E-systems Infrastructure

Probably, every IT practitioner knows about the history of the TCP/IP protocol.

The TCP/IP Protocol Architecture is a result of protocol research and development conducted on the experimental packet-switched network, ARPANET, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and is generally referred to as the TCP/IP protocol suite. It has 5 independent layers which are Application, Transport, Internet, Network Access and Physical (Stalling 2005 p.106).

Today Internetworking has highly adopted the TCP/IP architecture. The TCP/IP network has been dominating the market while there are many communications choices available, standardising on one particular protocol can make administration easier and reduce costs and complexity.

Internet Protocol (IP) is used at the Internet layer to define routing, logical IP addressing, the format of IP headers and packets, and interfaces. It provides routing function across multiple networks.

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is used at the Transport layer that enables data to be reliably passed through a network. Why? TCP uses a header to hold important information for performing its tasks. The header fields includes source port, destination port, sequence number acknowledge number, header length, reserved, flags, window checksum, urgent, options and padding and data. TCP uses the port numbers to identify application process on the sender computer and the receiving computer. Besides, TCP can do the error-checking on the IP packet. In case of any error, the packet would be resent again (Knott & Odom 2006).

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchic way of naming a computer on a TCP/IP network. The name of a network host is on the DNS hosted by the ISP.

The above are the fundamental components of the internetworks nowadays. In brief, IP is implemeted in all end systems and routers (which are bridging different networks). It acts as a relay to move a block of data (i.e. IP packets) from one host, through one or more routers, to another host. TCP is implemeted only in the end systems; it keeps track of the blocks of data being transferred to assure that all are delivered reliably to the appropriate application.

No matter you are running a close Local Area Network (LAN) or an open network if you adopt the TCP/IP model, you will need to have at least a DNS server within your network. All the hosts within the network need to find one another via the DNS server(s). Of course, behind the name of each host is identified by the IP address.

I can say, the Internet is actually the biggest network in the world. Your LAN, Wide Area Network (WAN), Intranet, Extranet and even your personal Wi-Fi gadgets are just the hosts of the Internet. Take the efiling service of Hong Kong Intellectual Property department (HKIPD) as an example, clients (most likely are legal firms) file their tradmark, patent or design applications through the official website https://iponline.ipd.gov.hk/base/bs0100.jsp. Of course, the clients need to registered their company accounts plus user accounts in advance. Money will be deducted from the accounts for each successful upload and e-receipts will be issued immediately. All the things are done over the Internet. Behind the scene, the process is far more complicated. First of all, the clients need to establish the e-system infrastructure for running the efiling service. Client sites need to follow the standard of HKIPD to setup their e-system infrasturcture. For example, a specific port number is required to open on the Firewall, official e-certificates are required for registering the accounts and the uploaded files must strictly follow the required formats.

The virtual private network (VPN) is a cost effective way to interconnect sites by using the Internet or other public network. For example, I can use VPN to connect two network sites located in two different countries. The beauty of VPN is offloading the wide area network management task to the public network provider. That same public network provides an access path for telecommuters and other mobile employees to log on to corporate systems from remote sites (stallings 2005). This can reduce the cost of B2B e-commerce and ease the operations.

The downside is the security of the public network would be out of control.

References

Knott T & Odom W 2006, Networking Basics CCNA 1 Companion Guide, Cisco Press, 800 East 96th Street, Indianapolis, IN 46240 USA, pp.462-463, 522-523.

Stallings W 2005, ‘Business Data Communications’, International Edition, 8th edn, Pearson Education, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458, pp.98-128.

Rapid evolutionary prototyping approach

Rapid software prototyping is an approach which attempts to remedy some of the shortcomings of the life-cycle model. There are three types of prototyping: Throw-it-away, Evolutionary and Incremental.

Hekmatpour (1987) mentioned that 'Evolutionary prototyping is in complete contrast to the life-cycle model and regards development as consisting of three stages of design, implementation and evaluation, where these are carried out iteratively until the prototype converges to final system'.

The rapid software prototyping approach is very applicable to develop small scale projects. I myself are taking this approach to develop a simple web application at my firm. In the first place, I started developing the most fundemental modules of the appliaction by writting a couple of web pages and creating a rather simple database plus a few store procedures. This would be a prototype for users to give their comments. After I collected the comments from the users, I would modify the design of the application and program it accordingly. Then, I asked the users to evaluate and test it. I iterated this process a few times until it could meet the requirements for the first phase roll-out. That means I leave some requirements to the next phase. When the application is in production, I am adding more modules to it and prepare for the second phase roll-out. Meanwhile, I am designing it for the phase three roll-out. In short, addition and modification are two essential features of the entire development process.

According to Wikipedia (2009), Agile software development refers to a group of software development methodologies based on iterative development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams. I can say Evolutonary Prototyping approach is similar to Agile software development as they both do not focus on the initial design but focus on the development process. The iterative development enables the product to be in production in relatively short time. Besides, the design will be perfected throughout the entire development process. This approach is highly adaptive to the volatile business environment. Imperatively, the development life cycle of an application is much shorter in the era. Maybe this is due to the fast moving of the technologies. For example, Microsoft SQL server is one of the most successful products of Microsoft, which released newer version in 2000, 2005 and last year. You can see there is a new delivery every 4 or 5 years. Probably, the frequent release is more likely subject to the business perspective rather than the actual technological breakthrough.

Developers do not afford to have a thorough study and a detail design for a project because this is too costly and risky. I can say longer the development process you take and lesser the production time ythe appliaction has. Therefore, rapid evolutionary prototyping is a more practical approach to software development.

References

Hekmatpour, S 1987, ‘Experience With Evolutionary Prototyping in a Large Software Project’, SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, vol.12, no.1, ACM, also available as PDF, pp. 38-41.

Wikipedia 2009, Agile software development, Wikipedia, The free encyclopedia, last modified 21 April 2009, Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., US, viewed 23 April, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_development>.

The evolution of e-commerce

Further to my blog yesterday, I would like to follow this path to share more about the development of e-commerce. Probably, everyone can get the meaning of “e-commerce” from Wikipedia or any other online knowledge bases over the Internet. The growth of e-commerce is highly related to the changes of the infrastructures of e-systems.

Nowadays, e-commerce has extended to various media. We can basically do business transactions through our mobile devices as the wireless networks like Wi-Fi, WiMax, 3G or even 4G and mobile devices are very well-developed.Therefore, it comes up with so-called M-commerce, T-commerce, U-commerce and so on.

Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (2008) illustrated M-commerce very well with examples below. However, it also mentioned other concerns the consumers need to consider.

Using your mobile phone to buy products and services is becoming a part of everyday life. Examples of this kind of trade—sometimes called m-commerce—include voting for reality TV shows, downloading ring tones and paying for car parking, and airline and concert tickets.

While using your phone in this way can be fun and convenient, there can be risks. To avoid them, you need to understand the costs and conditions of any products or services you buy.

Amazon Mobile, launched earlier this week, allows consumers to search for items on Amazon.com, update their shopping carts and wish lists, and make purchases from their iPhones.We can find many other ecommerce businesses over the internet.

Like HSBC ebanking, it offers the mobile mode, clients can use their mobile to access the ebanking services.

Many teens really enjoy downloading music or videos from the internet. Apple targets this market and successfully launched their products and services such iPod, iPhone, iTune and... They can shop through the Apple websites http://www.apple.com/.

Mobile games are very hot to young consumers. They download the games from the mobile games websites. Alternatively, they can actually subscribe the online games services. For example, "EVE Online" provides many different multiplayer games.

For adults, Britannica Online Encyclopedia is a paid service. You can get to its information by subscription. http://www.britannica.com/

References

Australian Competition & Consumer Commission 2008, Shopping on your mobile (m-commerce), Commonwealth of Australia, viewed 23 April, 2009, <http://www.accc.gov.au/content/index.phtml/itemId/266899>.

Meisner, J 2009, ‘New App Lets iPhone Users Photo Shop Amazon’, Ecommerce Times, Mobile Apps, viewed 23 April, 2009, <http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/65390.html?wlc=1240476927>.

The success of e-commerce II

Nowadays, Amazon is no longer an online bookshop but has extended a wide range of products for sale. In fact, the online community approach has made it very successful to grow in the market. Otterbacher (2009) illustrated why the online community design (the “helpfulness” method of social navigation) makes Amazon so successful.

What is the “helpfulness” method of social navigation?

Online communities displaying textual postings require measures to combat information overload. One popular approach is to ask participants whether or not messages are helpful in order to then guide others to interesting content. Adopting a well-established framework for assessing data quality, we examine the nature of “helpfulness” (Otterbacher 2009, p. 955).

Amazon’s community has successfully adopted this methodology in its design. Participants post their quality book reviews which are rated by other participants in terms of helpfulness. Therefore, participants can select the book reviews based on the rating. As we all know that at the information era, we are flooded with information. This design can help participants to get the quality information.

Besides, the search engine of Amazon is very powerful and user friendly, I use it to locate the book I need. The price comparison model is also useful for users to see the differences among the commodities.

I myself have bought a few books and DVDs through Amazon. My experience is very positive. I can actually chase the shipments of my products and view my purchase from account. Like other online shops, I settle the payment by credit card.

Reference

Otterbacher, J 2009, ‘“Helpfulness” in Online Communities: A Measure of Message Quality’, Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Human factors in computing systems, Boston, MA USA, pp. 955-964.

The success of e-commerce I

IDC, ACM & Alibaba are commercial websites, which more or less have adopted the characteristics of Online Community such as issuing membership, linking with local sense, providing blog and forums for sharing and etc. On the other hand, they all have differences in their approaches of Online Community.

IDC is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets (written in its website), which is profitted by selling their research papers and giving consultions. As an IT research company, she keeps in touch with the IT markets and IT professionals. To achieve this, IDC issue questionairs and news updates to their members regular and awards those who participate with the research with credit points and members can use those credit points t o purchase articles or research papers and the places for events/forums. Of course, you can choose to pay online by credit card. This is a typical e-commerce website and provides very little online community activities.

ACM is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, delivers resources that advance computing as a science and a profession. ACM provides the computing field's premier Digital Library and serves its members and the computing profession with leading-edge publications, conferences, and career resources (written in its website). Certainly, ACM is very different from IDC as it is a professional body. The members are governed by the code of ethics and Professional Conduct of ACM and are required to pay the membership fees yearly. ACM offers many news update, online forums and blogs. However, generally the particition rates are pretty low. It also accept online payment by credit card.

Alibaba is B2B e-commerce/e-auction company and claims as the world's largest B2B online marketplace, which offers membership, forums, trade shows, free websites and news. Besides, members can post their purchase requests and display their products for free. Members can trade wide range products through Alibaba. The side product of Alibaba, aliblog is very successful, which can draw many sellers and buyers to participate. Like ebay, it has very strong local sense of community and highly regards locality. But Alibaba is a free platform for buyers and sellers. The owner of Alibaba makes profit through advertising and therefore, it assumes no responsibility for transactions. This is purely the deal between the seller and the buyer. That's why the high participation rate is very vital for its success. Over 23 millions people visited the site in 2008 only (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 2009).

Reference

Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 2009, Alibaba Group, Wikipedia, The free encyclopedia, last modified 14 April 2009, Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., US, viewed 25 September, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alibaba_Group>.

The trend of the Internet - online community (II)

When we look into the popular online auction web site - ebay, we can observe that it has very strong sense of locatily with online communities. Under the top level domain http://www.ebay.com/, it has many sub-domains by country. The default page of each sub-domain has its locality.

Virtanen & Malinen (2008) claimed that "people tend to have a positive emotional bond to familiar places, and this psychological relation between people and their environment is referred to as place attachment". I greatly agree with this statement. That is why we can find immigrants with the same race would settle down together and build up their own communities through various means in Australia. For example, we can find China town, Korean town, Eastern Orthodox Churchs or Jewish synagogues in Australia, people build up their connection through these places.

Locality can give members a strong sense of virtual community. That is why the well-organised online communities such as Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Wikipedia and etc strongly focus on the locality. Very often, the languages to be used is the online communities are subject to the locality.

According to Virtanen & Malinen's studies, Facebook started as a geographically-based campus community, with its members sharing mainly local offline connections. It was launched outside US on 2006, quickly became popular in Finland in the autumn 2007and is now the 8th most popular web site in Finland. The result is prominent. That is why the great success of the online communities have pushed the growth of e-commerce.

References

Virtanen, T & Malinen, S 2008, ‘Supporting the Sense of Locality with Online Communities’, MindTrek: Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Entertainment and media in the ubiquitous era 2008, Tampere, Finland, pp. 145-149.

The trend of the Internet - online community (I)

I have attended quite of number seminars or events organised by IT research company, University or technology vendors since 2007 till now. Basically, they gives me the same message which is the future development of the Internet. I can really say that the internet becomes part of our lives to different extent as our social networks have been building on the Internet. We shop through the Internet; share ourselves/meet friends through blog, Facebook, MSN and ...;and do not get the latest news from newspaper, radio, TV or your friends but from the SMS of your cell phone or the browser of your laptop.

Nowadays, the network infrastructures and the Internet are very well-developed and we can therefore, establish our online communities highly effective. First of all, we need to give a clear definition to "online community" and then we can continue our discussions. According to Wikipedia (2009), “Online Community” is a synonym of “virtual community”. It states,

Virtual Community is a group of people that primarily interact via communication media such as newsletters, telephone, email, internet social network service or instant messages rather than face to face, for social, professional, educational or other purposes. If the mechanism is a computer network, it is called an online community.

It sounds very straight forward and not difficult to understand. However, when we try to understand the nature of Online Community, we would raise a few practical issues. Probably, I will further discuss this issue later. we can consider another view of VC. Ince (2004) gave an even more narrow definition of VC.

A virtual community is a web site which sells some product or service. In this respect there is no difference from an e-shop.

He also gave a perfect example to illustrate his view which is Amazon. Basically, Amazon is an online shop which allows members to submit product reviews and questions for sharing.

Blanchard & Markus (2004) only regarded the commercial interest oriented websites as "virtual settlements" and further illustrated that only those virtual settlements in which the members have develped affective bonds qualify as "virtual community".

They also indicated that a sense of community is to determine the beneficial outcomes of a community. By comparing "community” to "virtual community", the sense of virtual community (SOVC) should have the following behaviours:

• Membership, boundaries, belonging, and group symbols
• Influences, in terms of enforcing and challening norms
• Exchange of support among members
• Shared emotional connections among members

Zope is a popular open source online community which has the above behaviours. In order to gain a login to Zope, you need to register an account first. You can exchange ideas with other members and make more or less contributions to the community. Through these activities, you would have a strong sense of community. For example, "Children with diabetes" is a non-profitable online community which is a social network for supporting the kids, families and adults with diabetes.

Yahoo is another form of online community however, it has much lesser SOVC. The influences and objectives of the communities are very blur. Apparently, Yahoo is a content provider which has comprehensive services such as email, blog, dictionary, auctions, knowledge sharing, news, advertising and etc. These are more for commercial interests rather than the communities. Anyway, they can still build customer loyalty and enable the company running the web site to receive large amount of feedback on the product or service they sell.

Lewis (2008) demonstrated in his paper how human computer interaction (HCI) practitioners utilise an online community to drive commercial product innovation, definition, and development through a case study. The lead architects used the blogs and forums as the main avenues of communication to interact with users. Within two months of the community launch, there were over 200 registered users and this number were growing exponentially. There were over 2000 posts to the forum, from internal developers as well as external consumers. It shows that the particition of online community grows at a great extent is the key to the success of e-commerce.

I don't want to talk too much today.

To be continued

References

Blanchard, AL & Markus, ML 2004, 'The Experienced "Sense" of a Virtual Community: Characteristics and Processes', The DATA BASE for advances ininformation Systems - Winter 2004, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 65-79.

Ince, D. (2004), Developing distributed and e-commerce applications, 2nd edn, Harlow, Essex, UK: Addison – Wesley, p.32.

Lewis, S 2008, ‘Using online communities to drive commercial product development’, Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: CHI '08 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, Florence, Italy, pp. 2039-2043.

Virtanen, T & Malinen, S 2008, ‘Supporting the Sense of Locality with Online Communities’, MindTrek: Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Entertainment and media in the ubiquitous era 2008, Tampere, Finland, pp. 145-149.

Wikipedia 2009, Virtual Community, last updated, 18 March, Wikimedia Foundation Inc., US, viewed 21 March 2009, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_communities>.