The Mobile Social Application - Literature review Example

ITEC MID Insert Insert Application The mobile social application will be called “Anon,” this is derived from the word anonymous. “Anon” is a social application that will run on the android mobile platform. The application allows users to share difficulties and challenges they are facing or dealing with in life anonymously without displaying those names or contact details. This application offers the users a chance or a platform in which they express their feelings without the pressure of revealing their identity or being judged by their friends. Application architectural design The mobile social application is broken down into two subsystems, the mobile application client and the server that includes the database. The two subsystems will interact using a server/client model. The database will store all data that will include; login information, user accounts, error logging information and communication information details. The mobile application will send and receive data to and from the database through performance of queries. The database will be implemented using MySQL technology. The mobile application client side will be implemented using the android, Java and XML programming languages. The mobile application client will be comprised of three layers. The device layer, application and the user interface where the users can interact with the system. The two subsystems will communicate through XML messaging. Mobile application client subsystem and the server side or the database will have capabilities of converting requests into XML messages and passing them back into usable data. Components design User Interface The user interface is the point where the users of the social application will interact with the system. The interface will be designed using Android GUI components, XML layouts and Java. The interface will be very friendly and simple. Buttons and graphical images will be incorporated to allow user to describe or post their lifes experience and difficulties using graphical models (Blaauw, 1997). The design of the interface will allow users to post information, search for posts and read replies to their posts. Application Layer The application layer will handle the transfer of messages and information to the device layer. It will handle threads and application logs. Device Layer The device layer will handle the interaction of the application with mobile phone hardware and other features that will be required for the functioning of the mobile application. It includes communication ports, Wi-Fi or GPS. Database/Server The database will handle storage of all the application data. It includes user account information, posted messages and their replies. Using the “Anon” mobile application A user registers into the system only using the email address that will and an alias name will be chosen for him or her. The default user name for the users will be ‘Anonymous’. The user will have to provide the age and gender details only when registering. The user email will never be displayed to the public or other users. A user posts a message on the message board of an application under the user-name “Anonymous”. A user can view other posts by other anonymous user’s user and can send replies to the posts. A user can read replies to his or her posts and indulge in an interactive chat with other anonymous users who have replied to his or her post. It will then create a web of like-minded people with the freedom of expressing their feelings and lifes struggles freely without being judged or victimized by people who know them (Monitor, 2010). 2. The information system is the integration of technical resources that include hardware and Software to allow collection processing and storing of data in a central database. Information Systems allow smooth flow an ease in the availability of information in a business setting. Information technology can be used in a petrol station in the following ways: Automated Sales management Sales management in the petrol station can be done through a point of sale. At the point of sale is a system that manages the sale of items in the store and manage the inventory of the items in stock. A point of sale automatically handles the sale of items in stock, automatically produce receipts for sold items, warn the user of the system when the stock is running low and needs to be restocked. It timely tracks the sale of items while keeping records for all the transactions in the database, allows the owner of the business to control it remotely or does not have to be present at all the times since there will be customer efficiency, a point of sale will ensure that the employed personnel work efficiently. The point of sale can be implemented in “Blast Gas” through the acquisition of computers that will enable installation of the point of sale software. The point of sale in the petrol station will handle the amount of gasoline that is available for sale in real time since the point of sale software keeps track of sold petrol and compares it to the stock of petrol that has been left. It is called inventory management. The point of sale software in the petrol station will control the amount of gas that is sold per day and generate the accounting figures of all the transactions carried out including the profits generated daily, weekly, monthly as per the user’s preferences. It will allow the manager of “Blast Gas” to maximize profits since there are very few opportunities for the employees to be fraudulent (Hansen, 2000). Varied payment methods integration system It involves the application of information system to allow clients pay for goods and services through various payment methods like cash, bank credit cards, fleet cards and vouchers. It does not restrict the customer to only cash, and this offers many conveniences to customers who might not be carrying cash with them yet they want to refill at the petrol station. The management of “Blast Gas” can implement this through the acquisition of acquisition of credit card insertion slot that will be used to acquire the credit cards to enable authentication of the customer transaction in the petrol station (Hansen, 2000). The slot will be integrated with point of sale system order to have a central information system to reduce redundancy. Help Desk Information system It is the use of information technology to respond promptly to customer questions and grievances. It is done through telephone or various World Wide Web technologies. Helpdesk offers businesses to understand their customers better in order to improve services to them or to respond to concerns they have raised. The effectiveness of the help desk system is on the short response time. In the “Blast Gas” petrol station, customers may have inquiries on pricing of different brands of gas, or are calling to request for a service at a location around the petrol station. Help integration in “Blast Gas” can be achieved through the installation and integration of 24-hour telephone line that responds to customer questions. Having an email address that allows communication with the customers. The social media service like Facebook and twitter to allow for an interactive communication with customers (Anthony Sulistio, 2004). Help desk service can also be implemented through the creation of a website for the gas station that will handle help desk service via the web page among other services like advertising. Integrated communication system The integration and coordination of all communication channels that affect, or that is required for a business to function optimally. Communication channels can be between the owners and the employees, management with suppliers, suppliers with business owners, and employees with management. Communication systems allow for ease with information is shared, and this improves decision making within a business. “Blast gas” petrol station can implement an integrated emailing service that links all the stakeholders of the business together. The emailing system allows communication of the owners directly to the top management of the station. It is necessary for a manager when they have to make decisions promptly, and the owners are not around the petrol station premises. This communication system also facilitates the exchange of information between the manager of a petrol station and the suppliers of the products. It allows the management to place orders for new suppliers about new pricing of the products or conduct negotiations. This kind of communications allows the petrol station to make timely decisions that will ensure smooth running of the petrol station (Amrhein, 2009). 3. Google Search Google search is one of the primary products in the vast technologies offered by the Google Inc. Google search is a web-based technology that runs on the World Wide Web and allows people to look-up for or search for results from their web browsers. Web browsers run in desktop computers, laptops, either mobile phones or tablet computers. People can search for documents like those that are MS word, pdf, organization web pages, images, map location of places, the weather (Monitor, 2010). Services supported by Google search include: - Encrypted search - Author rank - Google alerts that notifies use when via email when new results of previous search terms are mad available. -Google books are a search engine specifically for books that have been printed. - Google news, which offers news, related services from major media houses. - Google finance is a service that provides opinions, news and financial analysis data of the current business of the world. It also gives specific web pages for companies, company executive’s information and business portfolios. - Image search that displays image results of search terms only. - Flight search that allows customers to scan for flights from numerous airlines to multiple destinations and giving the clients travel recommendations and prices for various airlines - Hotel Finder allows users to access check-in and check-out dates much like travel agencies. - Google Language tools that translate text to the user’s language of choice. - Other notable services in this category include Google scholar, Google shopping, news archive, Google video, customs search and Google groups. Positive impacts to the society Google search has made a lot of information available to many people in a convenient way. Information that is accessed from Google search has been used in doing research by many organizations and university, and this has led to new advancements in various fields like technology, agriculture, medicine and industry. Google search has created many advertising platforms that have affected and mapped a lot of business in the world. It has benefited many people especially the youth. Google search has enabled other services like travel, finance, hotel to be easily accessed by people. Negative Impacts to Society Google search has brought about Internet addiction to some of its users especially the youthful stage hence a lot of time wasting. Google search has personalized many web searches through use of cookies, and this has been being used as a basis of attack on the privacy of some of its users. Display of web page source code through the search engines has made some web pages vulnerable to hacking that can lead to many losses (Heuvel, 2007). Android operating System Android OS is a mobile operating system that was developed based on the open-source Linux kernel by Google Inc. Android OS is designed mostly for use by devices with touchscreen capabilities like mobile phones, tablet computers and smart-phones. Android is also being used in televisions like the Android TV, in cars like Android Auto and in wristwatches like the Android Wear. Android Inc. developed the Android OS before being bought by Google in 2005. Android OS allowed software developers to create on the Android applications that can be installed and run in the Android OS (Monitor, 2010). Positive Impacts to Society The Android OS is shipped under the open-source license that is an assurance of free use by consumers. It has reduced the prices of devices that run on android OS making it cheaper and available to most people in the society. Android application developer in the society has been paid or has earned a living from developing Android application. Android application in fields like medicine, agriculture, education, transport have improved many lives and made life easier. Negative Impacts Some applications that run in Android devices have gathered personal information about users. Applications mostly games and the social media have become very addictive especially to youth and wasted a lot raw talent or time for the youthful. Google Ad-Sense Ad-Sense is a program run by Google that allows web publishers to serve content in the form of text, video, images or interactive advertisements dynamically on web pages. When web users click on the Ad-sense advertisements on the websites they visit, the owners of the web pages in question are credited for it. Ad-sense acts as an advertising network, and owners of web pages generate income from it (S. Ghemawat, 2003). Most of Google income is also generated from Ad-sense and account for over 22% of Googles revenue. Positive Impacts. Web owners have generated revenue from using Ad-sense in their web pages. Customers of retail products who visit web pages have gotten an insight on the various products available for them in the market. Ad-sense has improved sales of the various businesses due to the wide variety of users their advertisements can reach through AD-sense. Negative Impacts Viruses and Trojan horses created as Ad-sense advertisements have been created and have destroyed web user computers or have been used for malicious use. Ad-sense has been used by competing companies to drive the operation costs of the rival companies through invalid clicks that drive up rival’s costs. It has brought many losses to some companies. Ad-sense cookies are a threat to privacy of users of the web pages (S. Ghemawat, 2003). Google fiber Google is a project launched by Google Inc. that brings fiber connection to residential places in the USA. Google fiber will provide television and broadband Internet to many locations. Similar services were rolled out to cities like Kansas, Missouri, Austin, Texas and Provo, Utah. This service offers a very fast Internet connection of up-to 100 more than the other broadband Internet companies do. Google fiber come with a 1Gbit/s Internet; Google drive service also known as the Terabyte that allows user remotely to store data of up-to 1 Terabyte in their cloud. DVR recorders Nexus tablets and a network box. Positive Impacts It offers citizens free Internet of up-to 5Mbit/s. It has offered a faster Internet connection for both download and upload of up-to 1000Mbit/s, which makes it the fastest Internet in America. People benefits from a faster Internet connection that will enable them undertake their day-to-day activities smoothly. People get a larger storage capacity in Google Drive of one TB. People get DVR recorder sets that give them the flexibility in the number of channels they can way and record simultaneously. Negative Impacts The Google fiber has threatened to price out of the market smaller companies offering broadband Internet who cannot compete with Google. 4. Cloud computing involves a technology in which the functionality of IT platforms are enabled, IT products and IT infrastructure to be delivered as a service to customers using Internet technologies. Cloud computing allows consumers to these services for payments of the services that they use and those that are necessary to them. Cloud vendors are the companies that provide clouding technologies that satisfy particular cloud service offerings like software as a service, platform as a service or even infrastructure as a service (Taylor, 2002). The widely known vendors of cloud computing include technology giants like IBM, Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Cloud Services and cloud computing technologies Cloud technologies refer to platforms and applications that enable information technology to be offered as a service. These methods include grid technologies, virtualization, and software as a service enabled application platforms, metering tools and service oriented architectures. These methods are only used by the cloud vendors and will never be exposed to the customers. Cloud service, on the other hand, are that service that they are used by a consumer depending on his payments (Taylor, 2002). Cloud services have to be accessed through interfaces like the World Wide Web. The cloud services can be classified into these categories: Software as a service – this include applications like email, instant messaging, customer relation management and mostly office productivity application. Platform as a service – this are mostly application development environments that offer developer platforms to code applications and deploy them on cloud provided infrastructures. Examples are like the Google App Engine. Infrastructure as a service – in this case the entire computing infrastructure is provided to the customer as a complete service. The infrastructure can be a database environment, storage environment or an entire Linux environment. Examples include Amazon EC2 or Amazon SimpleDB (Rochwerger et al., 2009). Acquiring the right platform or cloud service to use is a challenge to most customers and acquisition should be done in consideration of several factors like dependability, manageability, afford-ability and adaptability of the cloud service. Dependability Cloud computing is becoming a technology of choice for most organizations. Before cloud service, the customer has to ascertain that the service will be more dependable than the previously dedicated infrastructure. Privacy and availability are a serious issue when it comes to cloud computing. The dependability challenges that most vendors face are: Environments with few cloud-computing providers increase the risks of outages that will affect many applications and is a visible target for attackers. Therefore, the user should consider situations where many cloud vendors are available as this will ensure a certain degree of dependability. Cloud providers that share many resources with customers that have a wider variety of needs exposes cloud applications to increased risks, and this lowers the dependability of the services. A customer should seek vendors that offer specific line of service. Before making use of the cloud, the customer should seek a detailed explanation on the frequency of outages and do research from people who have had experience with the said vendor. Customer should seek to use a cloud vendor that is within his legal authority as this offers the customer sound and understandable legal implication and privacy policies than cloud vendors from other areas. The customer will be able to demand dependability of services by the vendors as they operate on the same legal authority. Dependability is achieved through security measures put in place by a cloud vendor. Therefore, a customer should seek a provider that supports OS level support as this increases reliability and security (Singh, 2005). Manageability Manageability refers to the extent of control that a cloud customer is offered on the services provided to them. Due to high security and privacy issues, cloud vendors have strict security measures that only allow access levels only to the services that the customers pay for. Adaptability Cloud computing services should be flexible enough in anticipation of changes in technological trends or customer’s needs. A customer should try to obtain a cloud service that provides him the flexibility during application use peak times and low usage times. Most cloud vendors provide flexibility as compared to traditional IT infrastructures. A customer should seek to acquire a cloud service that allows a customer to react and change to demands on his resources in real-time. A service should also allow the customer to implement scaling as this will allow them to maintain a higher performance level as per his requirements. The cloud service should also be one that allows the customers to shift and adopt new improvements in technological advancements especially in use (Amrhein, 2009). Therefore, a customer should choose a cloud-computing vendor that supports virtualization as this offers the customer the highest level of flexibility and adaptability. Afford-ability Cloud computing should offer customers reduction in IT costs as compared to traditional IT infrastructures that require a lot of capital expenses that were used in the acquisition of both hardware and software. Acquisition of a cloud services will enable a business to shift from the traditional capital costs to operational costs that will only be incurred with cloud computing services. The customer should look for a cloud provider that allows the customer to pay for the services he uses when he needs them. This allows the customer to have a greater flexibility on the cost. The customer should seek for a cloud provider that offers a larger range of services as a package as this will be more affordable to the customer and one that has more affordable start-up cost. In the end cloud, computing will be cheaper as compared to traditional information technology infrastructures and the services that will be provided are quality since the software tools are regularly updated by the cloud vendors and not the customers (Amrhein, 2009). It minimizes the software acquisition costs that would cost the customer more in a traditional information technology setting. 5. Data Warehouse A data warehouse is storage location for information that has been collected from different sources and stored in a unified schema. Data in warehouses is organized around major topics. Data warehouse have the following characteristics that separate them from the regular databases; Data warehouses have been separated from an operational database and are not used in handling day-to-day transactions of a business. Data warehouses are constructed through the integration of various heterogeneous data sources. The database is organized into subjects that present a simple and concise view on specific areas. It means that data warehouses are subject oriented. Most data in data warehouses is historical, and the data has a longer time range than data used in operational databases (L. Vaquero, 2009). Most databases are read-only with infrequent and periodic updates. Data warehouses can be categorized as: Enterprise warehouse – stores data that covers all areas of interest in an organization. Data mart – this kind of data warehouses stores data that covers a portion of data in a corporation that is to be used by a specific department like the marketing department in an organization. Virtual warehouse – these types of data warehouses are used to display sets of distinct views created from operational databases. These views are mostly predetermined or pre-computed. Data Mining The process involves discovering knowledge from an individual set of data and is termed as data mining. Data mining is concerned with the extraction of a discovery of unique, previously unknown, implicit and useful patterns of learning from a set of large data in large databases. The process involved in gaining knowledge from a data warehouse is: Data cleaning removes inconsistent data and noise from data in the warehouse. Data integration combines separate data from different sources. Data selection – data with a particular keyword are retrieved from the data in the warehouses. Data transformation is the process of transforming data into summary or aggregation as required. Data mining is the actual extraction of the specified data patterns discovered in the data warehouse. Pattern evaluation is the identification unique and related patterns in the data. Knowledge representation is the process of displaying the mined data or knowledge in a way the user will understand (L. Vaquero, 2009). In order to secure the country, the Department of Homeland Security should be able to anticipate and predict potential threats to the countries security. It is done through mostly through studying of communication channels to discover unusual or suspicious information. Through studying of peoples characters through comparisons with past behaviors. In order to do this the Department of Homeland Security needs to: Create a large data warehouse of communication data between the citizens. It includes data archived for a longer period and can be information invoice formats, email or text. Create a data warehouse that will contain citizen profiles that will include criminal records, residence location. Age and activities one is involved with on a daily basis. The data warehouse should contain data that span a larger period as this will produce a more accurate analysis of the desired results. The data warehouse should integrate all the databases used by the rest of the departments. Critical analysis of this data with sophisticated tools will lead to the discovery of an unusual pattern in the information being shared between citizens. It has enabled the Homeland Security to anticipate security breaches and makes them prepare adequately in order to stop or prevent the attacks being staged against the citizens of a country. This operation is considered successful when the vast variety of data will be available for the Homeland Security Department to use. This increases accuracy in knowledge generation from all the databases at their disposal. Terror attacks on the country are highly organized crimes, and this requires a lot of communication by the participants. The endeavor acts as a blessing in disguise for the Department of Homeland Security since all the communication channels can be tapped. The challenge in this comes from the citizens who fill that their privacy and freedom is being undermined through the study of personal information by the government (Heuvel, 2007). Therefore, the success of this will be achieved if the department only uses the information it has on people to improve the security of the nation and prevent attacks rather than infringing the rights of the citizens. 6. Advancements in technology today have allowed many business organizations to use technologies like data mining, data warehousing, target marketing and customer self-service. Shifting customer services to the Internet has enabled a cost-effective customized service delivery process and other loyalty programs to customers. It however has brought about many challenges that include privacy concerns and negative consumer responses. Citizens are protected by law in the sense they have a right to privacy. Consumer anxieties incorporate proliferation of databases, large volume of data that is being collected by retailers, and the likelihood of privacy infringement and the loss of control in the processes of gathering and utilizing this information. Retailers acquire all this information from the World Wide Web especially the social networking websites like Facebook, twitter and credit card information that is stored when the customers use credit cards to shop (Monitor, 2010). Consumers want a situation where retailers should strike a balance between conveniences, relevance and still maintain their privacy. Benefits of Convenience Convenience is only achieved when retailers use personal information of consumers to come up with ways of improving shopping convenience. The benefits of convenience include: Improved shopping experience by enabling them makes better decisions on product choice and pricing. There are personalized advertisements to consumer depending on their shopping history. Consumers get a retail stores offers on their mobile phones when they are near these retail stores. Consumers shopping history is stored, and this is used in tracking consumer preferences in regards to products they use. Consumers get highly customized goods and products that have been improved to fit their needs. There is an increased and better-informed decision making by the consumer on what products to purchase. Delivery of goods to consumers is simplified and made efficient (Amrhein, 2009). Risks Consumers risk their personal information being shared between different entities and the government. Consumers are posted to a higher risk of fraud since a lot of personalized information is being shared around. Consumers are led into purchasing goods that they did not intend to purchase. There is increased identity theft of the consumers. There is increased Phishing where customers are lured into thinking that they are dealing with legitimate retailers, and they are manipulated into sharing private information to malicious third parties (Thomas, 2008). References Amrhein, D. &. (2009). Cloud computing for the enterprise. Retrieved OCT 9, 2014, from http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/techjournal/0906_amrhein/0906_amrhein.html Anthony Sulistio, C. S. (2004). A taxonomy of computer-based simulations and its mapping to parallel and distributed systems simulation tools. Softw., Pract. 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