Seminar Eleven Cyber Security

In this seminar, Prof Gilbert drew our attention to the cyber crime which would be the next biggest crime source in the near future. I was interested in the video clip showed at the very beginning. There are a lot of ATM card stealing cases in China. But I have not heard about the "mechanism" before.
We also looked at the high tech crime. The terminology is quite complicated: there are different names for different cyber criminals:
Spammer:
People who abuse electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages, which are generally undesired. While the most widely recognized form of spam is email spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, mobile phone messaging spam, Internet forum spam and junk fax transmissions.
Hacker:
A person who specializes in work with the security mechanisms for computer and network systems. While including those who endeavor to strengthen such mechanisms, it is more often used by the mass media and popular culture to refer to those who seek access despite them.
Phisher:
People who attempt to fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Phishing is typically carried out using email or an instant message,and often directs users to a website, although phone contact has been used as well.

So the security for cyber is quite difficult to maintain. Now criminals are high IQ people. The fight between good and bad is a fight in intelligence. I am worried if the pay for phishing, hacking or spamming is much much higher than our security warriors, warriors may turn their back to security.

From a cyber user's point of view, it is better to stop the criminals. From a cyber guard point of view, it is wiser to prevent crimes. The scenario is like gaming, such as chess. The essential ability is to forecast and predict future trend. This principle was also illustrated in our in-class activity: Cyberwar. If I did not understand wrongly, this should be the hint that Prof Gilbert wanted to give us. ^_^

Another surprising knowledge to me is the content about Russian mafia. So I searched a bit on its history. From Wikipedia:
Despite seeming to arise during the Fall of the Soviet Union, organized crime had existed throughout the imperial and communist eras as a form of open rebellion against the systems in the form of the "Thief's World". During this time organized crime was fiercely honor-based and often attacked and killed traitors among their ranks. Nevertheless, during World War II, many enlisted in the Russian Army resulting in the Suka Wars, which killed many of the thieves who were branded as government allies as well as the original thief underworld during Stalin's reign. The criminals, seeking a new survival strategy, began to ally with the elite in the Soviet Union as a means of survival, creating a powerful Russian black market.
The real breakthrough for criminal organizations occurred during the economic disaster of the 1990s that followed the fall of the Soviet Union. Desperate for money, many former government workers turned to crime and the Mafia became a natural extension of this trend. According to official estimates, some 100,000 Russians are committed mobsters, with a large but unknown number engaging in these criminal practices on and off.
Between 1992 and 1994 the Russian Mafia targeted the commercial centers of power, seizing control of the nation’s fragile banking system. At first the criminal gangs were content to merely “park” their large cash holdings in legitimate institutions, but soon they realized that the next step was the easiest of all: direct ownership of the bank itself.
Banking executives, reform-minded business leaders, even investigative journalists, were systematically assassinated or kidnapped. In 1993 alone, members of the eight criminal gangs that control the Moscow underworld murdered 10 local bankers. Calling themselves “Thieves in Law” (vori v zakone), Russian gangsters have murdered ninety-five bankers in the last five years.
Since the mid-90s the Russians have been trying to expand into America, most often via the trafficking of drugs and illegal weapons. This has led to some brutal wars with the organizations already present, including the Italian Mafia, Chinese Triads and the Yakuza. The group is believed to have links to Colombian drug smugglers and many smaller gangs as a result of the fall of the Soviet Union. Some also believe they are at the heart of gangs smuggling illegal workers west to the European Union and often Britain, though no proof has been offered for this at this time. The home of the Russian Mafia in America is in the Brighton Beach (dubbed by Russians "Little Odessa") neighborhood in New York.
Over the last few years, the FBI and Russian security services have tried to crack down on the Mafia, though the impact of this has yet to be measured.

Its history does not mention a lot on cyber crime. However, this will be the next big thing in recent years to mafia.

Seminar Ten Business Plan and Storytelling Skill

In this seminar, we focused mainly on the business plan which was closely related to our final project.
A business plan is a formal statement of a set of business goals, the reasons why they are believed attainable, and the plan for reaching those goals. It may also contain background information about the organization or team attempting to reach those goals.
Based on my searching results, there are a lot of business plan templates available online. To my big surprise, some websites even provide the service to construct customized plans for people. However, I will not try that because I can not trust them to make the right plan for me. ^_^
There are several components essential to a business plan:
1 Executive Summary
2 Organizational Background
2.1 Mission Statement
2.2 Current Status
2.3 History
2.4 Management Team
3 Product Portfolio
4 Marketing Plan
4.1 Market Size and Structure
4.2 Competitive analysis: Existing Markets
4.3 Competitive analysis: New Markets
4.4 Pricing
4.5 Demand Management
4.6 Distribution
4.7 Promotion and Brand Development
5 Operational Plan
5.1 Current Product/project status
5.2 Research and development plan
5.3 Manufacturing/Deployment plan
5.4 Information and Communications Technology Plan
5.5 Staffing Plan
5.5.1 Staffing Needs
5.5.2 Union issues
5.5.3 Training Requirements
5.5.4 Hiring Time Table
5.5.5 Staffing Budget
5.6 Business Process Outsourcing Plan
6 Asset Development Plan
6.1 Intellectual Property Plan
6.1.1 Intellectual Property Inventory
6.1.2 Portfolio Development Plan
6.2 Acquisition Plan
6.3 Organizational Learning Plan
7 Cost Allocation Model
8 Financial Plan
8.1 Current Financing
8.2 Funding Needs
8.3 Funding Plan
8.4 Financial History
8.5 Financial Forecasts
8.6 Valuation
9 Risk analysis
9.1 Risk Evaluation
9.2 Risk Management Plan
10 Decision Making Criteria

We are now working on our mobile food guide business plan. At the same time, I continue reading the text book of Mobile Web 2.0. There are some points I feel quite useful to our case, and yet we still not think about it.
1. The triangulation is based on the cell. The cells are not uniform. They are usually bigger in country side than that in urban region.
2. The needs to mobile food guide may need to be reconsidered. If the rate is a bit high, potential users will not choose to search by phone but just simply look around!

Hopefully, we can have these two points solved during next meeting.

The other part of this seminar is the storytelling skills shared by Prof Gilbert. That was really interesting. Although I am not good at telling a story, I personally think I am good at writing story--but in Chinese. The storytelling skill is important, especially in a business career. I may learn some from Prof during each seminar, because the stories he told in class are really attractive. It is time for me to improve my English.

Seminar Nine Scenario Planning and Case Study

In this seminar, we focused mainly on the scenario planning method from a case-based perspective.

In the scenario about education, there are three key factors: market, knowledge base, and political requirement. As an education provider (polytechnics, universities, etc), our market is the recruiting companies and agencies. By properly sensing the need of talents and skills, we can modify the knowledge base of education. Since education is always in the social circumstances, we should consider the political issues all the time.

In the scenario about technology, the three factors change a bit: market, technology and political requirement. Here I want to elaborate only the political part. For new technology and issues raised by it to be legalized, the period of time is at least one year. It is reasonable for us to generalize that the legalization is always far behind new technology. This means it is not a good idea to solve potential problem after the born of new tech. Instead, there will be some suitable and foreseeing political requirements for new tech to follow. As a new tech provider or consumer, we need to consider these requirements very carefully.

From the search results of Scenario Analysis online, I found an interesting technique based on computing: Visualization of Scenarios, or Morphological Analysis.

Morphological Analysis
Morphological analysis (MA) is a non-quantified modelling method for structuring and analysing technical,organisational and social problem complexes. It is well suited for developing scenarios, and the method is highly appropriate for complex cases where expertise from several areas is required. It is also useful for developing and relating operational and tactical scenarios to force requirements. Using MA for scenario generation and strategy management typically involves workshop sessions supported by computer applications.

Process-data Model of MA This section presents the process-data model explaining the generic concepts and the activities involved in morphological analysis methods, as shown by figure below.



The left figure shows the meta-process model, which is the representation of the activities involved in performing morphological analysis. These activities are explained in more depth in section 2. On the right hand of the figure you see the meta-data model of morphological analysis, which is the presentation of the data that are produced by the activities of the method. Each of these data or concepts is detailed in section 3. The dashed lines in between the two models indicate the relationship between the activities and the produced data. An example of Morphological Analysis project to clarify the application of Morphological Analysis’activities is then presented in section 4. The aim of this example is to perform analysis and explore the possibilities to grow a start up company.

I think this seminar will improve our skill in case study and scenario analyzing, and thus is quite helpful for the final exam. ^_^

Seminar Eight Interaction Design

In this seminar, we first presented our proof-of-concept for the mobile technology product of the final projects. Our group was the first to present the idea. It was a mobile food guide java system implemented in the phone. There are some similar products available in the market, but we have important differentiations from other food guides as our competitive advantages:
1. It is with the phone, unlike others are just available online.
2. It provides an easy grading system to collect the feedback from visitors as well as Singaporeans. This in fact utilize the Web 2.0 idea, the wisdom of crowd.
3. It is ads free. We will try to cover all the eateries and update them based on sourcing group from our company and also recommendations from users of our system.
The suggestions we got in the seminar discussion are the following:
1.Food preference : Hindu, Muslim
2.Language preference (inbuilt)
3.PPT attractiveness
4.Transportation
5.Views and average rating
6.Other restaurant not bound to the location (search for restaurant)

I am also thinking about collecting information based on different country groups. For example, people from India may not like the food loved by Chinese. With this sorting system, visitors can view the ratings of people from their country and also the overall ratings.

Other groups' proof-of-concepts were really fantastic. For our group, we still have a long way to go in terms of technique for creating beautiful flashes.

After all the presentations, we learnt some design issues. There are three levels in design: user interface, telecommunications infrastructure and application domain& service. To connect these phases, we need standards for both software and hardware. After having designed a prototype of a specific product, we need testing. One common practise is the iteration testing: First test design without users, then with different kinds of users. Use analysis from test data in next iteration of design, then retest with different users. Design for multiple user profiles, using a variety of interfaces and adaptive mechanisms.

There is one new information I am quite interested in: the simcard for mobile bank. I found relative knowledge from wikipedia:
SIM Application Toolkit (commonly referred to as STK) is a standard of the GSM system which enables the SIM to initiate actions which can be used for various value added services.
The SIM Application Toolkit consists of a set of commands programmed into the SIM card which define how the SIM should interact directly with the outside world and initiates commands independently of the handset and the network. This enables the SIM to build up an interactive exchange between a network application and the end user and access or control access to the network. The SIM also gives commands to the handset, such as display menu and ask for user input.
STK has been deployed by many mobile operators around the world for many applications, often where a menu-based approach is required, such as mobile banking and content browsing. Designed as a single application environment, STK can be started at the initial power up of the SIM card and is especially suited to low level applications with simple user interfaces.

Advantages of SIM Application Toolkit:
1. Some manufacturers claim that STK enables higher levels of security through identity verification and encryption, which are necessary for secure electronic commerce.
2.STK has been deployed on the largest number of mobile devices.

Limitations of STK:
1.After a SIM has been delivered to the customer it can be difficult to change the STK applications and menus on the SIM. To do so either the SIM must be returned and exchanged for a new one which is costly and inconvenient or in some cases the applications can be updated over the air. This limitation hinders the number and frequency of STK application deployment.
2.No multimedia support (only basic pictures)
3.Poor independent development support

Seminar Seven: Podcasting

In this seminar , we learnt podcasting and its potential applications. The reason why I use "potential application" is that, usually podcasting means a tool to entertain viewers or publicize certain ideas and products, however, it can also deliver messages(an alternative of meeting). This idea is new to me and I think if we think more creatively, there will be tons of functions that podcasting will contain. For example, psdcasting can work for scientists when they have new discoveries or contributions, they can easily make a podcasting to elaborate more with papers. If readers want to learn more about the new idea, they can simply search for the scientist's name and the title of the paper to gain more comprehensive and visual explanations.

The other thing I think is really useful in this seminar is that the prof provide us quite a lot of websites and e-products. I like the audacity and now use it for building our elevator pitch sound background.

The results for the OCBC case study competition is still now released yet. Gabriel, Dawen and I worked quite hard for that. Hope we can get passed.

Seminar 6 Disruptive Potential of Web 2.0

In this seminar, we mainly talked about the case studies. For a given case study, we need to choose from different approaches and give out suggestions for that specific situation. Case study is a more powerful tool in terms of reality than business theory.
The following is relevant information from Wikipedia about case study:
A case study is a research strategy, sometimes likened to an experiment, a history, or a simulation, though not linked to any particular type of evidence or method of data collection (Yin 2003). It is qualitative research, as isn't often confused by laymen.
Rather than using large samples and following a rigid protocol to examine a limited number of variables, case study methods involve an in-depth, longitudinal examination of a single instance or event: a case. They provide a systematic way of looking at events, collecting data, analyzing information, and reporting the results. As a result the researcher may gain a sharpened understanding of why the instance happened as it did, and what might become important to look at more extensively in future research. Case studies lend themselves to both generating and testing hypotheses (Flyvbjerg, 2006).
Yin, on the other hand, suggests that case study should be defined as a research strategy, an empirical inquiry that investigates a phenomenon within its real-life context. Case study research means single- and multiple case studies, can include quantitative evidence, relies on multiple sources of evidence and benefits from the prior development of theoretical propositions. He notes that case studies should not be confused with qualitative research and points out that they can be based on any mix of quantitative and qualitative evidence (Yin, 2002). This is also supported and well-formulated in (Lamnek, 2005): "The case study is a research approach, situated between concrete data taking technique and methodological paradigm".

The points that I need further understanding are:
Value Chain Analysis
Financial Analysis

Value Chain Analysis
The value chain is a concept from business management that was first described and popularized by Michael Porter in his 1985 best-seller, Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance.
The value chain categorizes the generic value-adding activities of an organization. The "primary activities" include: inbound logistics, operations (production), outbound logistics, marketing and sales, and services (maintenance). The "support activities" include: administrative infrastructure management, human resource management, R&D, and procurement. The costs and value drivers are identified for each value activity. The value chain framework quickly made its way to the forefront of management thought as a powerful analysis tool for strategic planning. Its ultimate goal is to maximize value creation while minimizing costs.

Financial analysis
It refers to an assessment of the viability, stability and profitability of a business, sub-business or project.
It is performed by professionals who prepare reports using ratios that make use of information taken from financial statements and other reports. These reports are usually presented to top management as one of their basis in making business decisions. Based on these reports, management may:
Continue or discontinue its main operation or part of its business;
Make or purchase certain materials in the manufacture of its product;
Acquire or rent/lease certain machinery and equipments in the production of its goods;
Issue stocks or negotiate for a bank loan to increase its working capital.
other decisions that allow management to make an informed selection on various alternatives in the conduct of its business.

Financial analysts often assess the firm's:
1. Profitability- its ability to earn income and sustain growth in both short-term and long-term. A company's degree of profitability is usually based on the income statement, which reports on the company's results of operations;
2. Solvency- its ability to pay its obligation to debtors and other third parties in the long-term;3. Liquidity- its ability to maintain positive cash flow, while satisfying immediate obligations;
Both 2 and 3 are based on the company's balance sheet, which indicates the financial condition of a business as of a given point in time.
4. Stability- the firm's ability to remain in business in the long run, without having to sustain significant losses in the conduct of its business. Assessing a company's stability requires the use of both the income statement and the balance sheet, as well as other financial and non-financial indicators.

I will learn more about the case study and hope we can do well in the competition!

No Assignment For 7 Days

We were told that there would be no presentation in Seminar 6. Everyone seemed quite happy.
Another shocking news was that the out and in seminar time ratio is 2:1, which meant for 3 hours seminar, by right we should spend 6 hours at home. Wow, quite a lot! I need to work harder to catch up.
My plan in the recess week is to learn flash. Hope I will have a good result. Cheers!