Blog #8 Web 2.0

(Web Squared Technology)

'Web 2.0' is a techno-culture term that was coined in 2004. The moniker was born at an O'Reilly Media conference, and describes that the World Wide Web has now evolved into a provider of online software services. There is an ongoing quest to understand where technology is taking us; the milestone serves as an opportunity not so much to look back but to examine the landscape ahead. Whereas the advent of Web 2.0 marked a profound shift in the meaning of the Web, this next phase is less a new direction than an exploration of what becomes possible when the building blocks of Web 2.0 (such as participation, collective intelligence and so on) increase by orders of magnitude. The step is called Web Squared Technology. Web Squared is another way of saying "Web meets World."

An example of Web Squared is smart phones, which contain microphones and cameras, as well as motion, proximity, location, and direction sensors. They have their own eyes, ears, and sense of touch. Revolutionary new applications connect those senses to cloud databases and programs running on massive server farms. Where the Web Squared world gets really interesting, though, is when applications use all the senses of a device, coordinating them much like the human brain coordinates our senses, to draw conclusions that would be difficult with one sense alone. The Google Mobile Application for the iPhone detects the movement of the phone to your ear, and automatically goes into speech recognition mode. It uses its microphone to listen to your voice and decodes what you say by referencing not only its speech recognition algorithms but what it expects to hear you say based on the most frequent search terms in Google's search database.

In this sense, the Web Squared era is an era of augmented reality, arriving (like the sensor revolution) stealthily, in more pedestrian clothes than we expected.

Neural Networks

Neural networks are best at identifying patterns or trends in data, and they are best well suited for prediction or forecasting needs including:

Sales forecasting

Industrial process control

Customer research

Data validation

Risk management

Target marketing

In the business field with several general areas of accounting and financial analysis, and any neural network application would fit into one business area or financial analysis; resource allocation and scheduling; database mining, searching for patterns implicit within explicitly stored information in databases.

There is a marketing application, which has been integrated with a neural network system. The Airline Marketing Tactician (AMT) is a computer system made of various intelligent technologies including expert systems. Neural networks have a huge potential we will only get the best of when they are integrated with computing, AI, fuzzy logic, and related subjects.

Recent studies reported neural network business application studies utilize multilayered feedforwarded neural networks (MFNNs) with the back-propagation learning rule. This is popular because of its broad applicability to many problem domains of relevance to business: principally prediction, classification, and modeling.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is applied to product demand, employee turnover, cash flow, distribution requirements, manpower forecasting, and inventory aspects of business operations.

What is AI? It is a computer-based analytical process that exhibits behavior and actions that are considered “intelligent” by human observers. It attempts to mimic the human thought process including reasoning and optimization.

Forecasting generally uses three common types of AI:

Neural Nets emulate elements of the human cognitive process, the ability to recognize patterns.

Expert Systems summarize the totality of available knowledge and rules.

Belief Networks describe the database structure using a tree format.

Banks use AI systems to organize operations, invest in stocks, and manage properties; hospitals can organize bed schedules, make a staff rotation, and provide medical information; and heavy industry plants use it to complete jobs that may be too dangerous for humans.

Artificial Intelligence is developed and used in many ways to assist businesses in their day-to-day operations. Everyday and new develop is being made to make productivity faster and less time consuming. It is also used in security, which makes it harder for certain security measures very hard to penetrate.

Knowledge Spiral Model

                                                     Knowledge Spiral Model

The Knowledge Spiral Model is comprised of four components and Nonaka and Takeuchi theorized these components, and they are Socialization, Externalization, Combination, and Internalization. An example of this model in action would be Asurion, a cell phone insurance company, putting a team together to discuss a new plan of innovation to market the sale of Bluetooth’s to customers when they file a claim; this would be Socialization. The supervisor or manager of the team would post ideas on the whiteboard and have the team come up with the best plan of action and present it to the board members of the company, this being Externalization. The team writes their agreed plan of action down and presents it, which is a Combination; but before the team wrote the agreed plan of action down, each team member had to write their own plan of action down and this is Internalization. This is the whole process of an organization using the Knowledge Spiral Model also known as the SECI Model.

The World Is Flat

Based on the video and book “The World Is Flat,” the most important factors driving Globalization 3.0 are the ten flatteners that he addressed. We have moved to an era where communication is wireless, voice over the Internet, and file sharing (called steroids). People are now able to work together all over the world via applications. Companies have different ways to communicate and operate businesses through outsourcing, off shoring, open sourcing, supply chaining, in sourcing, and informing. All of these factors have contributed to the global economic playing field being leveled. A new platform has been built and a triple conversion has taken place. All ten of the flatteners are merged together to create a web-enabled platform. We use to be what was considered vertical and now we are moving towards being horizontal, for example instead of going to check-in at the airport to obtain your boarding pass, you can now download it at home. As a college student this movement means that if you do not want to leave your home in order to get your degree, it can be done online. It also means that most communication will be either wireless or voice over the Internet. There will definitely be file sharing over the Internet for college students. Even the use of the library can be done via the web instead of actually going to the library and finding necessary materials. It also gives college students opportunity to attend colleges and universities they would not ordinarily attend because of not being to pay for housing or travel to that state or country. It becomes easier to research with websites such as google.com where students can look up just about anything and inform themselves. College students also have an edge on job opportunities because of the Internet and can find a job in any city, state, and country.

Increasing Returns

The law of increasing returns is the concept of a product becoming more valuable the more it is sold. It is based on quantity rather than quality of the product. A good example that many economists like to use is the fax machine. The first fax machine created was not valuable because it could not communicate with anybody else but then a second was created and the first could communicate with it making the first fax machine valuable. The more fax machines sold, the more valuable they became because more people could communicate. This meant for a company or an organization to focus not necessarily on the quality of the product but rather generating quantities of the product. Another example of this would be BETA versus VHS; although BETA was the better product, not very many people owned it and did not inquire about it. VHS sold more, which allowed for VHS rental stores to open up and create more revenue for VHS. Now we have moved on to DVD’s and away from the VHS tapes. The DVD’s cost less to produce but they are more popular, convenient, and when companies make movies, tutorials, or any other item that needs to viewed they use DVD’s. The same is true for cassette tapes and cd’s. Some cars still have cassette tape players in them but no one really uses them anymore. When it comes to audio, the cd is what is more popular although they are cheaper. Cd’s can be produced much faster and cheaper, but they have generated more revenue for companies and spread worldwide. As you think about computers, in order to save your work created, the floppy disk was the product used and then it went to the cd, but now it has moved to the jump drive.

Innovation

Innovation is critical to stimulating and sustaining economic growth of society because it is the key to that societies success. Innovation is not just about adding or developing new technology, but it is coming up with new ways to do old processes better. Blockbuster and Hollywood Video would be an example of businesses that were successful at one time almost monopolizing the video rental industry. Neither company was innovative in competing price with Red Box. The videotape technology has dissipated and most people only own a DVD player, so no one was renting videotapes anymore. Red Box has taken over the movie rental industry because you can rent the movie at one spot and take it back another and the fees are very minimal. Antioch, TN is another example of not really being innovative which has caused the area not to sustain economically. Many businesses have closed or moved out of the area to where there is growth. The Hickory Hollow Mall, which is in Antioch, had many popular clothing and department stores, such as Dillard’s and Macy’s, have moved out of the mall. These major stores leaving the area have caused the economic growth and the market value in the area to decline. Homeowners have moved out of the area whether they were able to sell their property or not and restaurants have not been very successful. When stores and restaurants close down or move out the area, they often do not relocate the employees they had working for them. This is a problem because it then creates unemployment and consumers are not able to purchase products, which then causes the unemployment rate to go up for the city thus going up the chain to the state. If there are no consumers, then companies around the country responsible for offering or making the products suffer economically as well and it continues on to effect the country as a whole.