Social Media

A few weeks ago I attended a talk about technology advancements and how to keep ahead of the game. During the talk, the presenter posed the question:  “What’s the main source of information out there at 

 the moment?”  Initially I thought, well Google obviously. The presenter then continued to explain how Facebook holds so much more information than anyone else, easily surpassing Google. With the constant upload of posts, photos, shares, likes and videos it’s no wonder that Facebook is one of the most highly-valued companies in the world. They have the capability handle unbelievable high amounts of data 24/7. Did you know that more than 24 hours of video footage is uploaded to Facebook every minute? An entire day in a minute! 

 

Of course Facebook isn’t the only contender in the social media war.  LinkedIn saw that there was a gap in the market that needed to be filled: a network for businesses .This allows any business person to have a connection with any other business person in the world, helping the business world to expand and collaborate better with better integration across the networks.

With the evolution of web 2.0 and introduction of web 3.0, it’s becoming easier to determine social media’s value as it can help with a business’s CRM. Businesses now have Twitter, Facebook and Google+ accounts which helps their customers feel like they can be actively involved in the business. It gives customers the opportunity to post questions and get an immediate response.

I believe that soon enough the six degrees of separation will become the single degree of separation. People are networking and communicating on a global scale more than ever before.  Social media is no longer a media but a integral part of life which meets us all at one stage or another.

Cloud Computing

The basic concept of cloud computing originally began in the 60’s with the development of ARPANET. It was the developer and enabler of ARPANET, J.C.R Licklider that was aiming for an “intergalactic computer network”. He wanted everyone on the globe to be interconnected and accessing programs and data at any site from anywhere. Now, almost half a century later , this has been achieved.

 Cloud computing really began to grow in the 90’s with the introduction of significant bandwidth beginning to spread all over the world. Every day I find myself using multiple cloud computing applications without realising it, such as: Google Drive, Dropbox, Box.net, Spotify/Grooveshark, Evernote, YouTube, Facebook and Blackboard. As a student of this generation, I find it very hard to imagine how universities managed before cloud computing!

As it stands, mainly large expansive companies are the main users of cloud computing as it’s seen to be the most beneficial to them.Take IBM for example investing $360m to make a data center in North Carolina to provide cloud computing facilities for their clients just last autumn. What about the SME’s? As we progress we can see aspects of I.T gradually filtering throughout the entire company, not just refined to the “IT crowd” and cloud computing is no exception. SME’s are now learning that they may need to undertake cloud computing to be more efficient and cost effective. The enterprise sector of the Europa group carried out a report to show these findings.

With 90% of the worlds data generated in the last 2 years alone, it is obvious that cloud computing is the way forward for everyone. Accessible information across the network, just as J.C.R Licklider was hoping for.

 

E-business in a changing world

With the rapid development of eCommerce in recent years, a great many changes can be seen in everyone’s daily lives. Not just young people but people of all ages! I first realized this about 2 years ago when I went to visit my Grandfather and he was sitting in the sitting room on his brand new “machine” ( also known as a laptop). When I asked what he was doing he simply said “I’m playing scrabble with a man in Canada!”

It is incredible how interconnected everybody can be these days. Of course this is due to the massive and rapid development of new technology. I see this in my own daily life.  Currently, I have friends and connections in America, Hong Kong and Portugal that I like to keep in contact with on a daily basis. In previous years, the most I could do would be to send an email. Now, however, I can talk to them for free, video call them for free, leave voice messages for free and send pictures to them for free. Thanks to new-age software and applications like “Skype”, “Viber” and “Voxer” I can stay in contact with these people as if they were in the next room at no financial cost. The message is sent and then delivered instantaneously. We are rapidly approaching the globalisation 3.0 era that Thomas Friedman said would soon arrive.

While I know that these programmes are “free” I also recognise that value that the businesses developing these gain from my use of them.  I don’t mean euro’s pounds or dollars, but data, information and knowledge. All of these combined give these businesses a great competitive advantage in their playing field against other businesses.  I won’t complain though, I get to talk to my friends on the other side of the world for free. As they say: “if you want to win it, you got to be in it!”

B2C

As I began to consider my different topic options to write these blogs, this I felt was the most crucial and evident topic for me to write about. “Business to Consumer”.  I have always wanted to run my own business for as long as I can remember, but it wasn’t until I began this B.I.S course that I realised just how crucial the customer is to a business and (hopefully) will be to mine in the not too distant future. Without a doubt, the customer is the key stakeholder, without them there wouldn’t be business! B2C is a very intriguing type of business which has only really begun to boom in the past decade or so with the introduction and stabilisation of eCommerce and globalisation 2.0.

As a consumer I realise how much of an impact eCommerce businesses have affected my life, both personally and professionally. Gone are the days when you would ask somebody had they heard of any good places to rent or would they advise any good restaurants or even ask somebody if the film that they saw in the cinema was any good. Nowadays, everybody just goes onto their computer and goes on sites like Daft.ie or justeat.ie to get these reviews and opinions themselves .People may see this with a dim view, but I myself find it entirely fascinating. It is because of the evolution of online businesses that we, ourselves can thrive!