely eliminating the paper trail, online retail presents significant opportunities to reduce the amount of paper consumed within the retail process by using email communications and paperless invoicing. It's your choice whether you print it out or not. Besides that, we can also provide consumers to look for the catalogue though online but not paper catalogue anymore. Since paper catalogue is polluting the trees and it is wasting the cost for us.

In addition, we can contribute e-commerce go green by reducing wastage. Once a batch of product has been put onto the shop floor of an off-line retailer, a predictable proportion of that batch will be dropped, damaged, broken or simply shop-soiled. Either way it's "dead stock" that will probably end up being thrown out by the store owner - simple wastage. Online retail does not suffer the problems of in-store wastage, or the need to have stock relegated to the usually unsellable category of "display stock". Supporting online retailers is supporting the move towards the more efficient usage of the planet's raw materials by reducing unnecessary wastage.

Last but not least, we can contribute e-commerce go green by the effective way of product packaging. Off-line retail is a marketing environment where product presentation is critically important. Products are dressed up for display in a variety of packaging materials that involve the use of unsustainable or non-renewable materials like plastics and acetates, or cardboard and paper products covered with chemical inks and dyes purely intended to attract the attention of the consumer at store level. With on-line retail the presentation is done on the website using only an image of the product itself, allowing online retailers the flexibility to move to more minimalist and materials-efficient packaging, and to make greater use of boring white, beige and brown recycled cardboard boxes that wouldn't stand a chance at the front-line of offline retail. Online retail is significantly more environmentally sustainable when it comes to point of sale packaging.

Throughout the three ways above, we have full of confidences to bring the e-commerce go green.


http://www.ecommerce-marketing.com/index.php/green-ecommerce/

Who governs the Internet?

No one governs the Internet, but they have bodies which are maintaining the Internet.


Internet Society (ISOC) - It is a voluntary organization which promotes global information exchange through Internet.


Internet Corporation for Assigning Numbers and Names (ICANN) - It is an International self-governing bodies not a government agency. It was being established to represent a wider range of countries and interests. It begins to address emerging public policy issues in the E-Commerce I period.

The bodies that are maintaining the Internet:

1. Internet Architecture Board (IAB) - a group of volunteers invited by ISOC to come out with standards and allocate resources, such as addresses. It is divided into 2 groups, which are Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and Internet Research Task Force (IRTF). IETF develops and maintains the Internet communication protocols. It addresses the problems and coordinates new services. Working groups are appointed to define the standards and coordinates all the activities. IRTF research on the long-term research problems which will be critical in 5 or 10 years.
2. Internet Network Information Center (InterNic) - It is a project sponsored by NSF and is conducted by AT&T and Network Solutions. Various registry services needed for the Internet to operate effectively is provided by InterNic.
3. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - The laboratory for Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology manage the W3C. It is a joint initiative between MIT, CERN and INRIA. It is forms to develop standards for the evolution of the web.

Refence:
http://www.mkatoh.net/who-governs-the-internet

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a modern technology model for enabling convenient network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources such as networks, servers, storage, applications and etc that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort.

         One of the benefits of cloud computing is that it does not require a user to be in a specific place to gain access to it and thus, it is convenient to be used in any places. As for companies, set up cost is almost zero because all the expenses that the company would have incurred do not exist. 

For examples, cloud computing allows them to reduce the cost of information management since they are not required to own their own servers and can use capacity leased from third parties. There will be no hardware purchases for servers and spending on labour man. Besides that, since such cloud computing applications can be accessed from anywhere and at any time, it would be easier to collaborate with employees who are not in the same country and makes it easier to manage a global workforce.

          However, there are some drawbacks which arise in accordance the cloud computing technology. Although it is true that there is no upfront cost to many cloud computing applications, there are other ‘soft’ cost that cannot be ignored and the server do have an ongoing monthly subscription to pay. Moreover, the limitations for mobile cloud computing with wireless carriers are not totally reliable while offices and homes are fine so it is quite unstable for those who use cloud applications through mobile. 

Meanwhile, the loss of data and the risk of unauthorized access have cause cloud computing lack in security as the data is important to any business and organization. For examples, as cloud computing is about keep data on a web based, when it comes to security of data in a country, the country won’t be able to risk even a little of the confidential data within a country such as citizenship and monetary banking records to be exposed to computer crimes likes hacking.

          As a summary, there are no exact ways to measure whether cloud computing bring more harm than good or vice versa.

Related link:

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Cloud-Computing/Deploying-OpenSource-Cloud-Systems-5-Pros-and-5-Cons-295321/

Phishing : How can me PROTECT ourselves

                                                             Fishing = Phishing???   (o.O)??

PHISHING is pronounce like FISHING, however, it is not some relax, good like fishing.

Phishing is a broadly launched social engineering attack in which an electronic identity is misrepresented in an attempt to trick individuals into revealing credentials. In other word, phishing is THEFT.

                    




         PHISHING   =

Phishing is a technique used to gain others' personal information for purpose of identity theft using fraudulent phone call, website and e-mail message that sent by a legitimate firm. 

How does a phishing email looks like?

 As shown in the picture, a phishing email can be identified by looking in few ways. First, there is always some grammar error, secondly, there must be a threat contain in email and usually they will said that they are from some popular company like bank, government or some other well known website.

How can we as a internet user protect ourselves from phishing?

There are few suggested ways for us to learn.

1. Be skeptical

Internet is a place where everything can be virtual, whereby there is nothing real online. People pretend that they are not who they are in real life, doing everything that they are not going to do in real life via internet. Hence, as a internet user, we have to be skeptical. Never trust anything easily even the email or the private message is sent by some of your close friend because their account might be hacked. Besides, if the company send you an email with threat and you really worry about it, do call to the office of that particular company to double confirm the situation. Never think that we will never hurt in internet since it is virtual. Yes, Internet is virtual, yet people are real. Analyze everything clearly and carefully to prevent ourselves get trapped.

2. Using website to warn us 

Latest version of browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox and Google Chrome is now come with built in phishing protection. We can protect ourselves by surfing internet via these browsers. These browsers will analyze web sites and compare them against known or suspected phishing sites and warn you if the site you are visiting may be malicious or illegitimate. 

3. Use the keypad, not the mouse

If you really afraid of the threats that stated in email, do type in the URL by ourselves instead of clicking it direct;y with the mouse. We cannot guarantee that the link provided in email is real one, so instead of taking risk by clicking with mouse, please use your keypad and type the URL of the particular company manually.

4.Look for the lock

Valid sites that use encryption to securely transfer sensitive information are characterized by a lock on the bottom right of your browser window, NOT your web page. They also have addresses that begin with https:// instead of the usual http://. Do observe carefully.

5. Different is the keyword here

Use DIFFERENT passwords for different sites; I know it’s tough task as most functions of the brain are being passed on to technology, but this is a good way to prevent phishers from getting at all your sensitive transactions, even if they’ve managed to compromise one.

The five ways mentioned can be a good ways for us to protect ourselves from phishing threat. Do remember, Do not trust what you see online. Do not trust what you think it is true. Pick up phone and make a call to confirm is always the best way.

Here are some others websites that provide opinion on how to protect ourselves from phishing.

1) http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505144_162-57388953/5-ways-to-protect-yourself-from-phishing-attacks/

2) http://www.fraudwatchinternational.com/phishing-fraud/phishing-protection/

3) http://www.sec.gov/investor/pubs/phishing.htm

 


 

Identification & Comparison of revenue model for youtube, amazon.com and google

http://www.youtube.com/

YouTube is a well known e-commerce site where they are able to generate millions upon millions of video views per day. It is no problem for them to aggregate eyeballs from all around the world on it. There are millions of people upload and download videos everyday on face. With this competitive advantage (Enable to gather millions on people's eyesight everyday), YouTube is using Advertising, affiliate and subscription revenue model to sustain in the market.

https://www.google.com

Google's revenue model is just similar to YouTube, it depends most of its revenue generation on advertisement. Google generates up to 10 billions of total revenue and only 100-200 millions are from other sources like licensing.

https://www.amazon.com

While amazon.com initially is a online bookstore. It then diversified its products to electronic, toys, education, sports and so on. In addition, it is considered the pioneer in affiliate partnership marketing, where it uses affiliate revenue model as well. Besides, advertising and affiliate, it generate revenue using some other model which slightly different from YouTube and Google, that is transaction revenue.

We are going to discuss the revenue model implemented by these three e-commerce company in dept.

Advertising 

 

YouTube

Advertising is basically the most obvious and widely-accepted model to e-commerce sites. Video ads and text ads are two popular advertisement models. Even though other video sites choose to display both text ads and video ads, but until today, YouTube only opt for text advertisement as they are not willing to ruin users' experience on their site. Besides, YouTube can implement an email advertisement as they have the data and information of all registered user. Advertisement which is paid by other company to YouTube will then be sent out to users on daily, weekly or monthly basis.

Google

Google use Adwords to run its advertisement. Google Adwords offers par-per-click (PPC) advertising to owner where both text and banner can be advertised. It enable advertiser present it to people at instant those people are looking for information related to what advertisers are offering. Basically Google only allows short text advertisement in order to prevent users being annoying.

Amazon.com

With its well known and widely acceptance in US, it provides advertiser to make ads on its webpage and most of the time, their partners and alliances will make advertisement on its web site in order to catch consumer's eyes and increase revenue at the same time.

Affiliate

 

YouTube  

While affiliate is another revenue model which is similar to advertising but its fee is different. Advertisement is a payment of a sum while affiliate is focused on CPA (cost-per-action). Meaning that, YouTube only get pay when user buys or pays for the service or product through the page displayed in YouTube.

Amazon.com

As mentioned above, Amazon.com is considered the pioneer in affiliate marketing. Up to now, it did run its affiliate program as everyone can be a part in its affiliate program as shown in this website ( https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/ ). With this affiliate program, it actually enable Amazon.com turning consumer's click into cash which is going to be generated.

Transaction

   

Amazon.com 

The main source of revenue for Amazon.com is from its transaction as Amazon.com is a plate form for Sellers to promote their products and buyers to buy what they want and needs while Amazon.com act as a middle man to settle those customer service, packaging, delivering and so on. From this, there are lots of transaction with Amazon.com and the amount increase day by day as people nowadays are more rely on internet. Instead of going out, pick and choose, people are more convenience in click and get the products in short period of time. Amazon.com get revenue from every transaction and therefore it can generate huge amount of revenue through out the year. As shown in here ( http://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-strategy/online-business-revenue-models/amazon-case-study/ )

Subscription

YouTube

YouTube can generate revenue using subscription model as it contains huge amount of videos. It requires user to pay up a small amount of monthly fee or yearly fee in order to access a certain part of video or a better quality's video. Besides, YouTube provide a ads free environment to users with subscription.

This is a graph showing the revenue generated from few technological company.

 It shown that Amazon.com is actually the leader among these e-commerce sites.

E-commerce Success

To run an e-commerce successfully is not an easy task and to maintaining a successful e-commerce site is a vital part of a thriving retail business model these days. However, Amazon was passing through those difficult problems and become a success e-commerce throughout the network world. Amazon is a multinational electronic commerce launched by Jeff Bezos at year 1995. It started as an online bookstore, but soon diversified, selling MP3 downloads, software, CDs, DVDs, video games, electronics, furniture, toys, foods, and jewelry. Did you know? Amazon is also AmazonBasics that branded electronic products, AmazonFresh that sells and delivers groceries in Seattle, AmazonStudios that is online social movie studio, and Amazon WarehouseDeals that offers discount on refurbished products.

There are few strategies that Amazon applied to be success in their e-commerce business. First and foremost, internet imposes no limits on how much Amazon can sell. The digital enables limitless inventory, boots customer care and allows high margin, lowest prices. For limitless inventory, Amazon went from 1 category to 16 main categories. Amazon focuses on competition, product, search, buying power, brand and trust, and cost management. Besides that, Amazon also creates a digital driven supply chain by hiring the expert- Walmart. For boost customer care, Amazon first focuses on customer focus by following a bottom-up approach; every decision at Amazon is driven by customer’s needs. Secondly, Amazon focuses on frugality by continually looking for ways to do things cost-effectively. Lastly, Amazon focuses on innovation by always looking for simple solutions in order to provide lower prices to its customers.  Amazon had creates a trusted, loyal and informative relationship with its customers. For high margin and lowest prices, Amazon is significantly cheaper than its competitors assuming there is no sales tax and free shipping. As a pure-player, Amazon leverages its digital advantage to optimize its supply chain. Amazon leveraging its high positive cash flow, it is able to maximize margins and beat all other retailers when it comes to pricing.

Furthermore, Amazon’s control of customer accounts and loyalty. Amazon acquires its customers’ confidence and it benefits form a loyal customer base: 2/3 of the sales comes from returning customers. The 3 main approaches of Amazon’s control of customer accounts and loyalty are as below. First of all, recurring usage which is recurring usage captivates users’ attention. Then, seamless integration which is vertical integration that creates a consistent experience that is very appealing. At last, lock-in which occurs when circumstances prevent uses from leaving a platform.

Moreover, Amazon is building an ecosystem to achieve digital supremacy. Now, Amazon has reached a critical mass, it is trying to create an ecosystem to increase its footprint towards users and authors to customer loyalty. The examples for towards users are great device, massive selection and low prices. The examples for toward authors are higher royalty share (35% or 75%). Then, for customer loyalty, kindle owners will buy 70% more books than prior to owing the device.

Based on the three effective strategies applied by Amazon, Amazon has been a successful e-commerce in today’s world.


http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-205_162-706351.html