Thanks to the internet, distance does make hearts grow fonder

If you are readers to our blog, we are certain that you are familiar with emails, Facebook community, Instant messengers, and blogs. Nowadays, not only young people (teenagers to under 30 year-old), but also old people are getting used to the life begin with using one of these internet tools to communicate with others. We, Terence and Jade, are people who live far away from our home country for at least 9 months every year and half way around the globe from our family. More than you can imagine, Internet has helped us tremendously to shorten the distance. We call internet a maintenance tool and a social context for human relationship. In this entry, I am going to explain why internet has been successful in maintaining and enriching relationships.

In order to explain why the internet is becoming so essential in our life, we want you to see it as an IT component in an Information System (abbreviated as IS) in order to reach an ultimate goal: connecting people regardless of distance. Within an IS, there are four components: people who use the internet to communicate, loose or non-hierarchy structures of internet users, IT (computer, softwares for IM, operation system, and web browsers, and internet connection), and business processes (register for a username or email address, log-in and log-out with every use, etc). Here, people and inter-personal structure serve as a social system, while IT and business processes serve as a technical system. However, we consider the social system more important since it has been shaping internet as a relationship maintenance tool. The internet usage requires modest little IT investment and knowledge (except for internet security knowledge to protect yourself from viruses, worms, and identity theft, which will grow with time). In fact, Jade’s grandmother, who is already 74 year-old, is fluent in IM with her siblings, and her mother, who is 54 year-old, has her own blog. We, people who have access to computer with internet connection, make internet successful in its use to connect people. We see internet users as distributors and collectors of information for internet-based socialization. IT component does not matter anymore if we are not willing to respond to emails or to Skype with others. People causes the whole information system to fail in its goal if they would rather type Happy Birthday on Facebook wall instead of going out of the way to say it in person when they see that birthday person in class. When people rely too much on the internet to maintain existing relationships, we call that situation “social laziness”.

Generally, we all know that human relationship mostly based on proximity, similarity, and repeating interaction. Online relationship, just as the traditional offline relationship, relies on similarity and repeating interaction, too, but less on proximity. For example, instead an actual place and time, a new couple can meet online with internet as a social context for the relationship. Like a physical meeting, an online meeting also encounters first impression error based on appearance (so, always use smiling pictures as your profile picture!). Overtime, with repetition of reading and writing email, they get to know each other better and similarity in interest and thinking, they may further that online relationship (finally!) by meeting in person. Many people consider online dating a better way to date, simply because if you do not like a girl or guy, just delete their name on your friendlist and start over again with a new person. No strings attached! Hence, I stressed above that internet is a maintenance tool for human relationship. Internet alone does not create a relationship. A relationship is created by the willingness to interact and similar interests that keep them in contact.

On the other side, with existing relationships, such as relationships with friends and family while being separated, internet plays as a even more powerful and convenient tool to connect people. Many of our friends, who are international students, are very familiar with using Yahoo, MSN, or Skype to talk and see their friends and family. These IMs fulfill our basic needs in relationship: the need to see and the need to hear. Also, IM and other internet tools help solving a great distance issue: time zone. Thanks to the asynchronous characteristic of emails and blogs, one does not need to wake up early at 4am to call home when he/ she needs to leave a message to his/ her family, who may be 12 hours ahead of the Eastern US time zone. With us, and many people living far away from and communicate to our family and friends through IMs, we do not count by days left until we go home, we count by Skype times!

Leveraging the internet to help entrepreneurship

As a follow-up to last time’s blog, today, I would like to speak about how the internet has changed the nature of marketing forever. My example to prove my point is a study on how small startup firms can leverage the internet to help their marketing campaign to reach a larger target market.

Before the internet, new startup firms had difficulty with marketing because information about the competitive market and customer market was difficult to reach. One would have to spend a lot of time and energy going around doing due diligence. Depending on what type of market they were looking to penetrate, they may have to go do to door or perhaps look up information from government agencies. Furthermore, advertising was a risky and expensive investment and was limited to ads in local newspapers, bill boards and TV commercials.

Now, the internet has completed evened out the playing field. One way I would like to suggest new startup firms to do their marketing simply by going through forums with information about the relevant market. There are virtually mountains of information on internet forums that an entrepreneur can tap into when coming up with a strategy for market penetration.

For example, if an entrepreneur wanted to start a business buying and selling African Art, he could simply look on art forums to see what the art communities want and also where to buy the latest and more sought after pieces of art work. This is just one of the examples about how someone can look towards user generated content online for a business idea.

After the market research, the advertising campaign can also be enhanced by the internet. A company website is a great tool to present a face to your business. A website is a quick and fast way for potential clients to learn about your business and perhaps purchase your products through E-commerce.

A website will facilitate a new firms advertising strategy. In almost every single major websites advertisement space is rented out to companies wishing to advertise a website. For example, in popular websites such as google and facebook, a bar on the side of the machine will showcase links that are based on the content of the current page. This type of advertisement can be purchased quick conveniently and is much cheaper than traditional methods of advertising. I also know that on Chinese search engines, you can also pay to have your website moved up in the search list.

The point that I’m trying to make is that the nature of human interaction has been changed forever through the advent of the internet. Now an entrepreneur can learn and reach customers in the market that were previously out of his reach.

Service is for free, but we won’t go bankrupt, ‘mam!

You may have wondered: “Why do business firms need technology, more importantly, the latest technology?”

You may have also wondered: “ Why we can use the popular YouTube website for free?”

Or simply, “Why do we, hotelies like me and Terence, have to take class in Information System in a hotel school?”

The reason is not about trends, it is about generating revenue, increasing firms’ efficiency, and improving interaction in our working environment.

First, let’s talk about revenue. All of us know that based on Web 2.0, YouTube exists as a video-sharing website, or a content provider. It, at least, provides users the tool to upload and convert video files, video search engine, integrated software to view and share videos, and ultimately, hosting service. YouTube does not have inventory and does not generate videos by itself. It is us, YouTube users, who upload video that make YouTube a popular website like now. But to maintain the site, it cannot rely on people who dedicate time and hosting service for free: YouTube earn revenue by supporting advertisement and recently linking users to online-music provider Itunes. Not surprisingly, founders of YouTube are people who are familiar with Ecommerce: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal. As of July 2008, Reuter reported YouTube is likely to earn advertising revenue of $200 million. Moreover, in the future, I predict YouTube will allow more companies to upload its full-length video ads with a fee. Let’s hope YouTube will not add video advertisement within our video playbacks like Yahoo News is doing!

Second, let’s talk about efficiency. Efficiency mentioned here is a firm’s ability to produce with a minimum of waste, expense, or unnecessary effort. As we know, not long ago, input to database was put into a centralized server in batch, which means inputs from all departments in a company had to be put at a certain time by one or several persons. Now, thanks to the help of networking and real-time computing, information from different departments in a company and POS systems can go to a centralized data-warehouse. Instead of going to different departments to acquire information for an ad campaign, employees can inquire data by creating queries to a database. However, we should look also look at drawbacks of IT on business efficiency: cost efficiency and labor efficiency. In 1965, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, less than 5% of the spending of companies went to IT. Dramatically, it had reached nearly 30% by the end of the 90’s – over $2 trillion a year on IT. IT may be a commodity to be used in a long run, but its costs compare to its capabilities may not be worth it. The main reasons are that our economy is in short of supply of skilled people in IT and a new generation of skills must be developed with each generation of labor. A clear example for this: what engineering students learned during their freshman year is already outdated by the time they are juniors. Furthermore, let’s also look at a simple labor efficiency aspect: emails save time on telephone due to its asynchronous characteristics. However, for example, an email which takes 10 seconds to compose is sent to 5,000 employees of a company will take approximately: 20 seconds/person to read x 5,000 employees = 100,000 seconds or nearly 28 hours of business hour to read. This will cost the company more than $200 of labor cost for email reading, while employees are not recruited to read email and check them every 5 minutes! So what is the bottom line here? IT brings efficiency, but look how it will suit your company before raving its POTENTIAL capabilities.

We, hotelies, are becoming more aware of the advantages of IT in our student life and future career. It is important to know why knowing IT matters to every aspects of our daily life to make favorable changes to its (a.k.a. social shaping). To make it easy for you to understand it, let’s use an example of a grocery loyalty program. When we swipe our loyalty card into retail kiosks, we may earn a discount or accumulate loyalty bonus points for later use, and in return, the grocery chain company have information about their purchase history, geographic and demographic statistics. By tracking millions of individual transactions with loyalty cards, they have a tremendous database of customer preferences to use for business performance analysis and efficient production of favored products. Moreover, although not recommended, many companies have allowed third parties to have access to their customer database for money. Surprisingly, even supposedly not-for-profit organizations such as colleges are allowing outsiders to access and use information of their students and faculties for marketing purposes. What is the bottom line here? Always make sure to check out the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy on every website that you would provide information to. (Hint: Look at the fine line in those documents!)

Ehotelie – A blog for hotelies who love the internet!

The internet has changed the nature of human interaction. All you need is a computer terminal and a phone line for internet connection and you will have access to a technology that has revolutionized the relationship between one human and another. Currently, approximately 22% of the world’s population has access to the internet. Although that is still a small minority, 22% of the world’s population is about 1.5 billion people (en.wikipedia.org). The astonishing implication of that figure is that 1.5 billion people are on the same playing field called the internet. That means that we, as internet users, have the possibility to communicate with 1.5 billion other people in this world. And unlike the telephone, I would be able to communicate with much more than just one person at a time. If I told this to someone 20 years ago, that person probably would have thought that I had been reading way too much science fiction. Moreover, it is estimated that in the year 2030, about 50% of the world’s population will have access to the internet (www.50×15.com).

Hence, we, Jade and Terence, have decided to write this blog on how the internet has changed human interaction in both the business context and social context for Professor Wagner’s Informational Systems class in Cornell’s School of Hospitality Administration. In the business context, we want to mention in our blog the most important internet-based business application: e-commerce. E-commerce, defined by Wikipedia as “consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks”, has grown dramatically within the recent 24 years since Amazon.com appeared as the first virtual bookstore. Why do people enjoy e-commerce? Because compare to any traditional brick-and-mortar stores ( a.k.a. B&M), e-commerce requires less time (unless you love to get overwhelmed in surfing online stores), but gives customers more convenience and a variety of products, with mostly better price. For example, a current trend for many popular banks in the U.S. is to encourage their customers to use online banking for checking account balance, creating e-check, and transfer funds. However, this trend raises a considerable concern regarding identity-theft. Another example of using e-commerce is internet advertising. Internet advertising has gone a long way from simple banner ads, pop-ups and spam emails, to search engine optimization, pop-under ads, and web 2.0. How about inter-personal relationship under the impact of internet? We are sure that most of people who are reading this blog are familiar with internet tools such as email, instant messenger (IM), forum, and blog. The concept underlying in these tools is that people always want to keep connected with their friends and family no matter how far their distance is.

With the next blog entries, we would like to write about the following aspects of internet impact in business and relationship: electronic fund transfer and transaction processing, internet security, internet advertising, internet-based auctions, email, IM, forum, and blog. Throughout our blog, we would like to stress the role of IT in the society through technological determinism, and social shaping. Moreover, we hope that our readers can relate our blog to answer the 4 W questions about the internet impacts in business and human relationship: What, Why, How, and Who. We hope you can realize that it is YOU that will cause the internet to evolve and it is YOU that can change the experience about internet of people around you. We will use three methods in each entries: analyze, inform, and predict.

To illustrate how the internet has changed human interaction we can look to the story of Aubrey and Dan. Aubrey was a single girl living in Richmond Virginia. Dan was a combat medic halfway across the world in Iraq. Through the online dating website E-Harmony, Aubrey was able to find a perfect match in Dan’s profile page. Soon, they began having regularly correspondence through email and telephone. The fact, that they lived world apart did not hinder their blossoming relationship. Undoubtedly, Dan and Aubrey would never have been able to meet without the internet. They got engaged on September 24^th, 2008.

Hope your have enjoyed reading our blog. Please look forward to our next entry.