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November 29, 2006
Cyber Monday --- RIP???
I have the feeling that Cyber Monday is no more. Cyber Monday is the first Monday after Thanksgiving and is supposed to have the highest Internet retail sales of the year. That may have been true when most people had dial-up at home and fast connections at work. In those days, it was worth waiting to Monday to order online. Last year, however, Amazon.com reported their biggest day on December 14. A date that suggests that customers waited as long as they could to shop and still receive the shipment by Christmas. On the other hand, the Nov 27 Seattle Times reported (p. C1) the following projections:
| $32 billion | will be spent online this holiday season |
| $6.35 billion | was spent between Nov 1 and Nov 19, a 23 percent jump |
| $457.4 billion | will be spent on all holiday sales, 5 percent increase over 2005 |
| 114 million | users will shop online, a 6 percent increase over 2005 |
| 73.4 | percent of consumers who said they shopped online last holiday season |
| 34.9 | percent of consumers who planned to start shopping by Halloween |
| 79 | percent of online merchants that offered some form of free shipping last year |
Start seeing holiday ads before Halloween??? Hmpf. And don't pay for shipping!!!
Posted by DavidK at 06:11 PM | Comments (0)
The Risk of Answering Spam
"Spam Never Dies," according to MSNBC. Several years ago, MSNBC.com answered some spam regarding home mortgages -- just to see what would happen. Three years later, they're still getting calls. An interesting story on cold calls originating out of of call center in India and being transferred to a loan officer in the U.S. --- all in response to a spam response three years ago! Great reading here.
Posted by DavidK at 06:10 PM | Comments (0)
Phishing Gets More Profitable
From the same MSNBC site, Red Table Chronicles, the Gartner Group says phishing become five times more profitable in the past 12 months. According to Gartner's Avivah Litan, ""People kept saying this problem will become manageable, but what surprises me is it's getting worse." Lots of good data here.
Posted by DavidK at 06:08 PM | Comments (0)
An Interesting Ethics Discussion
Craig Peterson at Utah State recently described a class discussion involving ethics and IS:
"We had an interesting discussion in class today that seemed to drive home some of the ethics concepts I teach ....
"The situation presented today dealt with information availability regarding prices for 'Black Friday.' Information that has been leaked out to the public and available on many Websites such as www.bfads.net and slickdeals.net as well as others. We had a great discussion about how companies fall prey to employees releasing information, ad companies, printing companies, etc. Many of whom the retail company has little control over and difficultly determining where the leak occurred. We discussed why it was an issue for the retail locations and how this example could illustrate any kind of information leak.
"Students became engaged in the conversation because many of the products are items they are interested in purchasing and the prices are obviously very good. This discussion went into the possibility of companies leaking incorrect ads themselves so that competitors might have a false sense of prices and be caught off-guard. Again, students were very interested and we had one of our best discussions so far in the class...
"Just something that seemed to work well in our class today. Not sure it would be of benefit to others, but I throw it out there just the same."
Thanks, Craig for sending this along. Sure wish we would get more entries like this!
Posted by DavidK at 06:07 PM | Comments (0)
November 12, 2006
The Value of Internet Search
Elota Patton at UT, Austin, wrote TeachingMIS.com this week with the description of a class simulation experiment.
The simulation scenario is that the player has goods to sell (say a basket of fish). He or she is offered a price of the goods (driven by a uniformly distributed random variable between 0 and $200.) The player can take the offer, or ask for another bid from a different buyer.
The simulation has three phases: In phase 1, the cost of a new bid is $10; in phase 2, it is $2, and in phase 3, it is zero. For example, in phase 1, say a person is offered $90, he or she can take the $90 or pay $10 and get another bid. The person can accept the higher of bid one or two, minus $10, or ask for a third bid, again for $10. If a person plays 10 rounds in phase 1 and has a maximum bid of $150, that person's net gain is $150 - 10 * $10 or $50. In phase 2, the same situation would net $150 - 10* $2 or $130. In phase three, that same situation would net $150.
Elota had groups of four students take the simulation in class. She told the students that the $10 of phase 1 represents having a person physically meet with a potential buyer to determine the buyer's price. The $2 of phase 2 represents a person using a cell phone to obtain the buyer's price, and the free bid of phase 3 represents using Internet search to find the highest price.
Of 25 teams, phase 1 returns ranged from $41 to $176. Phase 2 returns ranged from $105 to $172. Phase 3 returns ranged from $166 to $199. Most were in the $190s, as you'd expect. The $166 was from a team that got tired or bored and quit after three rounds ...
Thus: The Internet levels the playing field!!!
The game was created by Charles Holt in the Dept of Economics at UVA. The idea for using it in the MIS class was suggested by Gautam Ray at UT, Austin, from a suggestion of James Wolf at Illinois State University.
Posted by DavidK at 12:11 PM | Comments (0)
Utah State University Seminar
I had an opportunity to speak at a Conference for IT Executives sponsored by the College of Business at Utah State last week. My topic was: Data Mining: Security, Privacy, Ethics, and Whacko. This was a very well run conference organized, entirely, by students! I mention this event because the entire USU IS Department staff promised to contribute to ideas to TeachingMIS.com, and I'm waiting ...... (!!!)
More broadly, I sure would appreciate contributions from fellow IS faculty. Elota's been great so far this year, but aren't there others? I know that lots of you read this blog from the usage statistics. Sure would appreciate some ideas!
Posted by DavidK at 12:07 PM | Comments (0)
Have You Tried MsDewey?
If you haven't seen her yet, you need to visit www.msdewey.com. Try Bill Gates, Google, or cars as suggested in this blog: They not dead over at Microsoft yet!!!
If you query for something and get an interesting response from Ms. Dewey, please send it in a comment. I think there are lots of terms that get interesting responses. Don't try to get fresh with her, I understand ... Search for 'You're cute' and see what happens!
Posted by DavidK at 10:18 AM | Comments (0)
Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D Beta
Is available. This is a really, really cool product. You can see a preview on Microsoft's Channel 10. Well worth waiting through the long introduction. You might even want to play the video in class.
The product??? Wow!!!
Here's my house (note the drawn-in buildings):
So, I flew down the hill and hovered over the Pike Place Market (where they throw the fish):
Some buildings are missing ... but notice the perspective on the Space Needle. Works with an X-Box gaming console.
Apparently, advertisers can place billboards on streets, allows navigation by category (Starbucks). City images taken from low flying aircraft and assembled via automation. Many more features.They hope to have 100 cities by summer. Very, very interesting.
Also, you can meet the developers on MSDN Channel 9.
It's a long complicated install, must be a ton of code, but it's cool!
Posted by DavidK at 10:10 AM | Comments (0)