Week 7 BOC: Privacy issues on the Web - Two Companies that can Spy on You

Week 7 BOC: Privacy issues on the Web - Two Companies that can Spy on You

Week 7 BOC: Video Challenge

Week 6 EOC: There's An App for That!

I have the next great idea for an "App", and I owe it all to my roommate, Jana. We have known each other for about 6 years now, and have been good friends through thick and thin. Over that time, I've come to learn a lot about her but it wasn't until 6 months ago, when we made the decision to live together, that I realized how much time she spends every day trying to find things that she has misplaced! Often times it's either her keys with the alarm for her truck, the remote for the garage door opener, or some other device that is easily misplaced. The one thing that I did notice in all of this, is that despite losing all of her other electronic devices, the one that she never loses is her cell phone which never seems to leave her hand. This gave me an idea... what if I came up with an app that was somehow able to trigger an audible alarm in these electronic devices that would help her find them! This is my idea for the app. Now, to make it work I suppose you might need some additional hardware that would communicate wirelessly that you would have to install in whatever you would like to work with the app, but any hassle this may cause would be well worth not losing your important items anymore!

Week 6 BOC: Parking Panda

www.parkingpanda.com - “Have a driveway or other parking spot? List it for rent and let it earn you extra cash whenever you're not using it. Set your spot's price and availability to suit your schedule, and change this anytime. We'll notify you whenever someone books your spot, and a check will be on its way to you! Parking Panda users are daily commuters, concert-goers, art aficionados, foodies, shoppers, and most importantly Ravens and Redskins fans. Everyone needs parking. We have stringent standards to verify that every user of our site is a real live person (or panda) with up-to-date contact info on file so that we can ensure every transaction goes smoothly.”
www.techcrunch.com - “The other part involves working with parking garage owners in major cities on yield optimization for their own empty spaces. When lots are empty, garages can massively discount the lots to fill them up. When the lots again approach full, garages can begin to charge more. As for which model dominates, it depends on the time of the year. As co-founder Nick Miller told us, when Parking Panda launched its beta in Baltimore, it arrived during football season. At the time, around 70% of its bookings were via the so-called “collaborative consumption” model where individual space owners would rent out their spaces to other drivers. After football season ended, however, the garages began to dominate, with individual space owners’ rentals dropping to 15%-20% of company’s total bookings.”
www.mashable.com - “The startup has raised an undisclosed amount of funding and is still in the process of raising more, Miller tells us. Parking Panda has helped more than 1,000 people park in Baltimore, he adds, and has recently begun working with parking garages to increase its inventory. ParkWhiz, another online startup in the parking space, focuses on helping people find parking in major commercial lots.”

Week 5 EOC: How do you become a mogul?

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Week 3 EOC : Spotify

When you hear the name "Pandora", what do you think of? In the past, perhaps the answer would have been "Pandora's Box" or some reference to Greek mythology. However, pretty much everyone who uses the Internet today knows that Pandora is a website that streams live music in a sort of "radio" type format that you can customize depending on your taste in music. It has been very popular because it's a free site for everyone, and if you would like to have more options within the program they also offer a paid version. Their success brought about quite a bit of attention, especially in Europe. Reporters were wondering whether the new popular European music streaming service Spotify could unseat Pandora (P) in the U.S. Strong revenue growth reported later in 2011 only seemed to underscore the threat, even though Spotify was still running in the red. Not to mention, Spotify has taken it's interaction with popular social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, to a whole other level that Pandora has yet to realize. Fast forward six months and things look different. Although 3 million U.S. consumers signed up for the service, only about 20 percent - about 600,000 - actually pay for the service in this country, according to a New York Post report. That's an enormous uptake in the world of so-called "freemium" services, where usually moderate single-digit percentages are considered successful. But if a business model is based on greater expectations and you have to get cooperation from rights holders like the music labels, success may be a much trickier prospect. The problem facing Spotify, and others in the online music industry, is the need to get along with large corporations that own rights to the bulk of music people most often listen to. That gets event trickier when you want to give music away to entice people to the paid service. Last summer, Pandora CEO Joe Kennedy said Spotify operated in a "fundamentally different marketplace," though that seems a bit of a stretch. Both companies have advertising and subscription models. It's not as though Pandora is on easy street. Music licensing costs keep rising, which resulted in a $16 million loss for the fiscal year that ended in January. But that was still significantly less of a loss than the $41.5 million that Spotify lost in 2010, as it reported last fall. As Pandora has shown, growing a music service costs a lot of money, and labels don't seem to be looking to encourage new business models. And unless either the number of listeners or the percentage of those willing to pay increases rapidly, the chance that Spotify could continue to disappoint financially would also seem to grow.

Week 2 EOC : Privacy on the Internet

It seems that today's society is torn between two very different view points when it comes to the issue of privacy on the Internet. There are a lot of theories and ideas out there about how we got to be so divided on this subject, however I believe it comes down to a simple fact of difference in generations.

Before the emergence of large social media web sites such as AOL, Facebook, and Twitter, the Internet was mainly used for things such as information sharing, business development and marketing, and (let's face it) porn. I can remember back in high school when we first started using the web our resources were very limited, and we certainly weren't using it for any kind of communication with our friends or family. It's was something more like an encyclopedia or some other source of information. Once the ability to email came about it caught on like wildfire, and so began the great war against spam, viruses, and anything else that hindered our experience on the web.

Scholars, lawyers and privacy advocates are also scrambling to sort through the implications of the rules, which set up a pitched battle between the right to privacy and freedom of expression online. The wide gap between these situations - and about a million imaginable scenarios in between - begins to map out the legal minefield the European Commission is charging through. Late last month, the executive body for the European Union proposed a strict set of privacy rules that included a "right to be forgotten." The regulations must be approved by member states, but the language sent a jolt through companies such as Google and Facebook, which have built business models dependent on user data and could face multimillion-dollar fines for infractions.