Next New

I have an idea for an app that makes grocery shopping – a mundane task that almost everyone does on a regular basis – much more intelligent (and enjoyable) by saving you time and money.

First, you must create a shopping list, and you can do that in multiple ways:

1) you can manually enter it.

2) you can use voice command similar to Amazon Echo.
3) you can take a picture of it (for example: a carrot), and it will recognize what it is.
4) you can scan the barcode on the packaging of an existing item (for example: yogurt, or dozen eggs).
5) it will add it for you automatically based on your shopping habits. (for example: it knows you’re purchasing garlic every other week, so it will be added to your shopping list based on that frequency.)

Next, it’s time to head to the store. The app will map out the exact location (shelf and aisle) within the store that you can find these products. A floor map of the items on your shopping list helps you avoid crisscrossing the store to find the items so it is a valuable time-saver. It will also highlight the on items on sale so it saves you money. The data that is used to generate the floor map and sale items can come from the store directly or from other shoppers who use the same app.

Once you finish your shopping trip, you will scan your receipts into the app. The app will know what you purchased, so it can check off the items on your shopping list and alert you on the items still outstanding. More importantly, the app will now be able to adapt to your shopping behavior. The app becomes your personal assistant. It knows what you have purchased, the frequency, and the price you paid, so it will automatically build your shopping list for the next trip. 

Last but not least, the app will allow you the share what you purchased, so your neighbors and friends who use the app can enjoy the savings as well. The app depends on an active user base who can contribute to finding sale items at each store and sharing with other users. 

Wiki So Far

I have contributed to several topics in the New Media Wiki, including Crowdfunding, Search Engine Optimization in Web Design, Enterprise Cloud Computing, and Ethics and Guidelines in News Reporting. These topics were relevant to my current or previous studies. For example, I learned about Crowdfunding and Cloud Computing in my Introduction to Information Systems class, whereas Ethics in News Reporting was recently a research topic for the New Media class. I plan to do more additional research in order to expand on these topics in greater detail in the coming weeks.

Working on this Wiki project has been interesting, as this is part of a group contribution to make something great. As a long time Wikipedia reader, I have always been impressed with the depth of information and appreciate all the contributors who have spend countless hours in making it as informative and timely as possible. As a new editor on Wiki, it took me a while to become familiar with the editor, creating new sections, uploading images to the Wiki and creating references. But once I became more familiar with the interface, it was easy to make edits and gratifying to see the contributions that I, and my classmates, made.

P2P

File sharing is sharing of digital content with other users online. File sharing can be done in many ways, from the simplest methods such as e-mailing an attachment or uploading to a file sharing site, to more sophisticated methods such as sending to a server via SFTP or using Apple’s AirDrop feature on supported iOS devices. 

One of the most popular file sharing methods is P2P file sharing, which involves distribution of digital files over multiple connected computers on a network, and is facilitated by a P2P file sharing client such as BitTorrent. When a user joins a P2P network, he/she often shares a number of files on the computer with others, who in turn, shares more files. When a user finds a file on the P2P network that he/she needs, a user simply requests and downloads the file from the host user(s). P2P file sharing often involves copyrighted materials, such as songs, books, movies, software, and even research papers. One of the most popular P2P client was Napster in the late 1990’s, allowing users to share files that were often copyrighted. Because Napster hosted a platform that facilitated copyright infringement, it was later shutdown and forced to turn into a pay service. Nonetheless, it gave people the idea to share files freely across the Internet, and dozens of other P2P file sharing services still exist today, including the popular BitTorrent and eDonkey.

File sharing has raised many legal issues with the copyright owners and the recording studios. In Stelter and Stone’s article, “Digital Pirates Winning Battle With Studios”, blockbuster movies were often available on pirated website on the same day the movies were released in theaters. People have been swapping copyrighted materials on BitTorrent and may not feel guilty about it because millions of others are doing it as well. Even when a court shut down the then-popular Naspter, there were many other similar P2P services available. As the article noted that in 2008, digital piracy led to a sharp drop in DVD shipment in years. Nonetheless, not all developments were bad for the recording studios, as it led to the creation of some legal streaming services as well such as Pandora and Spotify.

Works Cited:

Stelter, Brian and Brad Stone. “Digital Pirates Winning Battle With Studios.” The New York Times, 4 Feb. 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/05/business/media/05piracy.html.

Privacy

For as long as Internet has been in existence, there has always been concerns about loss of privacy. Every time that you click from one website to another, you leave behind a large data trail which reveals information about you and your browsing behaviors. Companies have been using “cookies” to track consumer’s interests, location, and preferences in everything from favorite products to taste in music, and share this valuable information with other affiliates and advertisers to create a more “personalized” browsing experience. Yet most consumers have little awareness that this is happening. Joe Nocera wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times that data brokers nowadays have been able to identify and track consumers through their social media accounts, mobile platforms, apps and websites they visited, allowing them to build a very rich profile about the consumer. The brokers then sell these information to advertisers who then present targeted ads about products and services that the consumer is interested in purchasing in the near future. Nocera calls more government regulations on unethical business practices engaged by data brokers, more transparency for the consumers, as well as changing business processes allowing consumers to “opt-in” rather than “opt-out”.

In addition, cybersecurity has played in significant role in privacy and identity theft. Recent announcement of data breaches have hurt the consumers and businesses alike. Companies ranging from big-box retailers like Target and credit reporting agency Equifax, as well as medical centers and universities, have been targets of hackers trying to steal personal identifiable information. Millions of Americans’ personal data are affected as a result, and creates a lot of nervousness from consumers who are rightfully worried about loss of privacy. According to Dara Kerr, Target is taking steps to offer security chip-enabled credit cards to better protect its consumers. Nocera also noted that companies were not incentivized to prevent data breaches. He advocated that government should levy a fine against companies that do not adequately protect consumer data. 

Works Cited:

Kerr, Dara. “Target Works on Security-Heavy Credit Cards, after Breach.” CNET, 3 Feb. 2014, http://www.cnet.com/news/target-works-on-security-heavy-credit-cards-after-breach/.

Nocera, Joe. “The Wild West of Privacy” The New York Times, 24 Feb. 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/25/opinion/nocera-the-wild-west-of-privacy.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=1.

Advice

If I was hired by Baruch College, I would make two improvements. First, I would expand Baruch's online course offerings. Baruch has 18,000 students, and for many classes, the class size is very large with 50+ students. More than three quarters of the students are business majors. As an accounting student, I often have difficulty enrolling into my required courses because they frequently reach the class limit.  Therefore, creating additional online sections for these popular courses, with lectures delivered via Blackboard as the learning management system, could be the solution. In many cases, online learning is very effective, can be self-paced, and can be very interactive with discussion boards, etc. Online homework can provide immediate feedback. To protect academic integrity, exams can be taken in-person, or professors can use an online proctoring service such as ProctorU to remotely proctor students during an exam.

Another improvement I would suggest is to make the College’s website more accessible for disabled individuals. As pointed out in a recent New York Times article, providing appropriate accommodations to disabled students has become increasingly important, as some would argue that the online education are subject to the same accommodation guidelines provided by the ADA. While Baruch’s Homepage has a “Make This Website Talk” button to accommodate vision-impaired students, many internal pages, including CUNYFirst and Blackboard do not have this accessibility. I would use technology to help disabled student learn and access the same information that ordinary students can. This could include closed captioning on lecture videos, text-to-speech technology, and creating a version of the website with larger fonts with higher contrast. All these elements are important to create an online learning environment that’s inclusive of all individuals. 

Creativity and New Media

For this blog, I decided to create a short video entitled, "I Love Delicacy", highlighting different foods I tried in a few countries.

The video is made with Adobe Spark, an online suite of applications that allows you to create an "storytelling" music album. It is a mashup containing the original photos and some animated effects, along with background music from the software.

Creativity

New technology fosters creativity through mashups. The ubiquity of the Internet and advances in technologies help create digitalization of traditional media into new online formats that are easily consumable and shareable by online users. With the ease of downloading, remixing, reproducing, and republishing, anyone can create content by combining multiple pieces of work from other sources. For instance, in the article, "Disney Tolerates a Rap Parody of Its Critters. But Why?", several users have created a parody of a rap song on YouTube that is based on popular Disney characters. It is a mashup because it is a music video, pieced together from snippets of animated shows along with cartoon characters doing the singing. The author noted that while there are potential copyright issues, Internet has generally tolerated parodies so far. This kind of mashup is made possible through digitalization of the original content, along with creativity of the consumers of media who also become content creators.

It is also important that through mashups, there is a convergence of user roles. A consumer of news can also be a contributor in online media. In the article, "User-generated visibility: Secondary gatekeeping in a shared media space", Jane Singer noted that journalists, as traditional gatekeepers of news based on their professional judgement and standards, have gradually relegated these responsibilities to Internet users who are also active contributors. In this ecosystem, since Internet allows users to easily create their own content, every user is, in effect, the gatekeeper to produce quality content that can attract more audience, who may create mashups by building on that content, or generate new ideas from their own creativity, and the cycle continues.

Works Cited:

Barnes, Brooks. “Disney Tolerates a Rap Parody of Its Critters. But Why?” The New York Times, 23 Sept. 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/24/business/media/24crank.html.

Singer, Jane. “User-Generated Visibility: Secondary Gatekeeping in a Shared Media Space.” New Media & Society, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1461444813477833.

Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

Virtual worlds empowered by advances in virtual reality technology have evolved significantly in the last few years. Believe it or not, most of us have experienced and owned VR technologies at some point. Although virtual world was initially developed for games, there are practical uses for virtual reality in the commercial world. In the article, “Avatar II: The Hospital”, Stephanie Simon wrote that medical facilities are using virtual technology to simulate emergency situations. Nurses would control an avatar in the virtual ER, issue voice commands to triage patients, interact with them, and provide diagnosis and treatment based on their conditions. In other cases, patients become avatars in the virtual world and help train medical students through role-playing, developing a sense of empathy, and allowing them to practice hands-on.

There are pros and cons with the virtual world. For the pros, virtual reality has becomes very realistic and have many practical applications, from aviation and healthcare, to consumer electronics and education. For example, Google Earth helps you explore the world and view the streets of major cities at the comfort of home. Pokemon Go is a wildly popular game that combines VR with augmented reality to catch Pokemons in the places you visit using a mobile app. As for the cons, as Simon’s article mentioned, it takes a learning curve to master movements in the virtual world, not to mention the hardware requirements and Internet speed requirements. Some are concerned, according to the article, “In Simulated Worlds Online, Consumption Is Still Conspicuous”, that virtual world seems to be promoting a generation of high-rollers, that the online persona is hardly sustainable in the real world. In addition, people may become too immersed in the virtual world that they may become detached from the physical world where face-to-face interactions is still important.

Virtual world foster creativity by allowing users to envision, build and test prototypes in a virtual environment. Since there is no cost involved in acquiring physical materials, the sky is the limit. In the article, “After Second Life, Can Virtual Worlds Get a Reboot”, it calls Minecraft a game-changer in that it is the LEGO-equivalent in the virtual world. It allows kids to use their imaginations to build and create things and to communicate with one another to exchange ideas.

There are boundless opportunities and applications for the futures of virtual world. As technologies continue to improve, virtual world will have more augmented reality built-in, making it more realistic to the real world. Virtual world help us dream bigger, as we can download an app on our mobile device, wear a VR headset and experience many interesting places in the world in 3D.  It also makes our lives more convenient, as virtual doctor visits are now possible for many common conditions. 

Works Cited:

Ferla, Ruth La. “No Budget, No Boundaries: It’s the Real You.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 21 Oct. 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/fashion/22Avatar.html.

Mehta, Diane. “After Second Life, Can Virtual Worlds Get a Reboot?” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 1 May 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/dianemehta/2013/04/30/after-second-life-can-virtual-worlds-get-a-reboot/.

Simon, Stephanie. “Avatar II: The Hospital.” The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones & Company, 13 Apr. 2010, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703909804575124470868041204.

Blog about Twitter

While both Twitter and Blackboard are online communication tools that facilitate discussion and feedback, they are different in their structures and usages.

Twitter is a general purpose social media platform with millions of users. Each message is limited to 140 characters, so choice of words is very important. Otherwise, it could be taken out of context and being misunderstood. Tweets are generally public and viewable by anyone, unless you start a Direct Message to a specific user. Tweets are organized by hashtags, allowing users to search for a particular topic or see what’s trending. The primary purpose of Twitter is to send short, concise messages to others as a form of "microblogging".

Blackboard, on the other hand, is a learning management system. Its usage is limited to classroom settings and discussions are typically facilitated by the professor. The discussion board is a forum, in which someone may post a topic, and others can post a reply to this topic. Blackboard discussions are restricted to students enrolled in the particular course. There is no specific restriction on the character limit in each message. Finally, being that it is a learning management system, Blackboard has other features, such as syllabus, announcements, and assignments, which allow the instructor to post class materials and students to submit their work.

Still, neither Twitter nor Blackboard can replace in-classroom discussions. Face-to-face communication is important, as it brings a level of human interaction that no online activity can replace. In-classroom instructions are always considered the most direct teaching-and-learning method. The instructor can facilitate discussions more lively, and it nurtures students’ engagement and participation as it creates an environment that more conducive to learning. 

Social Networking Sites

In this blog, I will compare four different social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, and LinkedIn. While all of them have the common characters of the 5C’s to engage their users, each platform serves a different purpose to a different audience.

Facebook is still the king of social media. It is known for its versatility and it combines many elements of social media, such as live feeds, multimedia, chat, groups and events, and third party app integrations. It’s a great way to stay in touch with family and friends. You can “like” someone’s update, tag someone a photo, and organize an event. One of the most important features is Safety Check, which lets you report your status and location to your loved ones in the event of a crisis or emergency.

Twitter is a popular platform for sending Tweets, in 140 characters or less, to a public audience. It is the quickest way to post something – whether it’s a quick message, a photo or a short video – for the world to see. You can use hashtags to organize and search messages in particular topic. President Trump is a fan of Twitter, and his messages are controversial and faces mounting criticisms for being unpresidential. Businesses often use Twitter to post service interruption notices and to keep their customers informed. Although I don’t personally use Twitter to post anything, I do follow other interest groups and trending topics. I also use Twitter for breaking news, as others often post raw videos and messages as news start to develop.

Yelp is a popular platform for writing reviews for businesses. It’s the old traditional word-of-mouth, but leveraging the social media create a robust community base of reviewers. It’s a perfect way to try out local restaurants, find new travel destinations, or discover new activities of interest. I find Yelp particularly useful because it helps me find out what to expect before I visit a place. I often depend on Yelp ratings when selecting a doctor. All doctors have different levels of compassion and patience, so having Yelp reviews is very beneficial in finding a suitable doctor for my medical needs.

LinkedIn is great way for networking and job searching. It allows you to create a professional profile, so that recruiters can contact you. LinkedIn also has a database of job postings and can recommend jobs to you based on the profile and your preference. It can also help you make a connection and ask for a recommendation. In recent years, I find myself use LinkedIn for job searching more than any other sites, primarily because the networking aspect of it really helps in landing the right job at the right company. 

Social Networking

Social networking started out as a way to create online profiles, post updates on personal details, connect with friends and family, and make new friends. Nowadays, it’s quite common for someone to have profiles built in multiple sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and/or LinkedIn, each serving a different purpose with different audience or followers. For example, Facebook can help users share personal stories, discover new events, and stay connected with your friends. LinkedIn can help you build your professional image online and it’s frequently used by recruiters to scout potential candidates. Taken together, social networking sites receive millions of visitors each day and are among the most frequently visited sites, as people often rank social networking as one of the most interesting and intriguing activities online. For example, in the article, How Obama Tapped Into Social Networks’ Power, David Carr described how Obama ran a successful online campaign, and through the effective use of social media, and reached out to millions that help him get elected. In another use case, Heather Timmons reported in the article, In India, Using Facebook to Catch Scofflaw Drivers, that people has been using Facebook to report traffic violations to the police, helping the police capture critical evidence to issue citations against reckless drivers. Although there were concerns about authenticity of the photos as well as privacy, the most people welcomed the change that helped make a city safer.

Social networking has also been helping large corporations to learn more about their customers in ways that were seemingly impossible years ago. One of the major emerging trends in the corporate world is Big Data, using large, multi-dimensional data sets to analyze people’s behavior and predict future trends in the business. While structured data, such as personal and transactional information, has been traditionally captured and stored in relational databases, many companies are beginning to tap into unstructured data, such as Facebook and Twitter feeds, by using text analytical tools to parse the natural language and store them in non-relational databases. Many companies believe that social networking feeds contain hidden treasures that the businesses can leverage to help analyze consumer behaviors and to better align the business with the consumer needs.

While social networking has benefited us by keeping us more connected, it also has numerous “dark sides”. In Doug Gross article, Dictionary word of the year: 'Unfriend', it highlights the danger of Facebook in which the user could be a target of someone’s stalking or “sexting” attempt. Indeed, privacy has become a major concern in social networking, as it’s easy to become someone’s friend or follower, but that may bring unwanted attention. The privacy setting could be so confusing that, it may not be easy to “unfriend” somebody or disconnect from the virtual social world. 

Carr, David. “How Obama Tapped Into Social Networks’ Power.” The New York Times, 9 Nov. 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/business/media/10carr.html.

Gross, Doug. “Dictionary Word of the Year: 'Unfriend'.” CNN, 17 Nov. 2009, http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/11/17/unfriend.word/index.html.

Timmons, Heather. “In India, Using Facebook to Catch Scofflaw Drivers.” The New York Times, 1 Aug. 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/technology/02traffic.html?ref=business.