A review on "UK to get tough with illegal downloader "

Nowadays, the development of the internet provides a lot of conveniences to the internet users. The users can find a lot of songs, movies, photos, and other materials in internet and easily illegal download the songs and movies by just clicking the mouse and wait for few minute and hours.

In year 2008, UK government is working on a new law to cut off the illegal download problem. In my opinions, others countries such as Malaysia also should work on the relevant law to solve the illegal download problem. The illegal download problem causes the movie and music industrial suffers a large amount of losses annually because the people are reducing the purchases of legal edition CD and DVD. This causes some company have substantial drop in income as well as close down the business.

The implementation of the relevant laws can bring a lot of advantages. Firstly, it can be useful in reducing the illegal downloading activities. Secondly, the elimination of the illegal downloading can improve the sales of the music and movies company because the people who want to listen the song or watching the movie need buy the original CD or DVD. Thirdly, the law can protect the singer and artist. The illegal downloading activities are denying the effort of the singer and artist such as the selling result of their CD or DVD are not goods. In other respect, this will causes them less motivation to achieve their goals and expectation.

In conclusion, the implementation of the laws is necessary for the whole world. The illegal downloading problem should be dispose off in order to create a piracy free environment.

A review of local ecommerce website

As the internet has been rapidly developed, there is a significant increasing number of internet users. This make the internet become a big market for doing business. After the success of ebay and Amazon.com, many companies started to pay attention to the potential value of internet and try to increase them more competitive in this market.
The website that I reviewed is a local website that selling the accessories of cats and dogs. ( http://catsndogs.my/store/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=22)

So many ecommerce website in the internet, how can you make people to view your website instead of others? Is the design, a great design speaks a thousand words. A good design will attract people’s attentions, a bad design will ruin the website. In the catsdogs.my, it uses some pictures and a simple design but make me feel comfortable when looking into the website. The categories are clear and simply easy to find whatever you want from here. This website has a category to differentiated the price level from RM5 until RM 100 and above, easier for the customer from different range.

The second factor is the online storefront (shopping cart), it enables customers to build an electronic catalog of the product which allow online ordering and seamlessly integrate with modules like order management, tax and payment gateway. In the website, it provide shopping cart and immediately show how much the price you need to pay under the shopping cart. Easy for customer to evaluate how much they have been spending.

The third factor is the payment gateway, it is a service between the online storefront software and the credit card processing network. It is used in real-time authentication and charging of the customers’ credit cards. The website using Paypal as their only payment gateway, the only payment gateway will limited their scope of customer.

The fourth factor is the commercial bank accounts set up between a retail business and a financial institution to allow a business to accept credit card transactions. The only merchant that the website provides is Maybank2u, this make some customer without an account in Maybank will not be able to buy good from the website.

A good website will provide live chat service to ensure the customer will get helped when they meet any problem in the process of buying the product. This website did not provide the live chat service, when a customer meets any problem, he or she cannot get immediate response.

A review of the product is needed for an ecommerce website as before every customer buys their thing, they want to know what other think about the product. In the website, it did not have many review of their product. This is a problem that needed to improve.

Online users will require to surf in a safe website, therefore, a good ecommerce website must show clearly online security and hacker seal and any anti-viruses that used by the website. The website did not provide these online security issues.

The last factor is the delivery, fast and convenient delivery will be preferred, the website has provide three choices of the delivery merchandise. Let the customer to choose the merchant that they trusted most.

In conclusion, this website still have many thing to improve and I feel that it have potential to become a popular website.

Prevention of E-auction Fraud for Consumer

E-auction is a market mechanism by which buyers make bids and sellers place offers; characterized by the competitive and dynamic nature by which the final price is reached which conducted online.

But beware, there are several types of E-auction fraud such as:

• Bid shielding (Having phantom bidders bid at a very high price when an auction begins; they pull out at the last minute, and the real bidder who bid a much lower price wins)
• Shilling (Placing fake bids on auction items to artificially jack up the bidding price)
• Fake photos and misleading descriptions
• Improper grading techniques
• Bid siphoning
• Selling reproductions as originals
• Failure to pay
• Failure to pay the auction house
• High shipping costs and handling fees
• Failure to ship merchandise
• Loss and damage claims
• Fake escrow services
• Switch and return

Ways to prevent E-auction fraud:

• Authentication service-it is a service to determine whether an item is genuine and described in proper manner.

• Grading services-a service that determines the physical of the product whether is in a good manner

• Feedback forum- this is a forum that provides users to express out their experience dealing with e-auction.

• Insurance policy- there is some insurance policy that provide to customers or users like the insurance policy by Ebays with no cost at all.

• Escrow services- Both buyers and sellers in a deal are protected with an independent third party. Buyers mail the payment to escrow services which verifies the payment and alerts the sellers when everything checks out. Eg: i-escrow

• Physical inspection- eliminates many problems especially for collector’s item. When the seller and buyers are in the same vicinity, it is easy to arrange for such inspection.

• Item verification- is a way of confirm the identity and evaluate the condition of an item. Third parties will evaluate and identify an item through a variety of means.

• Become familiar with the auction website. Look into the websites protection policies. Never assume you are protected from auction fraud.

• Before placing a bid, learn as much as you can about the seller. If you can’t find anything out about the seller, than avoid doing business with them. Never fall for promises of better deals by moving away from the original auction website.

• If the seller wants you to use an escrow service you’ve never heard of, look into it. Check out the website. Call up customer support. Contact crimcheck.com to dig up data on the business in question. If you can’t confirm the legitimacy, don’t use it.

• Never ever give out your social security number, driving license number, credit card number, or bank account information until you have thoroughly checked out the seller and the escrow service.

• Always save 100% of the transaction information. You’ll be glad you did in the event your case makes it to court.

• If after the sale you feel the item/payment should have been delivered already, try to work it out with the seller/buyer. If at that point you feel that fraud is involved, immediately contact your state attorney general’s office and the FTC at www.ftc.gov or call toll-free 1-877-FTC-HELP (1-877-382-4357).

Corporate Blogging: A new marketing communication tool for companies

In these modern time, there are more and more organization start using Corporate Blogging. Whether internal or external, blogs are not strange to the corporate world. A corporate weblog is advertised and used by an organization to achieve its organizational objectives. The corporate weblog enable others more convenient to find those posts and comments and follow due to centralized hosting and generally structured conversation threads. With different types of web browsers, such as Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer 7, RSS technology are supported, which allow readers to read recent post without visiting the actual blog, which is beneficial to low-volume blogs.

There are many different types of corporate blogs. However, they can be categorized into 2 sectors, which are internal and external blogs.

(i) An Internal Blog is mostly accessed through the organization's intranet, is a weblog that provided to employees of the firm. Besides that, many blogs are published as public to allow anyone can access and post to them. The informal nature of job may encourage the participation of employee and it allows free discussion of any issues. Morever, it's a way of collective intelligence and provide direct communication between various hierarchies of an organization.

(ii) An External Blog is blog that allows company employees, teams or spokesperson to share their view publicly. It's also used by company to promote new product and services, to explain and simplified company policies, or to response on public criticism on certain issues. Furthermore, it also provide transparency of a company culture and treated more informally than traditional press releases. In some corporate blog, those posts need to go through a review before they post it. Some other corporate blog, they allow outsiders to leave comment to the posts.

When done correctly, blogging can be extremely valuable to a company. There are several benefits for corporate blogging:

(a) Blogs build and brands your company to be a thought leader in your industry. People always think a lot everyday. However, they are less people will take time to record these thoughts. Record the business thoughts on the corporate blog will force you to think even harder about yout industry. If you think hard enough and work regarding to your idea that you thought yesterday, can be sure that you find the success way for your company.

(b) Blogs help to engage customers in conversation and help in building relationships with them. Relationship marketing is important. The more trust and familiarity between 2 parties will result in higher posibility of a transaction.

(c) Blogs help you to show to the world that you have nothing to hide. There is nobody like to deal business with someone who always keep dark secrets and refuse to disclose anything. Not saying that a business can't have any secrets. Business secret are necessary and should be well kept with appropraite staff education and a proper blogging policy. Blogging will help a corporate to show to its stakeholder that you have nothing to hide against them, and to show that you are not trying to cheat their money. This will help a corporate to build trust in society.

(d) Blogs help you to get feedback from customer towards company's services. It can be a direct communications channel to get response from customers. Blogs provide a way that for you to get feedback from customers and understand with their need. With a global reach through internet, it also allow you to have more time with your customers, so you can provide services which customer prefer with. Then they will leave a good comment on the blog and this help to build good image for the company.


Like everything else in the world, blogging also has its disadvantages to be used:

(I) Need to remember that blogging will lead to sharing of information about individual or company, which will be harmful for employee or the company in general due to unappropriate use of information by employees or outsider.

(II) Blogging can lead to a legal pitfalls. If the comments make by some employees in the corporate blog that negatively affected others, company will be responsible for it.

(III) Blogging can be harmful too because some employees may use corporate blog to express their dissatisfaction about the company and this will lead to a bad publicity and bad reputation of company toward society.

(IV) Like everything elso in internet, blog are easy to start but difficult to maintain. Writing corporate blog coherently is difficult and time-consuming for a person to undertake it during free time. As a result, many blog are not updated according to what actual have been happened, this will lead to harm a company's reputation rather than enhancing it.





References:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_blog
2. http://www.blogopreneur.com/2007/03/30/the-benefits-of-corporate-blogging/
3. http://www.enterpriseblogs.info/corporate-blogging/disadvantages
4. http://www.morebusiness.com/running_your_business/businessbits/Corporate-Blogging-Secrets.brc