Hafiz's NMT Blog

Online Transactions

Source Content

PayPal is the faster, safer and easier way to pay and get paid online. Available in 190 markets and 24 currencies, PayPal is a global leader of online payment solutions, with over 78 million active accounts worldwide. PayPal makes it easy to send and receive online payments, whether you’re doing it for personal or business reasons – it’s an all-in-one solution.As a seller, you can accept all major credit/debit cards, bank transfers¹ and PayPal balances. As a buyer, you can choose how to pay for items.

Demo

http://www.paypal.com/en_GB/m/demo/demo_consumer/demovideo.html

Source: http://www.paypal.com

Self-opinion

What i have noticed lacking under the donations page in the Club Rainbow website it the option to pay by PayPal. PayPal is faster, safer and an easier way to pay and get paid online.  It is available in 190 markets and 24 currencies. This is useful and convenient for those who does not own a credit card or for those people overseas who wants to quickly transfer funds into the organization. This also helps those who owns a credit card due to the fact that it saves the hassle of them needing to refill the form again everytime they want to donate. Those who donate frequently to the organization could just use PayPal which stores their personal details. They are just a few clicks away from successfully transferring money to the organizations bank account. This process is much faster, easier and less hassle. This will definitely help the organization to gain donations from overseas because foreigners can rest assured that the money they transfer will be in safe hands due to the tight security that PayPal offers.

PayPal is also widely used for online shopping. Since it is recognized internationally, customers from all over the world can shop online from anywhere in the world. PayPal will transfer those funds fast and secure with their proved business model. This also relates to the organizations virtual shop. If they would introduce PayPal as one of the payment methods, they will gain a larger amount of customers and locally and globally as they had use one of the most trusted and secured online money transfer channel in the world.

Social Networking services

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A social network service focuses on building and reflecting of social networks or social relations among people, e.g., who share interests and/or activities. A social network service essentially consists of a representation of each user (often a profile), his/her social links, and a variety of additional services. Most social network services are web based and provides means for users to interact over the internet, such as e-mail and instant messaging. Although online community services are sometimes considered as a social network service in a broader sense, social network service usually means an individual-centered service whereas online community services are group-centered.

The main types of social networking services are those which contain category places (such as former school-year or classmates), means to connect with friends (usually with self-description pages) and a recommendation system linked to trust. Popular methods now combine many of these, with Facebook, Bebo and Twitter widely used worldwide;MySpace and LinkedIn being the most widely used in North America; Nexopia(mostly in Canada); Bebo, Hi5, StudiVZ (mostly in Germany), iWiW (mostly in Hungary), Tuenti (mostly in Spain), Decayenne, Tagged, XING, Badoo and Skyrock in parts of Europe;Orkut and Hi5 in South America and Central America; and Friendster, Mixi, Multiply, Orkut, Wretch, Xiaonei and Cyworld in Asia and the Pacific Islands and Orkut and Facebook in India.

There have been some attempts to standardize these services to avoid the need to duplicate entries of friends and interests (see the FOAFOpen Source Initiative), but this has led to some concerns about privacy. standard and the

Although some of the largest social networks were founded on the notion of digitizing real world connections, many other networks as seen in the List of social networking websites focus on categories from books and music to non-profit business to motherhood as ways to provide both services and community to individuals with shared interests.

Source: Wikipedia

Source: http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

MobiTweet – Mobile Tweeter

MobiTweet is a mobile twitter service provided by Starhub. It allows  Starhub customers to send tweets using their mobile phones to the ones they are following. This is a very fast and convenient way as one does not need to access the twitter web portal to send tweets.

Source: Starhub

Self-opinion

Social networking without a doubt had grown rapidly in the last few years. Active users and new users keeps increasing at a daily basis. As of date the social networking site Facebook have over more than 400 million active users worldwide. This just shows how well-connected the world really is making great opportunities for new businesses to advertise their products and services or to just promote a certain interest. This is what is called viral marketing. This term describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence. It is kind of like a virus which spreads rapidly. This is mainly thanks to the wide web of social network which easily connects millions of people together like a daisy-chain.

This is beneficial to the organization due to the fact that it can gain a wide audience and create a greater awareness. Through this viral marketing, the content that the organization places inside its social network site account will be almost instantaneously be noticeable to not only in Singapore but also the world. This is an advantage for the organization as it opens up the chance of possibly getting donations from overseas and gaining an audience there as well rather than just locally. With these social network sites, the organization could also attract teenagers to get to know about the organization. The reason why teenagers is because they are the most uncharitable among the age groups and they have little sense of caring and love for the disabled and the elderly. This is a problem which every charitable and hospitable organizations have to face. So to attract more teenagers to get involved, social networking sites is the way to go as most teenagers spend most of their time surfing the internet. Through these such sites will the organization have a higher chance of solving this old and common problem.

The latest technology of social networking that had caught my attention was the mobile app called MobiTweet. It is a service provided by Starhub which enables its customers to send tweets via their mobile phones. As of date, mobile tweeter has already become a necessity in all the latest mobile phone models. It has become a new trend and need for people, just like what camera phones was back then in those days. With this new technology it is much more convenient for communication to take place anytime and anywhere. In my opinion this is very useful for the organization, for example if one of the patient’s parents was to know about the hourly progress of their disabled child, they can simply just tweet to their respective nurses and it only takes less than a minute for parents to get updated.

Web 1.0 vs Web 2.0

Source Content

According to Wikipedia, Web 2.0 is a revolutionary view of the Internet and the social and business uses of advanced technologies rather than the technical aspects of those technologies. The core concept of Web 2.0 is: Use Internet as a platform and leverage network effect to harness the collective intelligence in a cost-effective manner

The below image was actually made by aYsoon Blog to help its readers understand the structure and communication process of Web 2.0.

The term “Web 2.0″ (2004–present) is commonly associated with web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design and collaboration on the World Wide Web. Examples of Web 2.0 include web-based communities, hosted services, web applications, social networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis, blogs, mash ups, and folksonomies. A Web 2.0 site allows its users to interact with other users or to change website content, in contrast to non-interactive websites where users are limited to the passive viewing of information that is provided to them.

Web 2.0 websites allow users to do more than just retrieve information. They can build on the interactive facilities of  “Web 1.0″ to provide “Network as platform” computing, allowing users to run software-applications entirely through a browser. Users can own the data on a Web 2.0 site and exercise control over that data. These sites may have an “Architecture of participation” that encourages users to add value to the application as they use it.

Source: Wikipedia

Self-opinion

From the research content above, i understand that there is a big gap between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. The main difference would be the type of experience that each type offers. Web 2.0 is an improved version of Web 1.0. It offers users more interactivity and communication options and also customization(or user-generated content) and applications which enhances user experience as a whole and defines the extra activities users can do now which they couldn’t with Web 1.0.

The reason why i think Club Rainbow needs to update their current website to Web 2.0 is because people nowadays are more connected through the internet and survey has shown that a majority spend at least more than 4-5 hours surfing the internet so it is definitely worth the upgrade. This is beneficial due to the fact that this medium will provide more exposure and awareness that the organization needs without any cost at all. The organization could just register a Facebook, Twitter, Blogger or Youtube account for free and start updating content into their profiles. Since this is a non-profit organization, money is really an issue, so it is only obvious for them to choose a kind of advertising that is both viral and low in cost.

Apart from social networking, Web 2.0 also offers applications which enhances user interaction. This is another important feature of Web 2.0 which is beneficial for the organization. For example, i personally think that the current website needs a blog roll on the home page so that it can place all the latest events and people can easily find them and get updated. Another example would be to place a data form at the contact page, this is very useful because people can give comments or make enquiries directly to the organization via online.

5 key points speaker had mentioned during his presentation:

1)In the real world, one must be patient enough to withstand the pressure that clients will give.

2)Use new social media services such as Facebook and Twitter to promote oneself.

3)Being able to meet the deadline of a project given by a client is a valuable asset for designers to own.

4)Start from basic freelance work, then slowly learn your way to the top.

5)Constant self-learning and motivation is a must for every successful designer.

Inspiration:

1)The first would be the guest speaker itself simply because not long ago he was also a student just like myself,and years later he was able to be successful in his field of study.This just shows that dreams can be achieved through constant self-upgrading,motivation,dedication and passion.I truly believe that one can make it big in the real world if he or she can endure and withstand any obstacles that hit them throughout the journey.

2)From his presentation of his company’s portfolio, I can see that much dedication has been put in to create amazing websites for bloggers or businesses alike.It sort of like motivates me to want to learn even more regarding web design and even create my very own complex and professional website.

3)When the guest speaker shared with us his experiences, it had made me realize that school life and the real life “out there” is way different than what we had imagine.Only when we have experienced it ourselves will we truly understand what our parents had gone through to raise us up.All the blood, sweat and tears that had been dropped throughout their whole life just to give meaning to our own lives.

Finally I do think its useful for guest speakers to come to our school to share their experience and expertise because this is the only direct way that we students could communicate to the real world industry out there.To get a feel of what we will be facing in the future when our career path takes place.I am pretty sure that almost all students are completely clueless about the industry and its whole process and how it all operates.

This review that I’m going to write is based on Stan Schroeder’s article from the Mashable website titled Marvel Comics on the iPhone. In his article he reported that the biggest and most popular comics company in the world which is none other than Marvel Comics will be available for reading on the iPhone through the free comic reader Comixology.

In my opinion this is a great idea which involves new media because old media (which is the physical copy of the comic itself) is being digitized into digital formats viewable on any portable devices (new media) such as handphones, portable media players ,etc. This opens up a whole new platform and possibilities of how comics can be distributed to the consumers and many exciting features can be added in a digital version of a comic book which will attract more readers.

One of the advantages of having digital copies of comic collections is obviously because it saves you the hassle of owning the physical copies which in bulk could take up a lot of space in your room or could be heavy and a burden to carry around if you would like to read more than a few of them while your outdoors. With the digital versions you could simply store thousands of your comic book collections all in your portable devices and can view and read them anytime and anywhere you like.

But on the other hand, there is also a disadvantage to this new media.I fear that a few years from now the art and history of these comics’ origins might be extinct because readers might prefer its digital counterparts rather than the original physical copies due to its convenience and extra features that is not available physically. This will slowly lead to readers not appreciating the true art form of these comics and by the next generation all history of it will be lost and unheard of.

So the conclusion here is that while new media does benefit us humans with technologies that make our lives better and more convenient, it does have its own downturn.z

Last Saturday I had for the first time went to Ion Orchard and find it to be a very expensive shopping destination but nevertheless it also offers a great experience due to its unique artistic architecture and the first Art-Exhibition-in-a-Mall in Singapore.

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