Final Exam Part 2: Yahoo Pipes

Here is a Yahoo Pipe that I have created that includes the latest on Cosmetics.

Cosmetics Yahoo Pipe

Google Wave my way :)

Google wave is an awesome tool of communication. It pretty much combines email, instant messaging, chat and social networking into one pot! And the best of all: Its in real time!!!
According to my research I found the following overall review on Google Wave:
Bottom Line of Google wave is:

A combination of e-mail, instant messaging, and real-time document sharing, Google Wave is really only an intriguing technology demonstration at this point. Its real value may become evident when third-party developers take advantage of its open API.

Pros
The next generation of instant messaging. Drag and drop files for collaboration.

Cons
Lots of bugs and crashes. No voice chat. Waves can quickly get messy and disorganized, especially with many participants.

Network Neutrality

Network Neutrality's main focus is to reinterate the Internet's main job of forwarding packets toward their source without picking and choosing between packets based on what their source is, where they are headed to and even their content. This is creating competiton just like MyStoreOnline can compete against Wal-Mart, where any blog can compete for readers against the big publishers and even a door for new innovations to enter the marketplace.
The main areas of concern for Net Neutruality comes down to the following questions which determine which side we should really be pushing for:
How will we access it?
How will it be charged?
How fast will it be?
How fast will it grow?
Who will have access?

So which side should I take? Here is what I am concerend about:
That ISPs might end up slowing traffic at peak times, therefore this will take away from the legitimate users...  However, I would argue that if net neutrality laws were passed the markets would in fact work to consumers' advantage.  ISPs would be forced to minimize disruption to their users, or will end up risking that consumers would switch over to a competitor ISP with a better network.  This would cause a better infrastructure and higher internet speeds for all the consumers, no matter how much bandwidth they use.

Please refer to http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9773538-38.html for more information.

SEO

Since the topic discussed by our guest speakers was SEO, Here is more information about SEO.

SEO is an acronym for "search engine optimization" or "search engine optimizer." Deciding to hire an SEO is a big decision that can potentially improve your site and save time, but you can also risk damage to your site and reputation. Make sure to research the potential advantages as well as the damage that an irresponsible SEO can do to your site. Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners, including:

Review of your site content or structure
Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript
Content development
Management of online business development campaigns
Keyword research
SEO training
Expertise in specific markets and geographies.

This information was derived from http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291

Findability

What is findability?

Findability is simply how easy it is to locate or navigate to an item or piece of information.

Much of the time, "findability" is discussed in the context of searching for information on the Internet, where it is a huge challenge; in the online world, if you can't find it then (for you) it might as well not exist.

But findability also applies to physical containers of information, such as books in a library, or even to physical objects themselves (for example, finding things using GPS or RFID).


http://www.relevantinfoservices.com/findability.html

Findability takes us beyond usability and information architecture into the realms of design, engineering and marketing. And it encompasses wayfinding and retrieval in physical and digital environments.

So findability builds on the foundation of library science and human-computer interaction, but addresses the new challenges and opportunities of social software, collective intelligence and ubiquitous computing.


Usability
--------
A measurement of the ease of use of any interface on the Web.

The better your Usability the better your Accessibility and Findability will be on your website.

Accessibility
-----------

The means by which people can view the site regardless of the handicap involved, whether it be disabilities or technology.

The better your Accessibility the better your Usability and Findability will be on your website.

SEO
---
Strategies and tactics used for improving how easy a search engine can find a site that best fits the requested search.

Better practices in Usability, Findability, and Accessibilty will help build a better foundation when coding for SEO

iPhone Development

General iPhone Web page best practices: http://www.devworld.apple.com/iphone

Working with the viewport:
http://www.iphonecompatible.net/design-tips-tools/define-a-viewport/

CSS for good iPhone Web pages:
http://www.cssgalleryapp.com/

The WebKit and using it's features for iPhone Web apps:
http://developer.apple.com/webapps/designingcontent.php

the iUI:
http://code.google.com/p/iui/

Semantic Web

"If HTML and the Web made all the online documents look like one huge book, RDF, schema, and inference languages will make all the data in the world look like one huge database"
Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 1999

Our guest speaker last speak gave us further insight on Semantic Web. The most interesting part of the presentation to me was popular choices for schemas that include:

-FOAF
-Creative Commons: (Embeds RDF in mbps)
-Music Brainz
-DC: Dublin Care
-RDF

Schemas are sometimes called vocabularies, and there are many many schemas!
We also discussed OWL and SPARQL.

SPARQL, is a query language and data access protocol for the Semantic Web. SPARQL is defined in terms of the W3C's RDF data model and will work for any data source that can be mapped into RDF.

OWL:• OWL stands for Web Ontology Language
• OWL is built on top of RDF
• OWL is for processing information on the web
• OWL was designed to be interpreted by computers
• OWL was not designed for being read by people
• OWL is written in XML
• OWL has three sublanguages
• OWL is a W3C standard

OWL is a part of the "Semantic Web Vision" - a future where:
• Web information has exact meaning
• Web information can be processed by computers
• Computers can integrate information from the web

http://www.w3schools.com/RDF/rdf_owl.asp

Wordia Video Preparation- Best practices for producing and distributing video on the Web

As far as quality is concerned, we can never achieve TV quality for web videos. This is mainly due to bandwidth limitations and the results of video compression.
In order to improve web video quality, there are certain procedures for the compression practices. As we know, Video can capture only two dimensions of the world. Therefore a certain percentage of quality of images and sounds will be lost as we cant capture all three dimensions. If we use a higher quality camera, we will be able to minimize the loss of quality. Additionally in order to deliver video on the web, compression is a necessity. This will reduce the data information and amount again, therefore having an impact on video quality. This is why proper compression needs to take place in order to keep a good quality in place at the same time.

According to our research we found out that there are two main types of web vidoes: streaming and progressive download.

This is the preferred method for larger files. The streaming is live and is delivered in realtime online. It takes less time to download and end users will not need to download the entire thing in order to view it.

With progressive downloads. we have to make sure of the type of internet connection that the end user will have to view the video. This method is not desirable for users with a smaller bandwidth. At the end of the day, a copy of the file will be copied in the users personal computer. Therefore with larger videos, this will take up a lot of space on the end user's side.

Midterm Exam: Web Analytics

I truly enjoyed researching Web Analtics! Please click on the following link to view my Midterm report.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/21156317/7500-Midterm-Exam-Roya-Eidizadeh

Software as a Service

When you are so used to something that works really good for you, there really is no reason to look for new things out there, right? :)
Some like me would probably agree!
I don't think at this point it would be a good idea to create software that would beat Microsoft Office products. Everyone is so used to them and using anything else would be difficult to get used to!
I looked at Zoho and Google Docs tonight and do realize that there are some formatting features exist in Zoho for instance, that make life easier compared to using excel. I like how there are images in fields too in Google Docs !

Zoho or Google Docs? Both offer completely browser-based office applications like a word processor and spreadsheet, as well as communication tools like chat and email, as well as collaboration tools like project managers and wikis. In Zoho Spreadsheets are also relatively much better than Google spreadsheets with a lot of options.
I think that Zoho has more features than Google's offerings, but individual users are more likely to explore Google apps because they've already got a Google account for Gmail.

Something cool to keep in mind about both of these applications is that they don't require you to install anything on your computer except your web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox etc.) All you need is an internet connection, and your browser!!!

Rich Media: Video Broadcasting on the web

Interesting Video!
Before the show even started, the first thing I noticed was the advertising. It is absolutely brilliant to advertise prior to the show that is being broadcast, because that is where the attention on the audience is. I have to admit that the commercials that come in the middle of the program are kind of annoying. But think of it this way...they are not as many as the actual commercials on T.V.
Streaming sites like Hulu, CBS, ABC, and others have proven that savvy audiences are turning to their computers for entertainment, and in a way that's profitable.I think that even though the shows are available at free cost to the end user, all of the advertisement would make up for any costs associated with video broadcasting on the web. If anything, it is extra money for the TV Station !!! So basically in simple terms, cable companies are losing here !

http://www.hulu.com/watch/28343/dr-horribles-sing-along-blog

Rich Media

Due to the horrible flooding conditions in Atlanta, I was unable to attend class. Dr. Piercy mentioned that Rich Media was discussed.
I believe various websites were viewed in class as well that related to Rich Media.
So what is Rich Media? Rich media is an Internet advertising term for a Web page ad that uses advanced technology such as streaming video , downloaded applet s (programs) that interact instantly with the user, and ads that change when the user's mouse passes over it. For example:

* An ad for a Hollywood movie that inclues a streaming video sample of a scene from the movie
* A mouse cursor that is changed to an image on a particular Web site if the user requests it (for example, a cursor that changes to a tiny red question mark on a site like whatis.com)
* A standard-size banner ad that includes an inquiry form about ISDN installation, capturing the user's filled-in personal information, and telling the user they will be contacted by a company representative - all simply by interacting with an ad on an online publisher's Web page

Advertiser servers of rich media ads that use Java applets or components may also serve regular GIF images to people whose browsers don't support Java well.

Twitter Tools

Twitpic:
1) http://twitpic.com/
Twitpic is a website that allows users to easily post pictures to the Twitter microblogging and social media service. Twitpic is a great tool to upload and distribute pictures in near real-time as an event is taking place. Twitpic could be used independently of Twitter as well. This is in a way similar to Flickr. However several characteristics make this site a companion for Twitter. Comments to photographs are sent as a reply tweet.
According to my research, Twitpic was started in 2008 by Noah Everett.

I have always used my cellphone to take instant pictures and send off to my freinds/family. It would be nice to use twitpic to send pics with a nice and short explanation. Good thing is that the pics would be stored just like a flickr account, and I could even print them whenever I want!

2)http://www.twitzu.com
Twitzu: Promote your business, special offers, promotions and events with Twitzu.
This is a grat tool. I will absolutely use this tool when I have my own business up and running :)

3) http://www.tweetbeep.com
Twitter Alerts: Keep track of conversations that mention you, your products, your company and anything else, via hourly email updates.
This is again a great tool to keep track of what is being said about a person's company. I know I would want to know all the good and bad things that are being mentioned out there !!!

4) http://twtqpon.com/
twtQpon: Enhance your social media marketing by offering discount coupons to the Twitter-sphere!
This is a great tool for free advertisement. I find this very useful for future marketing.

5) http://www.tangerineworks.com/twitblocker/
TwitBlocker: If you become overwhelmed by a Twitter user’s constant tweets, you can keep them quiet with a single click of a button.

This would become necassary at some pint because too many tweets from a certain group may become a problem !This is a polite and temporay way of "blocking" them :)

Tips about how one can use Twitter with their business/organization?

I personally believe that Twitter is a great tool for companies, only if it is used for the right purposes!

Some Tips:

1) If you are in sales and want to monitor what’s being said about your customers to help them protect their brands, twitter could be a great tool for that!

2) If you want to locate certain vendors, partners, and employees for your organization, using twitter is fast and easy. You can use it as a great directory.

3) Twitter is like a free marketing tool ! It could be a great tool promote products and services for any business/organization.

4) Using the strawpoll feature, companies can create mini polls into their twitter stream. This is great for instant feedback on any surveys/polls.

5) I just realized that there is a tweetajob feature as well. Companies can get and fill current job openings with tweetajob.

Very Coool !!!!

Twitter

I did not have a twitter account, but I am so happy that this was a part of our assignment, as I hear about it EVERYWHEREEEEEEEE !!! A couple nights ago, we went to Best Buy, and I noticed that on the door, it said "follow us on twitter". Tonight, I actually opened an account and searched them, and sure enough I saw their info :)

Using Twitter was quite easy. I actually found the design to be very user-friendly.
The following were some of the interesting features of how to post and use Twitter:

- The INVITE phone number feature: It will send an SMS invite to a friend's mobile phone.

- The FOLLOW username: It allows you to start receiving notifications for a specific person on your phone.

-D username + message: It sends a person a private message that goes to their device, and saves in their web archive.

- I also found the specific standard of limiting the messages to 160 characters smart. Because if the purpose is just to provide status, then it totally makes sense to keep a limit! Since status updates are done through text messages at times, this is an absolutely great limit!

Client Server Network

One of the subjects that was discussed in class last week was the Client Server network and their relationship.
Since this whole technology field is kind of new for me, I researched more and learned that a Client Server Network is a computer network in which one centralized, powerful computer (called the server) is a hub to which many less powerful personal computers or workstations (called clients) are connected. The clients run programs and access data that are stored on the server.
When you compare the Client Server network to a peer-to-peer network, it is different. A peer-to-peer network on the other hand is a network of personal computers, each of which acts as both client and sever, so that each can exchange files and email directly with every other computer on the network. Each computer can access any of the others, although access can be restricted to those files that a computer's user chooses to make available. Peer-to-peer networks are less expensive than client/server networks but less efficient when large amounts of data need to be exchanged.

I enjoyed our guest speaker as well. All the cool things about the future of iphones is fascinating! Holding an iphone in front of a store and seeing their coupons and address appear instantly on the screen was a cool one that was discussed! Absolutely amazing!!!

Opera Software

After navigating the Opera website,I learned more about the different products that are offered through their company. According to their site, The world’s most popular mobile Web browser with over 30 million users is Opera Mini 4.2.
Opera Mini enables you to take your full Web experience to your phone. It is faster mobile internet as data is compressed before being sent to your phone...and of course Opera Mini is free to download. The Opera Browser is fast, powerful and efficient. The new Opera Presto 2.2 engine in Opera 10 is up to 40% faster on resource-intensive pages such as Gmail and Facebook. I guess those are sites that everyone would like to have fast access to :)
Opera does have Educational Resources. Opera Education is Opera Software’s outreach program for universities, schools, and other educational institutions. They do university tours and seminars, and could be an addition to computer labs at school and they have campus representatives as well.

Looking forward to seeing our guest speaker tonight and learning more about this software.

My Wikipedia Experience!

I searched on the Persian Language and wanted to update some capitalizations on the page. Initially, I wanted to update the page without becoming a member, but figured the features available as a member could make this experience better. On this note, I became a member and searched the Persian Language page and edited, saved my changes and previewed the changed page and there it was!
I thought it was an easy process. Found it interesting because I got to see the html coding and edited the page through there. Plus, seeing some familiar tags from the html trainings was fun too!
Here is the link to the updated page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_language#Varieties_and_dialects

Porter's five force Model Criticisms?

I missed last class as I had to fly out to Ohio for a family emergency. However I did ask my sister (Rita) what topics were covered in class and she mentioned a big chunk of time was dedicated to talk about Porters five forces and six forces model. So I decided to do a little research and have something on my blog in regards to this topic.

Based on my research there are criticisms out there on regards to the model. According to Stewart Neill, Kevin P. Coyne and Somu Subramaniam the three major crticisms are :

That buyers, competitors, and suppliers do not interact
It creates barriers to entry)
Low uncertainty allows participants in a market to plan and respond to competitive behavior.
Here is an interesting fact/Example I found on a website related to Porter's six force model:

"Intel Corporation is the world's largest semiconductor company and the inventor of the X86 architecture series of microprocessors, the processors found in most personal computers....
.According to most references, the sixth force is government or the public. Martyn Richard Jones, whilst consulting at Groupe Bull, developed an augmented 5 forces model in Scotland in 1993, it is based on Porter's model, and includes Government (national and regional) as well as Pressure Groups as the notional 6th force. This model was the result of work carried out as part of Group Bull's Knowledge Asset Management Organisation initiative."

W3C and Meta tag

If W3C validator did not validate the html document for no character encoding, this can be correcte by inserting a meta tag.
Meta tag? It means information about information. tags that are invisible to users but explain things to client apps
Meta elements are generally used to specify things such as keywords, author, last modified, and other metadata.
The meta tag always goes inside the head element. Search engines use meta data for example for keyword search.

Ocarina!!!

So every week we will be exposed to different, interesting iphone applications.
last week we were introduced to Ocarina.
I was quite amazed with this music app for the iphone because it was a whole lot different than the others, you will have to blow in the phone! This iPhone application was developed by Smule and it pretty much turns your iPhone into a musical wind instrument plus you can even see and share your music with people all around the world with their Network technology. So if someone in Africa is playing their Ocarina, you will see little notes coming up from that area on the globe. VERY COOL! This application combines tilting and touching and blowing and all together this will create the sounds. It is just like playing a flute but a digital version, you place your hands on the holes on the screen. I look forward to learning about cool, different apps every week!

First Class :)

Our first class started off with an interesting group activity, and at the end we did learn that in the world of the internet, comes many technologies,development tools, uses and social/business issues. Our group provided one example of internet technology which was VoIP. Voice over Internet Protocol is simply the transmission of voice traffic over IP-based networks. Due to the low cost of this technology compared to traditional telephone networks, it is in high demand of consumers. In fact, If you have a fast Internet connection (DSL or cable) you can make PC-to-PC phone calls anywhere in the world for free! If you would like to make a PC-to-phone connection, however, there's usually a charge for this but definitely much cheaper than your regular phone service. To better understand how this works, here is a VoIP Diagram:

We also learned a bit about the Infrastructure of the Internet and specifically about the OSI and TCP/IP Models. Here is a link to the OSI Model's different layers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:OSIstack

After our first class , I did more research about the "Internet" itself and wanted to share some interesting information : "The origins of the Internet reach back to the 1960s when the United States funded research projects of its military agencies to build robust, fault-tolerant and distributed computer networks."

Welcome to My Blog!

Hello,

I have created this blog for the Intorduction to JAVA course, taught by Dr. Piercy.
This blog would be a great source to not only keep track with important take aways from each session, but also to learn from other classmates by subscribing to their blogs. I look forward to learning many new things from this course!