e-Commerce

In today’s environment, use of online services for money related purposes are forever increasing. Use of sites such as Amazon and eBay are at an all time high with many users of the internet beginning to discover such sites. People are now happy to input there personal details and credit or debit card details to have the privilege of using there credit or debit card online.

Brick and Click

Many businesses now offer an online shop to partner their high street shop. Businesses offer the offline services, bricks, and online services, clicks, and some companies offer a third way of ordering, over the phone, if they do not offer this service then many of them will offer a telephone support line.

An example of bricks and clicks is when a store allows the customers to order a product through the website or order it physically in the store, once ordered customers then have a choice of getting there products delivered to their house or going to the store to pick up the product once it has been delivered to the store. A site that offers this is republic.co.uk:

There are advantages and disadvantages for both customers and the business for brick and click, advantages for the customer being that they can try on cloths or actually physically hold an item to know what it looks/feels like and the advantages for the business that, over the internet, you get a bigger audience that could possibly buy from the store. The disadvantages for the customer being that they would have to pay for postage and packaging if bought online, and for the business, having to pay for the shop building and, if they have staff, staff wages.

Online Businesses

Over the last few years, solely online businesses have become some of the biggest businesses in the world, sites like amazon.com and play.com being amongst the biggest of them. With businesses like this being the solely online they do not have a physical store where people can go and try things on or generally look, this is a disadvantage for the customer and an advantage and disadvantage for the business as they do not have to pay for the building but could lose out on sales through this.

I personally use these sites often as they generally offer much cheaper prices than other stores as they have to pay for other things such as staff costs and buildings which solely online sites do not have to worry about.

The advantages for the business of this way of selling is that they do not have to pay as much money in overheads as the price of a website is much cheaper than a price of a building, another advantage would be that they can have their whole selection of products being shown on the website whereas this would not be possible in a building. The advantages for the customer would be that they are able to shop at any time of the day as the website is open 24/7, this would be convenient for people that work during the day and possibly not being able to go shopping before or after work, it is also very good for students who maybe do not have to ability to travel to and from a shop very cheaply or maybe not even at all.

Online Banking

Online banking is becoming a very prominent way of banking in today’s world. People can use it for many different uses; they can transfer money from one account to another, look at their balance and generally manage their money more easily through this online service. Although used by millions, people still believe that online banking isn’t safe to use as they believe many things could go wrong such as, being scammed, losing their details or making a mistake causing them to lose money, this is why the majority of banking is still done in the actual bank on high streets. Online banking has become very safe and easy to use over the course of it being around, which is why people are now not so worried about using it, they realise that it is a very quick, easy and safe to use.

I personally use this service, as, for me, it is very useful for checking a balance before I buy something online, and I know that everyone in my immediate family also use this service.

Auctions

Auction sites are another service that is becoming massive. Sites such as eBay.com and Gumtree.com are increasingly becoming some family’s main way of shopping as they offer many products, may they be used or new, at discounted prices, many people see such sites as “an online boot fair” as, along many other products, some people try and sell anything. Many sellers sell things at discounted prices to get people to look at their product and think “this is really cheap” and when they look at it closely they see that the seller is charging more money in postage and packaging, or P+P, so that they are actually making a profit so in turn, buyer isn’t actually saving anything.

Every time a user buys or sells something, the other person in the process, either the buyer or seller, leave feedback, which, if good, makes your account more established so people would be more incline to buy from you, making you a ‘Power Seller’ but if they leave bad feedback them your rating goes down making people not want to buy from you. This can be an advantage to buyers and seller, but it can also be a BIG disadvantage.

Many people use this service to make a little bit extra cash; maybe to buy new things or to pay the bills, here is a video to prove this:

There are obvious advantages to sites like this, making money from old junk that you may not want anymore but somebody else does, and generally clearing the house from junk, but there are disadvantages as well, people may offer fake products to buy at the price of the actual product so people will think that the product is genuine.

Overall, e-Commerce has become one of the most useful services available today online and gives people the ability to do everyday things much easier and quicker.

Real Time Information

There are many ways in which information is presented through the world of media. Real time information is information that is delivered immediately after being collected. Real time information is most frequently used for navigation or tracking.

Many transactional online sites offer order tracking, sites like Apple, Amazon and Play.com let you log on to your account and see what part of the delivery process your ordered product is at. Domino’s Pizza offer a service which allows you to order a pizza over the internet and track which part of the cooking process it is in, it then tells you when it is being delivered, this picture shows the service:

Some people have hobbies like plane spotting, and with modern technology they can achieve their hobbies by using real time data on websites such as www.flightradar24.com, this site allows people to search for a specific flight and it refreshes the stream automatically to give the most accurate location of the plane.

                There are also sites such as www.earthcam.com that offer webcams to specific places for people to look at and maybe use for purposes such as weather. People also use these websites to look at a place of interest, maybe because they go on holiday to this place, sometimes they do this to see what the place looks like during a different time of the year, as they possibly never see it during this time.

Another example of real time data would be the notice boards at train and bus stations, they have a system where they show the train and bus number and when the train is expected to arrive. This is a good use of real time data as it allows passengers to know exactly when their train is coming. This board also would show if the train/bus has any delays or is expected to arrive early giving the passenger increased information on the train/bus.

Some transactional websites use real time data, when somebody selects a product to buy; he or she has to choose a size of the product they want, on http://shop.tottenhamhotspur.com the layout of the size choices is in a colour code system letting the customer see how many units of a particular product are a left, like this:

This is a basic method of using real time data, but still gives more information to the user, or in this case the customer, over the internet.

There are many more ways in which people use real time information including things such as the basic weather forecast, people can type into a search engine ‘weather forecast’ and it will give them a list of websites that can show them a real time forecast. On Google if you type in ‘Weather forecast’ followed by a postcode of the area, Google itself will give you a basic real time weather forecast on the search results page, this is good but very basic and doesn’t give that much information, there are other sites such as the BBC Weather’s page and the Met Office’s page that give a much clearer and detailed weather forecast of the day, they show the weather hour by hour to give a clearer outlook of the day for people to understand it much easier. The advantages of this are that it gives you a quick and clear weather forecast, but the disadvantages are that the forecast could be wrong, but then that applies for weather forecasts in general because whichever way you receive the information, it could still be wrong.

Another key feature of real time information is news feeds, news feeds are feeds that update as soon as someone posts something new up for people to view, whether it be, videos, photos or text. News feeds are also known as 'Really Simple Syndication', most commonly known as RSS. News feeds are used on the Internet for news mainly, and users are able to pick subjects that they are most interested in to feature in their own personal news feed more prominently than other subjects. An example of a popular news feed site is BBC NEWS. Advantages to news feeds are that people can find out news that they want to know all in one place, it also gives them the ability to look at only one subject of news if that is what they wish to do, so they do not have to look at the news that they may consider boring or uninteresting. The disadvantages to news feeds are that the news that is put out is read by many nearly instantly so if the sources to the news are wrong or the news is wrongly worded, there is very little time to correct the mistake before people read it so people maybe lead to the wrong message being sent out.

Social networking sites such as FACEBOOK and TWITTER have feeds, which are much like news feeds but instead of it being global news, it is news, in the case of FACEBOOK, from your friends that you are connected to through the site, or in the case of TWITTER, from celebrities and friends you are connected to through the site. All the updates, whether they are new photos, a 'status', a location, or a video, are put onto one page called the 'Homepage', recently FACEBOOK have added a feature where users can choose who they have featuring on their homepage, and also choose whom they do not want on their homepage. An advantage to this is that users have advanced options to make their time on the Internet much easier and better for them.

Online Communications

Ways of communicating on the Internet are gradually becoming more important in the world we live in today, with the amount of ways you can communicate online increasing everyday. In this post I am going to talk about all the ways of communicating online, how they are used and the advantages and disadvantages of selected ways. I’m also going to talk about a few very popular social networking sites and how they have a huge impact.

Email

One of the main ways in which communication is used in today’s world is email. Email is the most common as it is very easy to use and is very efficient. There are three main email servers that are used, they are: Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and Gmail, together these three have over 800 million users that use the service regularly with Hotmail standing at the top of that list with 355 million active users.

I personally am a user of both Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail and use them both all the time, for me I use Yahoo! Mail more than Hotmail as when I was younger I only had my Hotmail account and signed up for lots of junk mail to be sent to that email address, I know have many unread emails on that account as I never normally use that account anymore, I now use my Yahoo! Mail account more often as it isn’t as packed with junk mail as my other account.

The advantages of email are obviously that it is very simple to use and sends an email within seconds to the recipient, but the disadvantages would be than an email can fail and not send if you incorrectly spell an email address wrong or the server is down, but this rarely happens.

Instant Messaging

Another way of communicating online is instant messaging, many web servers offer instant messaging but the main way would be through Windows Live Messenger, this uses the email server Hotmail, it has over 330 million users and is the leading instant messaging service. It allows users to talk to a friend or relative through the Internet and users can send a voice message, picture or video through the service, it also allows users to draw pictures or actually write messages using a virtual pen, so it actually looks that the user has hand written the comment.

It recently has added a feature where as an online user can send a message to an offline user so that when the offline user comes online they will receive the message straight away.

I personally, don’t really use instant messaging services as much as I used to as some social networking sites offer a service that allows you to chat instantly to another online user.

Instant messaging has its own language as well, words that get abbreviated to either resemble another world, like ‘brb’ (meaning: be right back) or ‘lol’ (meaning: laugh out loud), or letters that if spoken out loud sound the same as an actual word, like ‘ru’ (meaning: are you) or ‘ne’ (meaning: any), that in the real world would sound really silly is spoken out loud, here is a video to show this: 

Social Networking

A social network is a network of people joined by a relationship, such as friendship, they can then communicate through the site as long as they have a profile, different sites offer different things, like fans can now ‘follow’ their favourite celebrity through a social network. Social networking is becoming such a big thing that the average Facebook user spends 1.2 days a month on the site.

Many sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, MySpace and Tumblr have thousands of active users. The more popular sites, Facebook and Twitter, have 950 million active users between them with Facebook dominating with 750 million alone. Different sites offer different things; on Facebook you can ‘Like’ a status from another user, send private mail, ‘Poke’ another user, you can now also play interactive games where you play along with friends, examples of this are Farmville or Cityville. Another site, in Twitter allows users to ‘follow’ their favourite celebrities through the site, letting users to view celebrity’s ‘Tweets’ on their homepage as soon as they are posted. I personally am a member of both Facebook and Twitter and use them both quite frequently, if I were being honest I haven’t really got into using Twitter as much as I use Facebook as I personally find looking and waiting for celebrities to post what they are doing or their thoughts pretty boring, where as on Facebook, I find myself on it longer than I would want to be and then think that I haven’t really done anything for the amount of time I might of spent on there. There are ‘Groups’ and ‘Pages’ on Facebook that agree with me, like this one:

Internet Forums

Internet forums are another example that IT is becoming more prominent in the world as they are a key to getting information quickly if you cant find it anywhere else on the web. You can create an account on the majority of Internet forums for free, once you are on there you can leave a comment asking a question about something you want to know about and, depending on the popularity of the forum, have a reply within seconds of posting. You can also help out other users of the site by answering questions that they may have already asked.

As well as instant messaging, forums have their own lingo, which is used on forums, words such a ‘thread’ that means a single conversation, ‘post’ that means user-submitted message, although ‘post’ is used on other sites such as social networking sites, it still is used on forums.

I use forums quite frequently and sometimes I use forums to get information on something without having to ask a question as it has already been asked, I can type a question into a search engine like Google, and it will have a result from a forum that I can use to find the answer.

Online Conferencing

Online conferencing has become a very important tool in most businesses in the modern world, although it used within households between families and friends, it was firstly set up for businesses. It allows people to chat face to face over the Internet and have a proper conversation if they cannot be together for whatever reason.

It also allows businesses to have a conference meeting over the Internet, with the members of the conference being where ever they like, as long as they have an Internet connection, in times of need, when a worker cannot get into work for any reason they can still have the conference but rather than in the physical sense, the virtual sense.

Earlier in this blog, I spoke about the instant messaging site Skype, Skype also allows registered users to make ‘video calls’ for free, but this only allows users to make a ‘video call’ to one person at a time, whereas on other sites such as WebEx, they charge a small fee for the privilege of talking to more than one person.

Online conferencing does have its disadvantages as well though, if the network goes down a conference could not happen, if the network signal is not very strong it can cause an amount of ‘lag’ causing the conference to take longer than needed and possibly making it too hard to put together a speech as some parts of it may not be heard or seen over the web cam or microphone.

Blogs and Blogging

I enjoy blogging as it makes uploading things to the Internet very easy, it offers services to upload videos, photos, text and sound clips which makes it very helpful to present information. I use a blog to upload all my work for my A-Level ICT course which makes everything easier for my teachers to check my work rather than sending documents over an email and having to save it and use up memory on the hard drive of a computer.

Many people all over the world use blogs to write about all sorts of topics, and get their opinion across about many things.

Chat Rooms

There are many online chat rooms that you can use over the Internet without having an account, and some require that a user have an account. There are many uses of a chat room but one the main uses of a chat room would be the share information with other users, the difference between online chat rooms and instant messaging is that chat rooms are designed to chat to multiple people in the same conversation, whereas instant messaging sites and software is predominantly made for one on one chat.

I have used chat rooms before but I generally do not use them, as I prefer to use instant messaging services like Windows Live Messenger as I can then talk to people I know. There are obviously advantages to online services but then disadvantages that come with it like the fact that in most case you do not really know who you are talking to as anyone can join in a chat whereas on instant messaging services you generally know who you are talking to as you know them personally.

Introduction

Welcome to my blog.

ICT has a big impact on today’s world; it is used in everyday life and used by nearly everybody in most jobs. In the upcoming months, I am going to blog about everything to do with ICT and how it is used.

 ICT is used in nearly every business in the world, in 2010, the amount of people that had access to the internet and used it rose by 30% from 2000, the amount of people that had mobile cellular telephone subscriptions rose by 78% from 2000, this is a great example of how ICT has a big impact on the world today.

The aspects of ICT that people use the most is email. The three most popular email servers are Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and Gmail with approximately 818 million accounts over the three servers, with Hotmail being the most popular of the three with 355 million alone. Some organisations have their own private email server that is just used for the employees; this is one of the things that prove that ICT is having a big impact. I am a user of email and use both Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail and both are very easy to use and allows you to chat instantly to people who are also online at that time.

Social networking is one of the major ICT uses, with over 60 million Bebo users, 200 million Twitter users and 500 million active users on Facebook.

Physical shopping is becoming a thing of the past; nearly every retail shop now has an online shop that is gradually becoming more prominent. You can now do your weekly shopping on the internet and get it delivered direct to your door without moving a muscle. You can buy a whole new outfit on the internet, sometimes for a discounted price, and get it delivered the next day. £26billion worth of clothes were sold online, representing 13% of the domestic market.

Businesses now use ICT in everyday work, for staff lists, wage slips, business contacts, nearly everything that would have been stored in file cabinets 10 years ago is now stored on a computer hard drive. ICT is also great for calculating things like wage slips, keeping a profit/loss document and making a website for their company.

There are also websites such as Youtube!, that allows users to upload videos and share with the rest of the Youtube! community, sites such as Flixr that allows users to upload photos to share with the rest of the Flixr community.