A self-service environment in which consumers carry out activities and transactions independently.

A self-service environment in which consumers carry out activities and transactions independently



A good point about shopping of an ecommerce site is that you don't have to go out and do the shop, you can do it at home or wherever you are. You can get a delivery which is good for people who like to socialize or you can get it delivered to your house if you don't want to go out that day. These ecommerce sites include Tesco, Asda etc. There is also sites such as EBay, amazon where you can order just one thing and get it delivered to your house, rather than like Tesco where you do a big shop.

Electronic commerce is generally considered to be the sales aspect of e-business. It also consists of the exchange of data to facilitate the financing and payment aspects of business transactions. This is an effective and efficient way of communicating within an organization and one of the most effective and useful ways of conducting business. However the ecommerce sites are putting companies out of their business. For example; block busters. with Netflix around, people would much rather rent and stream a movie than go out and buy a physical copy, meaning blockbuster loose out.

E-commerce can be divided into:

• E-tailing or "virtual storefronts" on websites with online catalogues, sometimes gathered into a "virtual mall"
• Buying or Selling on various websites
• The gathering and use of demographic data through Web contacts and social media
• Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), the business-to-business exchange of data
• E-mail and fax and their use as media for reaching prospective and established customers (for example, with newsletters)
• Business-to-business buying and selling
• The security of business transactions

 

Ecommerce websites have grown a lot over the past years and since it has been introduced.

Mobile technologies that are blurring the distinction between home and work.

Mobile technologies that are blurring the distinction between home and work

As technology becomes more mobile, it can chain employees to the office 24/7 and blur the boundaries between work and home life. Some people find smartphones help them get more work done, but others are beginning to resent losing control over the ability to keep their two worlds separate. Employers are finding they need policies to let workers know what's expected, including when it's OK to power off. But many businesses still offer no clue, causing anxiety and frustration for workers.

 

Mobile learning has a lot of potential for supporting learning in situations such as in a museum, at a tourist sight or when exploring biological phenomena at a riverside. There are learners that can interact with their environment and still make use of the advantages of computational power. However, researchers have found many of such projects hindered by placing the technology too much in the focus of the learner. Instead of interacting with the environment, they found the learners interacting with the device, heads down and ignoring the environment. I think the issue of focus to be a massive problem, one which needs a completely new metaphor for the design of an educational and technical setting.

 

Another bad point about mobile technologies these days are for the fact that the risk of car accidents is a lot higher than it has been over the past few years. Driver distraction is a major cause of traffic accidents, with mobile telephones as a key source of distraction.

 

Mobile technologies I believe are too distracting and that's what people find more distracting than anything else when it comes to working. Even though a mobile device might be good for researching it comes with a distraction. I think that the mobile technology is blurring the distinction between home and work.

 

The mobile phone would seem to have some distinct advantages in areas that might make the most difference to the digitally disadvantaged. These include remote accomplishment and pursuit of jobs (such as when a freelance photographer or day worker is notified of a potential job) and easy social interaction and quick real-time coordination of personal or household activities, such as keeping in touch with, meeting or dating people of interest. Indeed such software protocols and systems are being deployed in Japan and Europe (especially Germany) and have been experimented with elsewhere. Finally, one of the most important areas to most people is that of personal safety. Here the mobile phone would seem to be far superior to the Internet and the regular telephone in terms of being able to alert authorities to potential problems or summon police in case of an emergency.

Virtual Communities where people are bought together.

Virtual Communities where people are bought together

An example of this is Facebook; people can get in contact from all over the world with the people who are signed up to Facebook. However it depends on whether people can see others profile due to the account settings that they have it on. Facebook has over 1,000,000,000 registered users across the world. Facebook brings people together across the world, a good point about this is that you can find people who you were close with a while back and add them and instant chat them to see how they are doing. However a bad thing is that you don’t know who you’re adding. People pretend to be someone who they are not. This causes problems with Facebook. You can block your account so hat only your friends can access you timeline and see what is up to date or you can make it so everyone can see what you post 24/7 and access your timeline to see where you are from. .  This is a good and a bad thing because you therefore don’t know who has been looking at your account and finding out where you are from. On Facebook there are loads of different ways of communicating with people, you can post, send messages, visually talk to someone via webcam, audio etc.

Another site that is a common virtual community is twitter. This also brings people together including celebrities. Everyone who has twitter can access each other’s page and see what you have been posting. Facebook is a good social website and allows you to search anyone who is signed up to Facebook but another advantage of it is that some people have their profile on ‘Friends’ so if you are not their friend on Facebook then it will not allow you to look at their pictures, timeline or you cannot message them either so you can’t communicate with people over Facebook if their profile is on private.

A bad point about communication over the internet is for example Facebook. When communicating with a friend over instant chat you cannot be sure that it is 100% them. Another bad point about Facebook is the cyber bullying through the internet. Cyber bullying makes it easy for those to send horrible messages to people on the other end of the chat without having to say it to their face. However another good point is that it can bring people of a long distance relationship closer together. If younger people have accounts on these socializing sites they have access to anything and can easily add someone who they think they know but they don’t.

Increased business opportunities.

Increased business opportunities

Running an online business allows people to choose how communication is done, as simple a thing it may seem from a distance. Communication is the thing most business people, including freelancers; end up spending most of the day on. It’s important that people know how they want the communication to happen, how much of it you want to be doing, and how to make sure that communication is both efficient and effective by developing a skill for only communicating with clarity and purpose. Emails are widely used in the business purposes. Anything said in an email is legally binding; many organisations insist that business emails follow the same conventions in business letters. You can do Critical Vitae’s over the internet as well so this will help the business out over the world to get better people involved with their business’s instead of doing it via letter you can do it through email.  

 

 

However due to the amount of technology that the computer has many jobs have been lost because:

ICT can make someone more efficient at their job, a company can therefore employ less people to complete that job.  For example;

• In a factory, skilled technicians and machinists can be replaced by computer-controlled robots which can work faster, for longer and more consistently.
• In a factory, many dirty and dangerous monitoring jobs have been replaced by data-logging equipment using sensors.
• In a factory, many quality control jobs involved routine sampling and were very boring, many have now been replaced by automatic machines.
• In a warehouse, many loading and sorting jobs have been replaced by a few staff running a computer-controlled warehouse.
• In an office, many typists can be replaced by one person using a word processor. This is a lot more efficient, for example documents can be saved and reloaded for editing rather than being re-typed and mail merging can be used to create apparently custom-typed documents.
• In an office, many payroll clerks using calculators and paper-based records can be replaced by one person using a spread sheet to calculate a company's payroll. In an office, many clerks updating paper-based files in filing cabinets can be replaced by one person using a database.
• In a telephone exchange, operators have been replaced by computer systems that make the phone connections automatically.
• In a car park, the car park attendant can be replaced by automatic ticket machines and barriers using control technology.
• In a shop, online shopping means sales staff and cashiers etc. are replaced by staff selecting and sending out goods from a warehouse etc.
• In a shop, stock control staff can be replaced by automated with bar-code readers recording items entering the building and being sold.
• In a bank, ATM machines mean less cashiers are needed inside the bank to deal with customers.

Working with ICT requires new skills and many workers found it difficult to retrain because they found the new skills to hard to learn. Converting a business to make use of ICT can be very expensive and many small companies could not afford to make the change and could not compete against those that had.

However because of all the technology needed to be created many jobs have been increased;

 

Computerisation has created many new jobs or radically changed existing jobs. For example:

• Engineers are needed to build the new computerised machines.Programmers are needed to write the new programs that the computers run.
• Systems analysts are needed to design the new computerised systems.
• Skilled workers are needed to operate the new computerised machinery.
• Skilled workers are needed to use new software such as graphics packages, web-design software and CAD programs.
• More staff may be needed because of the increased business generated by improved efficiency.

Greater interaction with others and organisations.

Greater interaction with others and organisations

An example of greater interaction with others and organisations include emails, video calls etc. You can interact with others by using these methods. A common interaction that most people use is Visual calls. This gives you the opportunity to see them visually and talk to them through the video call. For example on Skype you can make video calls for free over the internet. This can be via your phone, desktop etc. You can record your voice over the internet and have audio calls with others. Emails are often used within organisations as you can receive emails and send them; this is a quick way for organisations to interact with others. Greater interactions have implications for the evolution of mature service delivery by e-government and the growth of each business products service to consumer. Organisations that provide a facilitator, coordinator or list manager who is able to moderate online interaction add to the sense that their sites care about professional integrity. A greater interaction also included within organisations is Facebook. Facebook is a common world-wide interaction website. On this site you can make visual calls, audio calls, instant message etc.

Sharing information quickly.

Sharing information quickly

There are many different ways of sharing information quickly. One example of sharing information quickly is via email. Sharing information via email is a quick way to communicate. However is you wanted very large documents or a large number of documents then this way is not easy. Emails can be a good point and a bad point. For the good points it allows you to email people instantly worldwide, however for the bad points opening emails can sometimes give your computer viruses. This therefore slows your computer down. Another way of sharing information quickly is via instant message. E.g. Facebook, Twitter, MSN. In these ways you can share information quickly through just an instant message. Other methods include things such as sending message through your phone for example IMessage on iPhones. You can also do discussion groups over the internet making it easier for people instead of opening individual messaging. Facebook is a good social website and also has a quick instant message that you can use. Information is being shared in a number of new ways. Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds, for one, can immediately report changes in Web pages to anyone with a browser or RSS reader. By subscribing to the feed, users have more immediate knowledge that something about a Web site has changed. Blogging is another way of distributing information on the Internet. When someone reads an interesting blog and shares the information, perhaps in his or her own blog, this spreads the new information even faster. Information can even be distributed to mobile devices from the Internet. For example e-mail address books can be downloaded to your cell phone or PDA and music downloaded to your iPod. Using sound to convey information is very popular these days and can be used in many different ways. For example; phone conversation using the internet. This is a good way to communicate with people via the internet because people who have poor literacy skills can easily understand this method of presenting information. Also you can convey information with this method to many different people at one time. However a disadvantage of this way of presenting data can be difficult with people who struggle to hear things. Another bad point is that there might be too much background noise that it can interrupt with your voice and for the people who are listening to it can struggle by this problem. Overall sound is a quick and easy way to share information as well as videos because you can show them visually what you mean if you were to do a video.

 

Presenting information in different ways.

Presenting information in different ways

Presenting information in different ways includes standard fixed information. For example sound, visual and audio. Sound can be presented via computer, phone etc. Visual is where you can see someone on your device. For example; Face time, Skype, Msn etc. Visual communication such as 'Face time' on iPhone you can do through the internet as well even though it is set up to use as your mobile network. If you have the internet and are connected to it, it will set that up so that you can communicate visually via your phone. Audio is where you can send audio messages where they can only hear your voice and where you can receive them and hear them. Text based information is usually easy to understand and most people are familiar and comfortable with reading text messages. This is the main way of most people communicating via their phones. The visual calls are easy to use and the majority of websites that let you make video calls are free. The communication over the internet adds a level of security that does not exist face-to-face. However it takes longer than verbal conversation and it’s hard to reply to all the points in a message, easily leaving questions unanswered.

A good point about presenting information through text is that a large amount of information and detail can be conveyed within a text. A bad point about using text to present your information is that a large amount of text can be difficult to read and process. Also it is not very good for understanding data, numbers, trends etc. Also the font styles that people use can sometimes be difficult for other people to understand. Symbols are often combined with text to help explain what they mean. The disadvantage of this is that you need to understand what they mean and that they take longer to perceive.

People present their work in different way in order to fit for purpose and audience.  Different publications are designed for different audience.