CIAO

I did it again. Since I'm taking this course I'm realizing how involved am I with the e-business activities. Last week, during the discussion about social media, we were talking about those sites for evaluating products. I've used Ciao (www.ciao.es in it spanish version) like one thousand times, but since today I've never stopped before and think about the real power and meaning of this site.

For those who do not know what's Ciao, is a portal where consumers share opinions about products. You can also find some price comparisson for the same items. I've been surfing the web, properly in order to choose a good new camera, and also to find out some information for my post. And what I can say, is that I couldn't find any non ethical post, all are more or less imparcial and show either advantages and drawback of the products on analisys. I couldn't find an explicit ethical code for posting, but I think it is implicit due to is a kind of collaborative task and it is just made of real opinions. There are some guidelines for posting, so I think there is this implicit moral code.

I really like this kind of sites, I find them really usefull.

Bliki Bliki!!

It is amazing how social media is evolutioning. Last Friday, during the class I discovered a new tool, the bliki. This new collaborative tool comes from taking the advantages of blog and wiki. Basically consist in a simple blog structure in which wiki edition is allowed in order to perform the post or blog entries.

This could be a great tool for teams and organization, because the blog is not anymore a closed structure of single ideas posted by a single author. Each blog entry, turns into a wiki article that can be edited collaboratively.

So again, the cooperative work and sharing experieces are taking advantadge!

Open your mind, use Open Source

Nowadays, choosing the technology and software that you want to use in your business is really a huge and risky decission, specially if you are involved with a Small or Medium Size Company. After the discussion on class about the Open Source tools, and also after making a small research between mates and friends about Open Source software I can say that people has no idea about which is really Open Source.

And now I can imaging the face of a SME's CEO when an IT Consultor suggests to change all their owner system, that sounds safe and easy to use because all the competence has the same (ie Microsoft software), and start using something called Linux or some Subversion system or using Apache...

Let's think for a while what's Open Source : "Open source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in." (Source www.opensource.org). But how this affects our bussines?

• Economic Advantages: Obviously this is one of the most important advantages, when we are hiring a developper to create any kind of software, we are the owners of the source code. That's a great advantage for us, due to we can reuse and adapt our own code without taking care of paying licenses or updates.
• Estability and Maintenance: the technology we use controls mostly all areas of business, so the needs of updating the software do not change as fast as the technological market grows and change. Using an owner software, we are oblied to follow the trends of the market and change our software and hardware according to the owners changes (updates of software sometimes are not needed at all and usually force us to change also the hardware). A well done software project can be extended, updated or changed maintaining a technological stability.
• Customization: It is imposible to find an owner software product that covers exactly all our needs. Using open source we can customize our tools according to the real needs of our business. This is also a great advantage regarding the security, because our software is unique, so it is more dificult for a hacker to find or to know the weakness or the backdoors of our system.

Due to all these reasons, we can be more competitive with a small invesment on technology. Giant companies are saving lots of money yearly using Open Source, i.e. Amazon saved $17 million in 2000 implementing their services with Linux. Yahoo, Google or AOL are implemented using Open Source as well. The European Union or the World Bank adopted Open Source in order to improve the security of their systems, and Sun Microsystems Iberica is working to be 100% Open Source... What else do we need to prove that is the best invesment for a small company??

Trust in me

Last lecture we have a huge discussion about TRUST. Maybe for a common user of e-commerce platforms and internet business systems, auction sites and so on, the fact of not trusting in someone online sounds ... a bit imposible!! But actually is a huge drawback for starting new e-business activities.


The idea is not only to trust in the companies or people behind the web or e-shop, but also to trust in the payment systems, the logistics and in an intangible service. Problems like phising, spaming or cracking do not contribute to create a trusting environment.


That's why is so important to create an image and a feeling reliability when we are operating online, the question is how to do it. Surfing the internet I found a non-proffit association, The Latin American Institute of Electronic Comerce eConfianza whose goal is to develop parameters and practices to evaluate how trustable is an e-commerce site and to create trust marks that allow the consummer to recognize those companies that use good e-business practices. Surfing their internet portal http://www.econfianza.org/ , you can find not only a directroy of all the companies that already have this trust mark, but also some other services focused on trasactions between enterprises. They offer a reclamation service for consummers as well.

I know that trust in someone (person or company) is really hard, but maybe this kind of organizations is a good starting point for those companies which want to operate online.