Lab 8 - Location Based Services

Location Based Services

Facebook

The "Places" tab under Facebook, is a location based tool used widely by users. It allows users to check-in and tag themselves and their peers at particular places such as restaurants or events. As a Facebook user, I regularly use this function to check-in to yummy restaurants, dessert places, or events I am at to let my friends know where I am and write if the food is yummy or if the concert was fun. While checking in to a place you can also add a picture to the caption to show others. People enjoy using this function to show their social status - in that they are out and about constantly. For businesses this is also very good as the customers check-in to the businesses, write recommendations where their friends will be more inclined to go and raise the brand awareness of the businesses through the word-of-mouth marketing. While checking in, in a place, you can also allow other to scroll-over the place where it gives you information on where it is located. If you click on the place, it bring you to the company's Facebook page where you can learn more about them, like their page, write comments about it. This is a great way of pulling in customers. 

Foursquare

Foursquare is also a location based app. It has over 50 million users on their app. It allows users to check-in to different locations such as restaurants or travel. It allows the users to write recommendations on the different places they have checked-in too. This useful for other users who want to find the best spots on where to eat, travel and go out. This tool is also useful for businesses as a means to connect and interact with their customers through customers writing about their businesses, adding photos, recommending their peers to visit their business. The more popular the business becomes, the more it will be talked about and advertised and in turn gain more revenue through increased brand awareness and loyalty.

SCVNGR

Scvngr is fun take on a location-based service. It is unique from the other location-based services in that they have developed the check-in service as a game platform where you check-in to places and do challenges, and in turn you can earn points and unlock badges. This creates a fun interactive way for customers to use the app. It motivates the users to check-in to lots of different places, do exciting activities and share their experiences with others. It also gets the businesses name out there as well by checking-in to their business.

Infosys 338 - Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing

Utest

This website is a place where businesses go to develop and increase the quality and efficiency of their mobile app through 'in-the-wild' software testing. App quality increase, time to market decreases and testing costs reduce. Some well-known such as Netflix, USA Today, Google, Microsoft and Amazon and Bills Guard use the utest software. The site uses a form of crowdfunding which is where individuals and businesses can donate money to the company. Utest, soon to be called Applause, has received over $80 million in funding so far.

Ponoko

This website is a software platform that can create downloadable products. You can make, share, sell and buy the product designs. It gives individuals the chance to have unique designs that can express themselves. This site uses co-creation as a form of crowdsourcing, which is where the users upload their own designs and can get it created.

Flickr

Flickr is a photo management and sharing application. It is a form of collaboration in that you can allow your peers or others permission to edit and organise your photos. It has the option of creating a blog that can be kept private or public, which allows the users to choose which option suits them. Anyone who the user is connected to or allows to view their blog, can comment, add notes and tags.

Chaordix

This website is a crowdsourcing platform. It can range from a small group of individuals, to millions of community members around the world. It can create diverse functional groups to a common collaborative space. It can allow for brand and product innovation through customer's ideas and feedback which is useful in that businesses can get the information directly from their customers, who are essentially the users. It can also give organisations a chance to connect and collaborate with their stakeholders.

Smartling

This website is a powerful software solution for managing translation and localization projects. It is a place where businesses can make their all their digital content in their global websites, mobile apps and business documents into multilingual. This is highly beneficial as it in turn increases a businesses revenue, downloads and willingness to buy the businesses products.

Amazon Mechanical Turk

This website is a popular crowdsourcing platform used by businesses. It gives businesses and developers access on demand and gives a scalable workforce. It is a community where it workers can choose from numerous tasks that suits them, and work on convenience - choose hours, work from home, get paid.

Collaboration Tools

Collaborative Tools for Group Project

Today in our lab, we have to analysis a collaboration tool that would be beneficial in our group project. The collaborative tool of Google Drive will be used in our group project.

Google Drive

What type of tool and what is it supposed to do?

This is a collaborative tool that allows each member of the group to share files and it allows each person to edit in real time. During the real time editing, any number of group members can edit the document while everyone can observe the changes being made by the use of cloud sharing. Their is also chatting tool abilities that allows the group members to chat in real time which is useful as we can discuss relevant ideas about the group project. There is a large storage base within the Google Drive which allows us to upload large files.

Human Interaction Factor

The human interaction is the ability for each group member to view and edit the documents in real time as well as chat amongst each other. This tool will be very helpful throughout the duration of our project as we can discuss ideas and add/delete/edit ideas as needed. We can keep up to date on our progress, and have virtual meetings to see how everyone is doing.

Collaboration tools is beneficial in any group projects and it also reduces costs such as money and time in the sense that we can meet online instead of having to constantly meet face-to-face, which reduces any petrol or bus money costs as well as time wasted thinking about ideas or going off topic.

Second Life Blog

In our lab today, we are exploring the virtual world of Second Life. Second Life begins with creating an avatar of your choice to express yourself, and thereafter you can enter different destinations. The destinations are formed into different categories such as "what's hot", "beaches" and "clubs", each suited to fit each avatars style. Within each of these destinations you can interact with other avatars in the same destination and do different activities.

Above, is a screenshot of a club destination called blackhearts café and London city destination where other avatars are dancing together and chatting. A lot of the avatars use Second Life as an online dating medium. The content said between avatars is not filtered and could be offensive to some individuals. The graphics are very realistiI personally find this software very "laggy" and therefore can be frustrating at times. I would not intend on using Second Life regularly, as it is not of interest to me, although it is entertaining to browse and understand the idea of this virtual world.

 

Blog 2

Today in our second lab we focus on using the software called Gephi. We extracted data from our Facebook page using an app called Netwizz. Gephi created a spider-like connection of all our own personal Facebook friends, as show below.

Gephi has many tools that can be used as a form of analysis. This is relevant in a business context as you can gain detailed information about network systems, such as Facebook. The above graph has different colours in different section, showing the clusters of groups that can be broken down, such as high school friends, university friends, family and so on.

 

As shown above are the statistical information for the network overview.

 

Above is a data table with detailed information about my Facebook friends such as their ID and sex.

 

 



First Blog

Today in our Infosys 338 tutorial, we have the chance to explore both Twitter and Blogger. It is just to get a better idea of how to use the tools for each program and get more familiarized with it. This is an example of a link, twitter.co.nz, which you can go on by clicking on it.

 

This is an example of a picture inserted.

 

Above, is an example of the social networking site, Twitter. I have tweeted including a link, hashtag as well as photo.

 

I am a current user of tweeter, and as you can see, I follow people, mainly consisting of celebrities.

Instagram is another social networking site that is widely used. I am a frequent user of this site. I enjoy uploading photos, and editing the frames and colours that are available. I can use all the functions of this site such as uploading photos, editing colours and frames, tagging friends in pictures using the @ function and also using # (hastag) to write words.


LinkedIn is another popular networking site. I am a first time user of this site. I browsed through different parts of the site, editing my profile and adding details about my work and study experience. I have browsed through my homepage and learnt more about the functions of it.