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Even though we discussed social commerce a couple weeks back, i stumbled upon an article related to this topic that was too interesting to not mention.

The article is about a new app called Verisize, developed by a group of students from the Computer Vision Centre in Barcelona (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona), with which you can find out your size for any piece of clothing and brand when purchasing online. Any online store can make use of this app to allow customers to easily estimate their sizes.

The app would be so helpful for so many online shoppers since finding the right size for clothing is hard enough but when sizing varies for every brand it becomes a nightmare for a lot of online shoppers. This causes a lot of people to stay away from online shopping or frequently buying the wrong size and ending up having to go through a lot of effort of returning the garment.

The app works by estimating your size after you have inserted your height, weight, age and choosing a body shape out of six possible profiles that the system provides. These body profiles were developed after researchers studied the ‘anthropomorphic’ characteristics of 50,000 people with different body types. This allowed for the statical modeling of the human body. The model used works in a way that when the user inserts basic data, such as age, weight and height, a virtual mannequin that looks like the user is created. This mannequin provides the best fit and thus size of a garment that a user has picked out at an online store.

The main objective of the app is to reduce the return rate and increase customer satisfaction. This can be a revolutionary app for e-commerce, as it would make online shopping so much easier for so many people.

The app is available to all online stores at verisize.com. In my opinion every store should really take a closer look at this app, it could be incredibly beneficial in terms of online shopping.

Verify your size at http://www.verisize.com/en/

 

Article available at: http://news.discovery.com/tech/attention-online-shoppers-app-knows-your-size-120926.html#mkcpgn=rssnws1

Verisize website: http://www.verisize.com/en/

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Hello everyone,

The topic for this week is about online social networks, so once again I’ve started a search around this topic of social media. As many of you guys already know, there are more than 300 social media networks out there for everyone to reach, connect and entertain them self. Most of you guys share, tweet, like and post things you have bought, done or are currently doing. And you might think that only your friends who you have allowed to see your page etc is watching and following you. But you are definitely wrong.

In a recent court case, Aegon a Dutch insurance who through hyves and google had discover that an insured client was not a vegetable, but was able to climb the alpe d’huez. For those who don’t know alpe d’huez is a ski resort at 1,860 to 3,330 meters. It is a mountain pasture in the central French Alps, in the commune of huez. The result of this was that Aegon was able to recover their payments. So my question is, are YOU watching the world or is the world watching you??

Another case was of a road worker who was paving a road, and than suddenly the bucket of a crane hit him and since then was declared “incapacitated”. And the insurance agreed an amount based on a minimum insurance of € 110.000, due to the road worker lost income.

Aegon again started a research conducted through hyves and google and the research has shown that the road worker was from 2005 till 2009 annually participating in the amstel Curacao race (a cycling race of 80 km), had skied in Austria and also had climbed alpe d’huez. Result of this was that a court demanded the insured road worker to re-pay hefty sums to the insurer aegon. So, placed online data have thus ensured that the insurer, its claim for repayment of advances made ​​was been able to be substantiated.

My conclusion is that we all must be careful of what we post, tweet or comment, especially when we are doing things we are not suppose to. LOL. Be aware and careful because not only you are watching the world but the world is also watching you!

Take care

Stephanie

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Of course as a mom I think about my daughter all the time. And with all this talk about social media in class I really wonder how social media will affect her when she’s older. Although she’s only (almost) 9 months she already loves the Ipad and the laptop. With these early likings in technology it will only be ‘normal’ that new technologies as well as social media will be a big part of her life.

As a parent it’s my responsibility to keep my eye on her (digital) activities. But will my eye protect her from cyberbullying, nasty comments from her peers or peer pressure online? Maybe it depends where she will be online?

I found out about some Kid’s social network sites which (should) have better privacy and control options for parents. Parents are pretty much able to control the settings and the page. But knowing your parents can control your page it could be less fun, so kids might try to stay away from these sites. And also you can’t control what their friends say on such sites.

So what do you think about these ‘safe social network sites for kids’?

Have a nice weekend!
Kelly

http://socialtimes.com/top-5-safe-social-networks-for-kids-only-well-sort-of_b43625#disqus_thread

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Hi All,

Next week we are going to talk about online social networks, and today I want to show you a useful “new” platform called Ning. It is the world’s largest online platform that allows people and organizations to create customized social networks. Ning development started in 2004 but it was released publicly only in October 2005. At the beginning, it was funded by its founders Bianchini and Andreessen with other angel investors. Only in 2007, Ning received funds from venture capital, raising almost 100 million in capital. In 2011 it reached 90000 customers worldwide and 100 million of registered users social profiles.

Ning allows everyone to create their own communities and social networks around specific users’ interests or needs choosing which visual design and features to embed. Users can insert photos, videos, chat, blogs, and communities, as they prefer. Ning could be integrated also with the most famous network, such as Facebook, Twitter and Google: for example users can share content from Ning network directly to their Twitter or Facebook accounts. Members can also share content from other sources like YouTube and Vimeo for videos, or MySpace and SoundCloud for music players. The service allows users to charge for membership in their social network. They can also use other services, like Google AdSense, to add display advertisement to their Ning Network. Members had full control on their networks and they could edit source code, which is written in PHP, adding or removing other features.

In 2009 Ning joined to OpenSocial, Google’s project that contains a set of common Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for web-based applications allowing users to edit their creation in an easier and faster way. In 2011 Ning rolled out Ning Design Studio that helped members in choosing between pre-made templates, varying in colours, layout and font, or they could use CSS to customize their own templates or to do other visual changes.

At the beginning, Ning was for free, but now there are three paid accounts: Mini, Plus and Pro. The plans are offered on the basis of the features that users want to embed in their networks and range in price, so members can choose which is the one that best fits for them.

If you would like to build your own social network, you can go to http://uk.ning.com for a 30 days free trial.

 Claudio

 

 References

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ning_(website)

http://uk.ning.com

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When I was writing my case write-up about wikipedia, I happend to notice that wikipedia has more than four million articles in english! You can’t make me believe they store all these articles on one server, which made me remember an article I read around a year ago. A new hype in web 2.0 next to social networks is Cloud computing. Cloud computing means that you can pay a cloud provider to manage your information flows of your company, and storing it in a ‘cloud’. This means the cloud provider puts the information on a server of a third party. The question you ask of course, is why should you do that? It is very simple. First, since you don’t have to buy and maintain the hardware that you need in order to store your information. Second, that you don’t have to worry about your security not being up to date, since the cloud provider takes care of that. Conclusion, it saves a lot of money. The disadvantage however is the privacy. for example if the information of around a 1000 people is on one server, how do you make sure only the owner of the information is allowed to see it? If you want to read more about this topic, you can read the following article:

Zhang, Q. & Cheng, L. & Boutaba, R. (2010) Cloud computing: state-of-the-art and      research challenges. Journal of internet services and applications, 1(1), 7-18.       Doi: 10.1007/s13174-010-0007-6

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The home assignment topic this week is about exploring peer productions and Open Source. I’ll give you a brief summary and my findings about the readings this week and then continue with two examples, Wikipedia and Apache.

The readings for this week focused on peer production and Open Source. Not the easiest subject I found on my part. However the guest lectures last Wednesday did shed a little light on the matter. All four articles had something in common; they question what motivates people to contribute to open source software and peer production platforms and why this way of working has ‘survived’ and not being taken advantage of. From the readings I think we can conclude that the main reasons people contribute to open source software and peer production platforms is due to social benefits, these being benefiting from extended functionality catered to own needs, creating a reputation for oneself, pure enjoyment, or the feeling of giving something back (Hyatt 2008). The reason open source software works even after the emergence of a dominant design is due to the self rewarding benefits which people find great enough to continue contributing. Another reason is the invention of the OSS licenses, “Copyleft,” and the fact that a sufficient number of contributors enforce the rules. This also ensures that software will continue to remain a public good and can thus not be taken advantage of.

 

As examples I chose Wikipedia, a website that not only I but I am pretty sure a lot of you use really often, and a more challenging example which is Apache, an open source platform which before this week I had never heard of. Wikipedia is probably one of the most well known peer production platforms. Its goal is through collaboration being a free and complete online encyclopedia Wikipedia contains 23 millions articles and over 4 million in the English Wikipedia alone. All of these articles have been written collaboratively with volunteers from all over the world and its currently estimated 100,000 active contributors. However the question a lot of people ask themselves is why do people contribute to Wikipedia? After a lot of research it mainly came down to credit and claim of authorship. Active contributors actually have their own pages on Wikipedia with resumes with all the work they have contributed. This credit is their self-rewarding benefit, which encourages them to contribute.

Apache took a lot more research to figure out what is was all about. Apache is generally recognized as the world’s most popular web server. “Apache server software is use on Web server computers that host Web pages and provide appropriate content as requested by Internet browsers” (Hippel & Krogh 2003, P.211). It differs from Wikipedia greatly in the way that it is technology based and thus has a completely different type of contributing group. Not just everyone van contribute to Apache like Wikipedia since it is a lot less user-friendly and you really have to know what your doing if you want to contribute. This can be seen as a strength and at the same time a weakness since you make it harder for people to contribute, since not everybody knows how Apache works, yet at the same time they can make sure that only specialized people can contribute and they don’t get a lot of nonsense to deal with.

 

Well I guess that pretty much briefly summarizes the main findings of my assignment! See you all tomorrow!

 

Sophie de Jong, 341927

 

References:

Hippel von, E. & Krogh von, G. (2003) Open source software and the “private-collective” innovation Model: Issues for organization Science. Organization science/Vol. 14, No. 2, March-April 2003

Hyatt, J. (2008) The oh-so-practical Magic of Open source Innovation. MIT sloan management review Fall 2008

 

 

 

 

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Hi everyone!

For me, the topic of this week was quite difficult since I had really no clue of what peer production and open source was. Luckily, the guest lectures by Mr van Baalen and Mr Zhang last Wednesday helped me to understand the articles of this week a bit more.

The four articles of this week were slightly overlapping, so I will discuss in this blog post the main objectives of the articles and will already give you some information of the two open source development organizations of my presentation tomorrow.

In the guest lecture, Mr van Baalen asked whether there will be a new type of organization in the future, which will result into a new productive system, whereby there are no prices or bosses? This system will consist of only open source software, which will be available to anyone online via the peer production. So, in the future, will there be a CONTROL-SHIFT? Unfortunately, there is still a battle between private and peer-2-peer organizations. Private organizations keep their property safe and controlled by implementing patents and copyright laws. Many more binary versions of software existed, and Richard Stallman viewed this as morally wrong thus came up with the idea to create a basic license called “General Public License (GPL)”, whereby the source code is again open and could be modified and exchanged for free (von Hippel & Von Krogh, 2003:210). This brings us to Linus Law, with the use of metaphors of a Cathedral (e.g. Microsoft) and a Bazaar (e.g. Linux). Why should we invest a lot of money in hunting bugs in the “Cathedral” (with only a few) when we are also able to work with thousands of people on projects (OSS), whereby bugs will be quickly discovered (“given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”) (van Baalen)?

OK, so we are able to work with thousands of people on these open source projects. But then again, open source projects are mostly not rewarding, so what keeps people motivated to actually design new software and exchange it for free? Apparently, people have the need to contribute online (Wikipedia, Zhang & Zhu, 2011). Thousands of people are creating software/content online (von Hippel & Kogh). And, according to Osterloh & Rota (2007:164) this has to do with the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. With intrinsic motivation people enjoy creating and editing the projects (satisfaction of needs) where, on the other hand, with extrinsic motivation contributors get money rewards or compensations. And explanation of why so many people are contributing online, is because of the chance a good contributor could get a great job offer.

Thus, will open source projects survive? Will contributors remain editing, designing and modifying? This questions was also coined to Mr Mickos (Hyatt, 2008:19). His reaction is that innovation is nothing new, so no, people will not get sick of open sourcing. And because of the highly interaction between contributors, innovation will continue, and thus new open source projects will…

The two open source development organizations which I will present tomorrow are SourceForge.net and LaunchPad. Possibly, one of you may know these websites. The two sites consists of making, adding, editing and exchanging software (such as Linux).  However there are some slight differences between the two, similar looking, organizations. I will elaborate more on the two organizations tomorrow during my poster presentation.

See you all tomorrow!

Isabel Beijers, 335155

References

Zhang, M. and Zhu, F. 2011. Group size and incentives to contribute: A natural experiment at Chinese Wikipedia. American Economic Review 101(4) 1601-1615.

von Hippel, E., and von Krogh, G. 2003. Open source software and the “private-collective” innovation model: Issues for organization science. Organization Science 14(2) 209-223.

Osterloh, M., and Rota, S. 2007. Open source software development – Just another case of collective invention. Research Policy 36 157-171.

Hyatt, J. 2008. The oh-so-practical magic of open-source innovation.  MIT Sloan Management Review 50(1) 15-19.

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I was just googeling around on the internet and then all of a certain I entered a website with many interesting articles about social media. Then I found a video from national geographic.

The video was about a project that continued to the ‘wow’ Signal. (See the image below)

Source: Nationalgeographic.com

The Wow signal is the first evidence of the human race having contact with extraterrestrials. With that, it is also one of the biggest mysteries in science. This contact or ‘possible contact’ started in 1977, but in all the years following it was never detected again.

Now, in 2012, the scientist decided not to only listen, but try to make contact. They want to do this by sending out thousands of tweets into the universe. They chose three stars in spance to sent them to.

It was a really interesting video, and I was pretty amazed by it. I don’t know if there are extraterrestrials, or if they can receive those tweets, it sure is an amazing project.

Here is the video, so just check it out!

If you want to know more about the Wow Signal, check out this link:

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/chasing-ufos/articles/what-is-the-wow-signal/

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Dear Classmates,

My home assignment explores the topic ‘’peer production and open source’’. I will give you a short summary of the findings in my home assignment and a comparison of Linux and YouTube.

The articles for this week were about peer production and open source and the main questions that came forward from the articles is: Why do people contribute to open source software and peer production without getting a real compensation and what is the reason why developers do not take advantage of the public codes? After reading the articles and searching the web the answers came forward.

The reason why peer production and open source software can exist is because people voluntarily contribute to these programs. Developers who have a high level of expertise about programming computer codes are able to contribute to open source software. The main reasons why they do this are to learn something about programming, enjoyment, establishing a reputation and to make a better software program for themselves. This reputation in the programming community can be the first step towards a career at a big software company. These developers can adjust the public codes of open source software and are trying to make them better. They put their knowledge in the codes (Osterhol and Rota, 2007). Peer production works in a similar way. But peer production does not need the expertise that is required for open source software. Everyone in the world with an internet connection can easily access and share knowledge on the peer production programs. Peer production is easier to understand than open source software, and this is one of the reasons why peer productions has more users on average. The reasons why people contribute to peer production software are almost similar to the reasons why people contribute to open source software. A reason why people don’t take advantage of the public codes is the legal concept ‘copyleft ‘, or the informal rules from the open source communities (Zhang and Zhu, 2011).

As examples I chose YouTube and Linux. YouTube is a peer production platform where people share videos. It has a huge amount of users who watch more than four billion videos every day. People contribute to this platform, because they enjoy making the videos and sharing it with others and to build a reputation. Some people became very famous because of YouTube. Users are watching videos on YouTube because they don’t want commercials and see something immediately that they like (http://www.jeffbullas.com…, 2012). Linux on the other hand is an open source software. It is an operating system for computers which source code is released for the public. Developers from all around the world can adjust the code or make new tools for it. It is popular among developers, because you can adjust the operating system you use to your wishes. Linux also tends to be faster and more secure than other operating systems (http://smallbusiness.chron.com…., 2012). As you compare YouTube and Linux you can see that YouTube has a lot more users and is easier to use. Linux is hard to understand. Linux is more customizable than YouTube. You can earn money directly from YouTube when your videos are very popular and you can earn money indirectly from Linux with offering service as a third party. I think YouTube will do better in the future than Linux because of these reasons.

I hope you understand a lot more about peer production and open source software after this week.

See you in class on Friday,

Tim Ellens

Literature

Osterloh, M., and Rota, S. (2007) Open source software development – Just another case of collective invention. Research Policy 26 157-171

Zhang, M. and Zhu, F. (2011) Group size and incentives to contribute: A natural experiment at Chinese Wikipedia. American Economic Review 101(4) 1601-1615

http://www.jeffbullas.com/2012/05/23/35-mind-numbing-youtube-facts-figures-and-statistics-infographic/, 2012

http://smallbusiness.chron.com/strengths-weaknesses-linuxbased-systems-26633.html, 2012