Week Eight Reading Reflection

Lowenstein: What’s next for location-based services?
What is the future of the location-based services seems an interesting question to us. Lowenstein believes that the after the navigation, the subscriptions for particular applications are the next stage of LBS. Location still matters, and becomes an important element in the mobile marketing and social networking fields. “Who shares what information with whom” is what the wireless operators should follow in the future. The package information about where the customers are and where they go is also valuable to the wireless operators.

Questions:
1. What is the role of the wireless operators in the LBS?
2. What is the key factor in the consumers’ subscription decision? Interest? Needs? Entertaining?

Week Seven Reading Reflection

Kenya in Crisis
The author indicates the social and economic impact which is brought by mobile telephony in Kenya. The numbers of mobile phones in Kenya has grown from one million to 6.5 million during the past five years. Since Kenya is a country where more than 50% people live in abject poverty, it’s not easy to get access to the computer and the internet to them. With the mobile phone technology, people can transmit the remittance money easily and effectively.
Questions:
1. Can the economic impact brought by mobile telephony be applied to other developing countries?
2. Does the mobile technology help the democracy in Kenya? How can the mobile technology be applied in the politics in other countries?

Week Five Reading Reflection

Jamster Slammed for Mobile Selling Practices

Direct Marketing, Mobile Phones, and Consumer Privacy: Ensuring Adequate Disclosure and Consent Mechanisms for Emerging Mobile Advertising Practices
Direct Marketing, Mobile Phones, and Consumer Privacy
The biggest legal issues in mobile communication are customer’s privacy and the fraud advertising. When content providers and operators promote the mobile content to users, they might create the fraud advertising in order to gain more revenue. Operators can make profits not only from downloads of content such as games and ringtones, but also from the text messaging. They charge the users per downloads and per message. The Jamster case is an example which reveals the potential fraud advertising issues in the mobile content business model. Some customers said they were misled to overuse text messaging service during the communicating with the content providers by the alleged false advertising.
The privacy issue has always been hot in the digital world, and so does in mobile communication. James Nehf indicates that the customers are not that “noticed” under the present notice-consent approach which the operators use inform customers. She provides 5 questions in the communication between the customers and the operators.
 

Question:
1. How to identify the misleading advertising from a customer’s perspective?
2. What is the actual profit do the wireless carriers make by selling the customer’s information?

Week Two Reading Reflection (01/19/09)

Understanding the Mobile Ecosystem

This paper tries to convince us that there are many opportunities in the mobile content market. We can get some firm statistics from the paper. The number of the mobile users in Asia Pacific is growing at a very fast speed. The average time of the usage of mobile phones is growing at a stable speed as well. With more and more people using multimedia handsets, the services on mobile phone go diversely as well. Although voice services are still the biggest part of the operator revenues, the growth of the voice services revenue is slower than the growth of the data revenue. The major data revenue comes from the infotainment category including games, audio and video downloads, streaming video, information services. The author suggests that the media content market is a good opportunity to people.
Moreover, the author indicates that there are differences between different regions. There is stronger operator

Week One Reading Reflection (01/13/09)

Mobile Content End-User Survey

We can see some things from the comparison between the two surveys, however; we need to be careful when we understand the data. The data shows that the social network mobile subscribers are those who are younger and are more likely to have smartphones , assess the mobile internet, use SMS and mobile email. They are not only those who communicate, text, and social with their friends by cell phones more frequently, but also are cell phone users who utilize the entertainment services more often. These facts tell us that the social network mobile subscribers are those users who really utilize the multiple functions on cell phones. These surveys also present us a fact that only a small portion of users really take advantage of the technical convergence on mobile phones. Although people can listen to

Week Eight Reading Refleciton/Essay Three (11/18/08 Political Journalism)

Articles:

Leubsdorf, B. (2008). Can Print Newspapers Survive?

 Vasquez, D. (Oct 7, 2008). What newspapers must do to survive?

Cook, T. E. (1998). Governing With The News. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

 

Are the news media the political institution?

Cook discusses the politics in journalism in this chapter and he suggests that the news media can be seen as a political institution but is more like an intermediary institution like parties and interest groups, but not like the three constitutional branches of legislature, executive, and judiciary, which is called the “forth branch” of government by some people. Yet news media are still different from the parties and the interest groups because they don’t have clear rules and collective actions to reach a political goal like the latter. News media do affect our politics in an implicit way because they are not just mirroring the facts, but report news selectively to the public.

Journal Summary

Journal Summary

We have written five journal entries in this quarter. We explored the game design, website design, industrial design, everyday appliance design, and the design process in design companies. I enjoyed this journal entry writing experience and the whole course. We observe some design principles at the beginning by exploring the game design. After having some ideas about design, we analyze and compare the website design. Then, we observe a well-known designer and give comments to his works. We also go through the design process form

Usability and Desirability Test (12/04/08 Group Project)

 

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Thoughts about Final Reflection (11/18/08 Closing Assignment)

At the beginning of this class, I thought that the public can benefit from digital technology because it gives people more opportunities to participate the political events and people can communicate their political beliefs with lots of people on the Internet. I thought that the Internet technology would enhance the public communication and such communication would further people’s understanding to each other. Such interaction should bring the society to realize the democracy.

After taking this class, we understand that digital technology does facilitate people’s communication, and we learn about how digital technology can be used in politics. Candidates, interest groups and political parties all can utilize the Internet to enhance the organizational maintenance and internal communication.  

Furthermore, although digital technology facilitates people’s communication, it also builds a barrier too. People who don’t have the access or the necessary device to connect to the Internet are blocked outside of the whole online world. Those people will spend more on communication with others.

Week Five Reading Reflection/ Essay Two (10/28/08 Digital Advocacy)

Field workers regain their passion.

We can see that the operation of political campaign has changed with the new technologies from mass media to the Internet in Trippi’s book. He suggests the Internet would bring Americans closer to democracy because it gives the public more opportunities to join the political discussion and participate in the political events. People don’t have to stand passively watching the political advertisements from TV anymore and they can now speak their own opinions freely and openly to the public on the Internet. Since the Internet offers such a two-way communication channel for the users, Trippi also suggests that political campaigners can also take advantage of it. After the TV-dominating era which seems a dark period for field workers, they can now regain the passion to work for their beliefs on the Internet like what they did before the TV-dominating era. They can get acquaintance with “real” people on the Internet, make friends with them, and share their beliefs with them as well. These are