Week 3 : Crowd Wisdom

The first term I heard today is group think. I've learnt it before. Well for info, group think is a condition when in a meeting the participants don't voice out their opinion. They just follow whatever the leader says in the meeting. Group think makes the meeting inefficient because the purpose of meeting is to find the best solution the participants can think of. If there is group think the solution only comes from the leader which can't be the best solution all the time, therefore has to be avoided. There are several factor that caused group think:
1. The participants wants the meeting to end quickly because if there is a difference in opinion the meeting will last longer.
2. The participants don't want a conflict among themselves, so they just agree to others' opinion.
3. The leader usually never pay attention to his subordinates opinion. This caused the subordinate to think what's the use of his opinion anyway.
Group think has a bad effect to the company, the leader and even the subordinates. Like mentioned by Professor, the employees of TT Durai former Chief Executive Officer of National Kidney Foundation (NKF) in Singapore will be labelled as the people who won't voice out their opinions. Of course this will ruin their career life for years.

There is difference in opinion about the crowd size in decision making. As was said by Henry David Thoreau "The mass never comes up to standard of its member, but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest". James Surowiecki said"Under the right circumstances groups are remarkably intelligent, are often smarter than the smartest people in them." Actually these two persons didn't say the wrong thing the key word here is "under the right circumstances". A simple example is to calculate the load that a bridge can handle, one expert is better than a crowd. But for judging people's behaviour crowd's opinion is better than the experts.

Going back to James Surowiecki statements. For a group to be more effective than experts required diversity, independent of opinion, decentralization and aggregation. According to Surowiecki hypothesis decision quality is proportional to number of types of solutions. Diversity is needed as it provides more alternatives which then will give a better solution. Independent is the main problem in group think, people's opinion is determined by others opinions. One way to solve this is by making the decisions made simultaneously.

Then the Professor talked about the process to launched a new product to market. The first thing to do is to conduct a marketing research. There are several things to consider here i.e. the cost, the functionality, form of the product(small or big), appearance(nice or ugly). After doing research and know what the market wants they start building the product. The next process is to distribute it to the consumers through available channels. Because the time doesn't permit the professor only touched a little on the infrastructure for mobile commerce.

Week 2:Technology Infrastructure: The internet and the World Wide Web

This week seminar the professor started with presentation of the starhub study case. From the discussion we all mentioned that starhub should dominate the market. Why is it so? because telecommunication it a business with high start up cost and low variable cost. The cost of serving 1 million customers doesn't much from serving twice as many customers.

Definitely Starhub has to keep up to date with the current technology to gain market share. One of the professor ideas was to give information about the traffic by locating the position of the customers. If many people stay in their position, the service provider will send information to the customers who are going to that particular road. In that way, the customer can avoid traffic jam.

After 3 groups presentation the case study, the professor go on with the technology infrastructure. It starts with the origin of internet. Actually internet was first invented for military purposes of the U.S. department of defense. Then subsequently internet is available for public usage. For the past 2 decades internet has experienced an excellent growth(exponentially from 1991 - 2002). In 2003 and 2004 internet only grow linearly.click here

We may have always heard of the term TCP/IP, but I don't really know what is that. Well, TCP/IP is the heart of the internet. Why is that? let me explain, the data of the internet is sent in the form of little package. TCP controls the assembly and disassembly of the data. Of course IP can never be separated from TCP, IP is the address of the computer to receive the package sent. Currently IP addressing is using the internet protocol version 4 (IPv4), but soon the will be no more address to assign to internet users since the number of internet users are increasing. So they have improve the IP addressing to version 6(IPv6) which use 128 bit number bigger than version 4 which is only 32 bit. An interesting matter of this improvement is that why it isn't version 5? The explanation is like this when version 5 come out, version 4 can still be used. To change to newer version is not an easy task and isn't cheap. So none has changed to version 5.

I've also learnt something about the new technology in handphone that has connection with the wireless ethernet. The increasing use of wireless ethernet create the possibility of mesh routing. What is mesh routing? Directly transmits Wi-Fi packets through hundreds, or even thousands, of short-range transceivers acting as routers. The idea is like this, when every single household has wireless ethernet wherever we go we can receive the wireless signal from our handphone. In short wherever we go, we are connected to the internet. By using the internet connection people can send sms, call, without having to pay. In that case, can this technology be considered as disruptive technology? what will happen to the telecom service provider? will they survive?

First Week

Today is the first time I attend MB362 class. The first class is talking more about the structure and the overview of the course for this semester.

I also learnt some new things like VoIP, this term is not completely new to me, I've heard it before. I only know it has something to do with the phone and the internet. By the discussion in class I knew how it works and the advantages compare to telephone. This technology harm the telephone industry such as Singtel by decreasing Singtel's revenue alot. Singtel responsed to this by providing new service in order to survive in the industry.

The forward pace of technology has made the world change so much, not only in daily live but also the business world. The internet has harmed many industry such as the email service has caused the post office revenue decreasing. But the internet has also provided many opportunities for new industry such as Amazon.com which is not impossible without the emergence of internet service.

It's all about me, me and me