Exercise 25: M-commerce and the e-wallet: Innovation and mobile devices

Explore some of the problems associated with mobile technology or their suppliers.

1. What is meant by a location based service?

According to (Wikipedia) a location-based service (LBS) is an information and entertainment service, accessible with mobile devices through the mobile network and utilizing the ability to make use of the geographical position of the mobile device.

LBS services include services to identify a location of a person or object, such as discovering the nearest banking cash machine or the whereabouts of a friend or employee. LBS services include parcel tracking and vehicle tracking services. LBS can include mobile commerce when taking the form of coupons or advertising directed at customers based on their current location.

2. Visit an airline Web site and search for information on WAP or SMS access to booking airline services. Do the same for WAP or SMS services in banking. How do both industries compare?

Olympic Airways provides a wap service at http://www.olympic-airways.gr/wap to allow users to

• keep an eye on all Olympic Airlines Flights
• Get information on Departures from and Arrivals at the Athens International Airport as if you were before the Flight Information Display at the airport
• Check your actual miles if you are a member of our Frequent Flyer program


Southwest Airlines utilises WAP http://mobile.southwest.com/ which allows passengers to

• book flights
• Check Flight status
• Check In
• Cancel Flights
• view schedules
• etc

Apparently at some time prior to 23 October 2004 Westpac had WAP banking services enabled. However according to an article on ITWire on 13 October 2004 http://www.itwire.com/content/view/182/2/ from 23 October 2004, "the Westpac banking site will no longer support wireless application protocol (WAP) internet banking through your mobile phone"

Until recently according to (AustralianIT) mobile banking services have not been provided by Australian banks. They had provided services in the earlier parts of the decade but closed them down in mid to late 2004 due to poor patronage. But things seem to have turned the corner with the banks now re entering the mobile market.

3. Lucent Technologies designs and delivers the systems, services and software that drive next-generation communications networks at: http://www.lucent.com

According to http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/wps/portal/aboutus

Alcatel-Lucent is the trusted partner of service providers, enterprises and governments worldwide, providing solutions to deliver voice, data and video communication services to end-users.

A leader in fixed, mobile and converged broadband networking, IP technologies, applications and services, Alcatel-Lucent leverages the unrivalled technical and scientific expertise of Bell Labs, one of the largest innovation powerhouses in the communications industry

4. Visit the W3C website and find the status of the VoiceXML project. When do you think it will affect business on the Web and what will its impact be?

The current standard for VoiceXML is v2.1 which was released on 19 June 2007. The current working draft as at 2 June 2009 is Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML) 3.0

5. Investigate CDMA, GSM or other network technologies for mobile phones and circuit-switched and packet-switched data capabilities.

According to (Wikipedia) Code division multiple access (CDMA) is a channel access method utilized by various radio communication technologies.

One of the basic concepts in data communication is the idea of allowing several transmitters to send information simultaneously over a single communication channel. This allows several users to share a bandwidth of frequencies. This concept is called multiplexing. CDMA employs spread-spectrum technology and a special coding scheme (where each transmitter is assigned a code) to allow multiple users to be multiplexed over the same physical channel. By contrast, time division multiple access (TDMA) divides access by time, while frequency-division multiple access (FDMA) divides it by frequency. CDMA is a form of "spread-spectrum" signaling, since the modulated coded signal has a much higher data bandwidth than the data being communicated

(Wikipedia) suggests that GSM (Global System for Mobile communications: originally from Groupe Spécial Mobile) is the most popular standard for mobile phones in the world. GSM differs from its predecessors in that both signaling and speech channels are digital, and thus is considered a second generation (2G) mobile phone system. This has also meant that data communication was easy to build into the system. Newer versions of the standard were backward-compatible with the original GSM phones. For example, Release '97 of the standard added packet data capabilities, by means of General Packet Radio Service (GPRS). Release '99 introduced higher speed data transmission using Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution (EDGE).

6. According to Nokia:

   “The Nokia One Mobile Connectivity Service provides easy and secure access to email, calendar, directory and more from a mobile phone, PDA, PC or fixed-line phone - take your corporate applications mobile.”

   Why is a company like Nokia – http://www.nokia.com – described as having end-to-end expertise?

According to (Nokia) it takes innovation to win new business. Yet by its nature, innovation is hard work. The promise of a novel service is fulfilled through a complete understanding of all its components.

Nokia Siemens Networks, in collaboration with our parent companies Nokia and Siemens, offer end-to-end expertise and capabilities to create seamless, personalized end-user experiences delivered by streamlined business and network solutions.

We offer five key steps to create competitiveness through end-to-end innovation:

• conduct the research
• identify the opportunitiesfor innovation
• specify the solutions
• implement your plans
• evolve your services portfolio

References
The Australian IT. Suncorp dials into mobile banking. Retrieved 19 July 2009, from http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,25194759-24169,00.html
Nokia Siemens Networks. End to end expertise. Retrieved 27 July 2009, from http://www.nokiasiemensnetworks.com/cn/Insight/end-to-end/end-to-end-expertise.htm?languagecode=en%20topic%20End-to-end%20expertise%20-%20our%20offering
Wikipedia. Location-based service. Retrieved 14 July 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Location-based_service
Wikipedia. Code division multiple access. Retrieved 19 July 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_division_multiple_access
Wikipedia. GSM. Retrieved 19 July 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM

Exercise 24: Virtual business worlds and cyberagents

Search the Web for a site that uses a cyber character or cyber agent to host a business site. (If you create a successful cyber agent, you may be able to get large companies to use it to sell their products online.)

1. Describe what software agents are.

According to (Wikipedia) , a software agent is a piece of software that acts for a user or other program. Such "action on behalf of" implies the authority to decide which (and if) action is appropriate. The idea is that agents are not strictly invoked for a task, but activate themselves.

2. Differentiate the various types of software agents.

(Wikipedia) identifies the following types of software agents:

• Autonomous agents
Autonomous agents are software agents that claim to be autonomous, being self-contained and capable of making independent decisions, and taking actions to satisfy internal goals based upon their perceived environment.


• Distributed agents
Since agents are well suited to include their required resources in their description, they can be designed to be very loosely coupled and it becomes easy to have them executed as independent threads and on distributed processors. Thus they become distributed agents and the considerations of distributed computing apply. Agent code is particularly easy to implement in a distributed fashion and should scale well


• Multi-agent systems
When several agents (inter)act they may form a multi-agent system a.k.a. multiple-agent system. Characteristically such agents will not have all data or all methods available to achieve an objective (this can be referred to as "limited viewpoint") and thus will have to collaborate with other agents. Also, there may be little or no global control and thus such systems are sometimes referred to as swarm systems. As with distributed agents, data is decentralized and execution is asynchronous


• Mobile agents
Agent code that moves itself, including its execution state, on to another machine, to continue execution there. This is also referred to as mobile code. Agents can be used to gather system information, taking back-up of files by copying them in client-server paradigm, monitoring network throughput or to check resources availability and moderating the resource utilization of system by checking the services running on system


• Fuzzy agents
In computer science a fuzzy agent is a software agent that implements fuzzy logic. This software entity interacts with its environment through an adaptive rule-base and can therefore be considered as a type of intelligent agent.

3. Describe how techniques such as artificial intelligence and statistical techniques are used in software agents.

(Wikipedia)In artificial intelligence, an intelligent agent (IA) is an autonomous entity which observes and acts upon an environment (i.e. it is an agent) and directs its activity towards achieving goals (i.e. it is rational). Intelligent agents may also learn or use knowledge to achieve their goals.

Intelligent agents are also closely related to software agents. For example, autonomous programs used for operator assistance or data mining (sometimes referred to as bots) are also called "intelligent agents".

As software agents have an autonomous role, they need to be able to make decisions. Statistical techniques are used to devise the decision model that the agent will use. As the agent learns, the statistical model is refined by the agent so that the decisions it makes better fit with expectations.

4. List popular software agents currently in use in the commercial world.

• http://www.amazon.com/makes recommendations on what you might like to buy, based upon previous enquiries.
• NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has an agent that monitors inventory, planning, and scheduling equipment ordering to keep costs down.
• Allstate Insurance has a network with thousands of computers. The company uses a network monitoring agent from Computer Associates International called Neugent that watches its huge networks 24 hours a day. Every five seconds, the agent measures 1200 data points and can predict a system crash 45 minutes before it happens.
• Google has agents that analyse web browsing trends and provide targeted advertising.

5. Identify various activities in e-commerce where software agents are currently in use.

It is suggested (Wikipedia)that there are 4 essential types of intelligent software agents:

1. Buyer agents or shopping bots
2. User or personal agents
3. Monitoring and surveillance agents
4. Data mining agents

Examples of using software agents include:

• Car insurance Quotes.
• Travel and Holiday comparison portals eg FlightCentre

References
Car insurance Quotes. Free Resources: software agents. Retrieved 14 July 2009, from http://www.autocarinsurancebest.com/search.html?q=software+agents&submit=Search
Wikipedia. Intelligent agent. Retrieved 14 July 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_agent
Wikipedia. Software agent. Retrieved 14 July 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_agent

Exercise 23: Searching mechanisms

1. How do search engines such as Alta Vista differ from information directories?

I must admit that I was very surprised to see that altavista still had a presence on the web.http://www.altavista.com/ I guess it is debateable as to whether having a website constitutes a presence.
I seemingly remember that years ago it was one of the big few interfaces to the web, but now it just looks like the very poor mans google.

Having said all that and having to search for the connections between Altavista, information directories, and this topic, (Wikipedia) provided the enlightenment. It turns out that AltaVista used a fast, multi-threaded crawler (Scooter) to trawl the net.

I am going to take a stab that an information directory is meant to represent a static information source, whereas AltaVista which used a crawler, could be thought of as a dynamic data source.

2. What is a spider? What does it do?

A spider is an automated software program used to locate and collect data from web pages for inclusion in a search engine's database, and to follow links to find new pages on the world wide web.(Eustace, p2)

3. Describe a search situation where the requirement for recall is high?

I am having trouble defining exactly what this question is actually asking. I am going to take a stab that it is referring to the correllation between search terms and the returned results. The more relevant the result the higher the recall value. With this interpretation in mind, (Cole)relates Visualizing a high recall search strategy output for undergraduates in an exploration stage of researching a term paper. The abstract states that When accessing an information retrieval system, it has long been said that undergraduates who are in an exploratory stage of researching their essay topic should use a high recall search strategy; what prevents them from doing so is the information overload factor associated with showing the undergraduate a long list of citations. One method of overcoming information overload is summarizing and visualizing the citation list.

4. What is a meta-search engine? Provide some examples.

According to (Wikipedia)a meta-search engine is a search tool that sends user requests to several other search engines and/or databases and aggregates the results into a single list or displays them according to their source. Metasearch engines enable users to enter search criteria once and access several search engines simultaneously. Metasearch engines operate on the premise that the Web is too large for any one search engine to index it all and that more comprehensive search results can be obtained by combining the results from several search engines. This also may save the user from having to use multiple search engines separately.

Brainboost, ChunkIt!, Clusty, Dogpile, Excite, Harvester42, HotBot, Info.com, Ixquick, Kayak, LeapFish, Mamma, Metacrawler, MetaLib, Mobissimo, Myriad Search, SideStep, Turbo10, WebCrawler, DeeperWeb are all meta-search engines.

5. What is spamming?

According to (Yahoo)Spam is any message or posting, regardless of its content, that is sent to multiple recipients who have not specifically requested the message. Spam can also be multiple postings of the same message to newsgroups or list servers that aren't related to the topic of the message. Other common terms for spam include UCE (unsolicited commercial email) and UBE (unsolicited bulk email).

6. How can you get your site listed at major search sites; and how could you improve your site ranking?

According to (Yahoo) to get your site listed and improve your ranking do the following:

• Submit your site
• add meta tags
• cultivate links to your site
• build a quality site
• keep your site fresh
• use a sitemap

References
Cole C., Mandelblatt B., Stevenson J. Visualizing a high recall search strategy output for undergraduates in an exploration stage of researching a term paper (2002) Information Processing and Management, 38 (1), pp. 37-54.
Eustace K, Bots, agents, spiders and mobile computing. ITC382/ITC594/ITC565 Topic 10 lecture notes
Wikipedia. AltaVista. Retrieved 13 July 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista
Wikipedia. Metasearch engine. Retrieved 13 July 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasearch_engine
Yahoo!Help. How can I get my site listed in search engines? Retrieved 13 July 2009, from http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/smallbusiness/webhosting/promote/promote-05.html
Yahoo!Help. What is spam? Retrieved 13 July 2009, from http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/smallbusiness/bizmail/spam/spam-21.html