The application of pre-paid cash card for customers

Nowadays, people are more likely to apply prepaid cash card to apply in every daily transactions because of some common reasons :

(1) Convenient : No need to bring so much cash with you at anytime,anywhere.
(2)Time Saving : No need to count the cash when payment was made, just swap it.
(3)Safety : Bring a lot of cash may cause criminal case happened around.

So, here are some example of prepaid cash card would like be introduced:

Touch 'n Go

Touch 'n Go card is one of the common prepaid cash card in Malaysia, as it is approaching to 10 years already. as the mission is going to provide secure, swift and convenient cashless payment mode to all. Customer can use it for paying the toll fee of highway, public transport fees, parking in some shopping centre in Klang Valley. As its convenience, there are about 4.4 millions of Touch 'n Go users in Malaysia. Recently, Touch 'n Go has expanded its service to 7 Eleven, Dunkin Donuts, Burger King, A&W, Cathay Cineplex even with latest in the parking of KLIA.

http://www.touchngo.com.my/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touch_n_Go#Prepaid_card

Octopus Card

The Octopus card is a rechargeable contactless stored value smart card used to transfer electronic payments in online or offline systems in Hong Kong. Launched in September 1997 to collect fares for the city mass transit system, the Octopus card system has since grown into a widely used payment system for virtually all public transport in Hong Kong. It is also used for payment at convenience stores, supermarkets, fast-food restaurants, on-street parking meters, and other application such as vending machines. The cards are used by 95 percent of the population of Hong Kong aged 16 to 65, generating over 10 million daily transactions worth a total of about HK$29 billion (US$3.7 billion) a year.

http://www.octopuscards.com/consumer/en/index.jsp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus_card

EZ-Link
The EZ-Link card is a contactless smartcard as used for payment in Singapore especially for transportation in Singapore. It was established on 2001. As of 2007, there are over 10 million EZ-Link cards in circulation, with 4 million card-based transactions occurring daily. The card is commonly used in Singapore as a smartcard for paying transportation fees in the Mass Rapid Transit (MRT), Light Rapid Transit (LRT) and public bus services. After that, the service have been expanded to payment in Singapore branches McDonald, food centers, supermarkets, libraries, even softdrink from vending machines. Some schools in Singapore have also started to adopt the EZ-Link card as a way to mark the attendance of students and to pay for food served within the school campus.

http://www.ezlink.com.sg/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EZ-Link

Electronic Currency

Electronic currency



Thanks to Wikipedia. Electronic money (also known as e-money, electronic cash, electronic currency, digital money, digital cash or digital currency) refers to money or scrip which is exchanged only electronically. Typically, this involves use of computer networks, the internet and digital stored value systems. Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) and direct deposit are examples of electronic money.



Potential issue arises
The central bank will lose over monetary aggregates cause electronic currency able to flow freely across international borders. And even worse that, it would alter foreign exchange rates, disturb money suppliers and encourage overall financial crisis.

SMART CARDS
An electronic card containing an embedded microchip that enables predefined operations or the addition, deletion, or manipulation of information on the card. A memory chip card usually a “read-only” card, similar to credit card. Although the micro processor is capable of running program like computer does but it is not stand-alone. The program and data must be downloaded from and activated by some other device (such as ATM machine). Smart cards have three broad functions; authentication, storing value and storing personalised information. Authentication is concerned with ensuring only authorised individuals gain access to systems and buildings. A smart card can be used as an electronic purse to store units of value in different currency denominations as well as credit and other units of value such as bonus points or air miles. Values can be replenished on a smart card. The smart card can also be used as a portable storage device independent of some fixed location and with the capability of holding a large amount of data of different forms and for different purposes but usually of a personal nature.



Benefits of electronic currency or smart cards.

1. Using smart cards is safer than carrying cash for an individual.
2. Smart cards can improve access to services for the disabled and elderly.
3. It is a secure means of authenticating the identity of reader device.
4. It is portable and secure store of information available to all.
5. Access can be made available in geographical locations where on-line communication is not possible.
6. The opportunity of fraud is reduced using smart cards.

Mobile Payment Systems In M'sia: potentials and strategies

Mobile Payment (M-payment).
M-Commerce is a new computer environment which design for workers who travel outside the boundaries of their organizations or anyone on the move. Salespersons are able to make proposals at customers’ office; a traveler could read and answer all of the day’s e-mails while on the road, one could work with the mobile devices as long as the battery is working.
What do you mean by Mobile Payment?

According to Wikipedia, Mobile payment (also referred to as mobile web payment or WAP billing) is the collection of money from a consumer via a mobile device such as their mobile phone, SmartPhone, Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) or other such device.
Mobile Payment in Malaysia.

Visa and Nokia have teamed up to release the world’s first credit card payment system in Malaysia which allows consumers to shop and pay using their mobile phones. Japan already has this kind of service a few years ago, which almost similar with the credit card payment. But the different they using phone credit to do transactions. The cash counter scans the code display on the phone screen and cash done. Refer back to topic, we also have PayPal launched PayPal mobile that lets people transfer money through their phones. Nokia phones will use the Visa Wave smart card technology that uses radio frequencies to eliminate the need to swipe credit card into a reader. During the trial period, 200 Visa Wave cardholders in Malaysia will be given a special Nokia phone that can be used for such payments. About 2,500 outlets nationwide ave Visa Wave readers.

Visa Wave is already available in Malaysia, Taiwan and South Korea and will be expanded to Japan and Southeast Asia this year.

Mobile Payment systems’ potentials
· To allow global organizations to access a far wider market, including peopla in previously hard-to-access locations.
· Shortcodes are false sense of security, and can be impersonated just like web sites.
· Digital transmissions fairly secure.
· Reduce cash payments and transaction costs
·
Mobile Payment Challenges
· lack cohesive technology standards that can provide a universal mode of payment
· Security payment issue.
· Privacy issue.

Consumers’ adoption strategies
· Well much depends on consumer’s confidence about the M-payment
· Now consumer can check their flight time using their cell phones and even booking with cell phones. Why not implement m-payment in cell phone? Convenient.
· Cell phones is easy-to-bring communication device, it carries credit too. Instead of bring cash alone, using cell phone to pay is a creative way.
· Follow the trend, sooner or later the world will be seen pay using cell phones, it’s just a matter of time Malaysia implement it. Do they tax on M-payment?

A review on a post on Internet Security from My E-Commerce blog

After review those posts about Internet Security, one of the topic which is IMPACT - To Fight Cyber Terrorism, where I have some views about it.

IMPACT which is the shortcut of International Multinational Partnership Agent Cyber Terrorism as it is a centre set up by Malaysia Government to fight those cyber terrorism around the world and the based in Cyberjaya.

However, the amount of RM43 million setting up an international centre which help to defeat cyber terrorism may lead the Malaysians feel disagree on it. For them, the amount is too high as they feel that those are part of their contribution to the country.

For me, I feel that the amount may be costly a bit but if it can reach the ultimate goal of the centre, I think it is valuable to all of us. Especially for those internet users in Malaysia, according from http://www.internetworldstats.com/asia/my.htmtar there are 47.8% of population use the internet services. For future, the amount of internet users surely will be increasing a lot as the IT development changing fast around the world.

SInce the cyber terroism keep attacking the IT world, the government spent such a huge amount to counter-attack it may wish to bring a satisfied result to those internet users in Malaysia.

The threat of online security: How safe is our data?

Few months ago, Edison Chen photo scandal shook the Hong Kong entertainment industry as it was involved various actresses in Hong Kong. In case this is the careless of Edison Chen, as during he sent his notebook to repair in a computer shop, they downloaded the photo illegally without the permission from Edison Chen.

So, back to here again with the topic. Now there is always the threat of online security in the business world. Besides that, for those personal, they might be beware of this threat as it might be unexpected.

To prevent our data be stolen, for example the notebook. May be for some purpose use, we might to protect that our notebook been stolen. As the most safety way, bring it and not leave it on the car or other places. For those businessmen, they might be keep their data which is private and confidential all the time. As do not keep it probably, their business competitors might have the chance to get the data of customer illegally and may be face a huge loss.

Besides that, some websites may require password whereby we need to set a strength password or else people who know you can break through on it. For my suggestion, do not put such kind of info like your identification card number, birthday date or some number which easy to remember as your password. For me, my password combine capital letter, small letter and number if required.

Finally, I just want remind that, not only poeple face threathen in reality world; maybe in the IT world, we must be aware also especially of the online security.

Firms use cyber thugs to attack competitor

Nowadays, there are firms who use cyber thugs to attack competitors by using DDoS (Distributed Denial of Services), especially online game sites. One of a famous company in Malaysia is e-games who always being attack by their competitor and cause their system knock down. And if their systems are knocking down too frequently, it actually will cause their company from losing a numbers of players. So, it is important for company to do some prevention.

First, an investigative process should begin immediately after the DOS attack begins. There will be multiple phone calls, callbacks, emails, pages and faxes between the victim organization, one's provider, and others involved, but this can be a very time consuming process. The easiest way to survive an attack is to have planned for the attack. Having a separate emergency block of IP addresses for critical servers with a separate route can be invaluable. A separate route can be used for load balancing or sharing under normal circumstances and switched to emergency mode in the event of attack.

Firewalls have simple rules such as to allow or deny protocols, ports or IP addresses. Some DoS attacks are too complex for today's firewalls, firewalls cannot prevent that attack because they cannot distinguish good traffic from DoS attack traffic. Additionally, firewalls are too deep in the network hierarchy. Routers may be affected even before the firewall gets the traffic. Nonetheless, firewalls can effectively prevent users from launching simple flooding type attacks from machines behind the firewall.

Application front end hardware is intelligent hardware placed on the network before traffic reaches the servers. It can be used on networks in conjunction with routers and switches. Application front end hardware analyzes data packets as they enter the system, and then identifies them as priority, regular, or dangerous.

Intrusion-prevention systems (IPS) are effective if the attacks have signatures associated with them. However, IPS which work on content recognition cannot block behavior based DoS attacks. An ASIC based IPS can detect and block DOS attacks because they have the processing power and the granularity to analyze the attacks and act like a circuit breaker in an automated way.

How to safeguard our personal and financial data?

Nowadays it is important for us to safeguard our personal and financial data from outsider. There are because people can steal these information for illegal usage. It is very danger for us to disclose our personal and financial data online. But for those users who really need to disclose it online, they can actually subscribe some antivirus to safeguard their data. For example, Crypto Heaven allows your group to send encrypted e-mail, securely backup and share files, pictures, charts, business documents, and any other form of electronic media through a secure environment.

If you use instant messages to convey sensitive business or personal information, you are inviting big, big trouble. In total, there are millions of users using instant messages for business purpose daily. Password theft and identity theft were extremely common in instant messages. You can actually secure your data by setting password at least 12 characters long, set a password that cannot found in English dictionary, set password with numbers and special characters ( i.e. @, $, %, &, *, ^, etc.), password should not use name of your dog, your I/C number, telephone number. Besides, you can also use Internet Sweeper to erases the cache, history, cookies, addresses, recent documents list, and temporary Files.

To safeguard personal and financial data, you should also clean your computer tracks. But when we delete a file from our system and remove from recycle bin, the contents can still be retrieved by someone who is knows what they are doing. Super Shredder helps to delete files using Gutmann and NISPOM (DoD), but can be completely customized to give you all the security and/or performance you may need. It can receive files via drag-and-drop onto the application or the icon, selecting files from inside the program, command line, and can even add a shortcut to your 'Send To' menu inside the Windows Explorer so it's simple to delete files in a secure and convenient fashion. The Eraser program securely deletes files from your computer by overwriting the data many times.

E-commerce failure and its causes

The dot-com is one of the major failure in E-Commerce history. According to Wikepedia and thanks to them for their hard works to keep the history of it. Here how it says:

A Dot-com company, or simply a dot-com, is a company which does most of its business on the Internet, usually through a website that uses the popular top-level domain, ".com" (in turn derived from the word "commercial"). During the stock market crash ending the Dot-com bubble, many failed and failing companies became known as dot-bombs, dot-cons, dot-composts or dot-gones.

While dot-com can refer to present day companies, it is also used specifically to refer to companies with this business model during the late 1990s. Many of these startups formed to take advantage of the surplus of venture capital funding. Many were launched with very thin business plans, sometimes with nothing more than an idea and a catchy name. The stated goal was often to "get big fast" i.e. capture a majority share of whatever market was being entered. The exit strategy usually included an IPO and a large payoff for the founders.

Others were existing companies that re-styled themselves as Internet companies, many of them legally changing their names to incorporate a .com suffix.

After the crash, many of the surviving firms dropped the .com from their names.

Reasons of the failure.

1. Weak site design- The site should provide easy or friendly interface to customers. Merely poor design won't attract customer, not even a click on it.
2. Inadequate site usability-"Web usability," a concept that has gained a lot of ground in the past year, is all about making the right first impression. More than having a good web site design, your site must be both useful and usable for your audience. Your site must perform the function for which it was designed, with the minimal amount of user frustration, time and effort.
3. Obstacles to shopping- Besides good interface, you must provide a freedom to let the customer to do shopping online rather than ask them ask too much personal information as soon as they drop by your site.
   
4. Lack of comprehensive shopping- There is no truth to the "if you build it, they will come" notion on the Web. There are millions of web sites on the Web, and you need to create a reason and way for customers to come and visit your site. More than just customer "eyeballs," you need to be able to convert their visit to actual sales.
5. Poor customer service- Customers are always right and we open business to welcome customer to buy product so both customers and ourselves happy about it. Treat your customers badly and you can be sure that they will never visit your site again.
6. Wrong product fit- As e-commerce expands, there is one basic tenet that you should understand: not all products can be sold online. Many dot-coms had the mistaken notion that they can sell anything and everything on the Internet, only to realize that it just not true. Some products lend well to this medium, but there are many products that are hard, if not impossible, to sell on the Internet.
7. Failure to prepare for success- Once you have your e-commerce site up and running, with good traffic levels and high sales conversion rates, your next concern will be preparing for your growth. Success on the Internet can come quickly - if you are lucky and do things right - that you may find yourself ill prepared to handle the growth.
8. Slow and faulty fulfillment- You open a site to do business, that means you also need to satisfy the customer's' needs. If the customer wants the product delivered on time, then do it right. Products delivered late can destroy customer loyalty and thwart any remaining willingness to repurchase from your site.
9. Failure to specialize- Your level of capitalization will dictate the focus of your online business. If you are able to get investors to finance your business, you can target a broader product category for your business. You can aim to be like Wal-Mart of the retail world, or the Amazon.com of the Internet.
10. Failure to consider security as top priority- Security should be a top priority even before your site goes live.

Revenue model for google, Ebay,amazon

To be short, Google earns from advertising which related to Internet search, web-based e-mail, online mapping, office productivity, social networking, and video sharing as well as selling the advertising-free versions.

The Google’s revenue model are Google Adwords and Google Adsense. Google Adwords is a pay per click advertising program of Google designed. It is to allow the advertisers to present their advertisements to people at the moment the people are looking for information, which related to what the advertiser has offer.

Adsense is an ad serving program, which is run by the Google, Google Adsense. The website owners can enroll to the program to enable text, image, and video advertisements on their sites. Revenue is generated on a per-click or the per-thousand-ads-displayed basis. The ads are administered by Google. The Google advertisers are required to pay the Google a fee, on each time a user clicks on one of their ads displayed on the web sites

Amazon is different from Google since Amazon sells lots of goods by internet and most income are from goods sold. Google's income are from advertisement. Amazon is the first Major company sells goods by internet which the Amazon is completely e-commerce company.

eBay is an online auction and shopping web site that the people and businesses buy and sell goods and services worldwide. eBay also owns Paypal and skype. Paypal is a online transaction which the customer need not to disclose his/her credit card number. More security i would say, since if your credit card number hacked, God Bless You!! Back to the topic, since eBay is an online auction, that means you can bid the price online. is it? Well i not actually familiar with it.

How E-Commerce helps in reduce time cycle...etc

How e-commerce reduces time cycle time, improve employee’s empowerment and facilitate customer support.
How e-commerce helps suppliers and customers?

Through e-commerce, customer may able to communicate with supplier through the supplier’s web site and do a stock order online. Let’s say, the customer wants to buy a laptop, he can surf online to dell web site to order or to customize the laptop according to his preferences. After finish customization, the product will finish as soon as possible and all the customer needs to do is prepare enough cash to buy it or even use credit cards.

With e-commerce, customer direct communicate with supplier and all the middle man or retailer are completely eliminated which called disintermediation. With this, customer can purchase at a cheaper price and supplier can earn more than sell to retailer which is B2B, business to business.
Another how e-commerce helps supplier is create a communication system between suppliers and manufacturer. Example is supplyworks. SupplyWorks has one focus – to help manufacturers profitably satisfy customer demand by optimizing direct materials procurement and replenishment.

Today's manufacturers face competition on a global scale, along with continuous customer demands for lower prices, higher quality, and greater responsiveness. In answer to these pressures, the trend has been to source a larger and larger proportion of content from third-parties. But as suppliers become the critical link in profitably satisfying customer demand, manufacturers are faced with the challenge of efficiently managing the global procurement and replenishment of thousands of different parts and materials from hundreds or even thousands of suppliers.

SupplyWorks MAX On-Demand was designed specifically to meet this challenge by enabling manufacturers to communicate and collaborate more efficiently with suppliers, to respond more quickly to changes in customer demand, and to optimize the flow of parts and materials in lean and demand-driven supply chains. By understanding and supporting the needs of both buyer and supplier, SupplyWorks is helping today’s leading manufacturers to achieve measurable financial benefits by dramatically improving their supply network performance.


SupplyWorks MAX is a complete Web-based On-Demand suite for the procurement and replenishment of direct materials. It has been designed to help manufacturers achieve several key business objectives:

Reduce raw materials inventory levels without sacrificing responsivenessor creating shortages. By optimizing procurement and replenishment activities, SupplyWorks users have lowered RMI levels by as much as 30% while actually improving customer responsiveness.

Improve supplier visibility to manufacturing requirements and demand fluctuations, thereby reducing the need for expediting as well as helping your suppliers to lower their costs. SupplyWorks users have reduced their expenditures on premium freight by 30% or more and lowered their cost of goods sold.

Respond more quickly to customer demand. By improving demand visibility and supplier collaboration, SupplyWorks MAX has helped our users to achieve as much as a 25% reduction in supplier lead times.

Achieve material sourcing and cost reduction goals. By facilitating enterprise-wide execution against negotiated agreements and quantity discounts, SupplyWorks users convert negotiated and identified savings into actual savings and reduced cost of goods sold.

The history and evolution of e-commerce

E-commerce was first developed in the early 1970s with innovation such as electronic funds transfer (EFT), whereby funds routed electronically from one organization to another. E-commerce grew steadily throughout the 1980’s. It was during the time people started to use credit cards on a regular basis. However, the term ‘e-commerce’ was not referring to the type of business that we know today. For most people, the term refers to transactions, which take place completely through the web. When you search for an item on sites such as eBay or Amazon and then pay with credit card or online banking, you are conducting e-commerce that most people think of when the term comes up. That was not possible until the average person began to use the Internet in the 1990’s.

Two things happened in the mid-1990 to make this kind of e-commerce a possibility. First, computer security was strengthened enough to make consumers and businesses feel comfortable when conducting these types of transactions online. Second, the average people are more familiar with the web and started using it for daily activities such as online shopping. In 1995, Amazon.com was launched and we really started seeing the type of e-commerce that we are used to today.

However, there are several factors that inhibited the growth of the online business currently. For example, there are many people did not have high speed Internet in their homes, so online shopping tended to be limited to what could be done in the workplace. Additionally, many small businesses invested too much money in creating a web presence and they were not able to sustain that development due to lack of funds. At the turn of the twenty first century, the dot-com bust happened and many of these businesses went broke.

Year	Event
1984	EDI, or electronic data interchange, was standardized through ASC X12. This guaranteed that companies would be able to complete transactions with one another reliably.
1992	Compuserve offers online retail products to its customers. This gives people the first chance to buy things off their computer.
1994	Netscape arrived. Providing users a simple browser to surf the Internet and a safe online transaction technology called Secure Sockets Layer.
1995	Two of the biggest names in e-commerce are launched: Amazon.com and eBay.com.
1998	DSL, or Digital Subscriber Line, provides fast, always-on Internet service to subscribers across California. This prompts people to spend more time, and money, online.
1999	Retail spending over the Internet reaches $20 billion, according to Business.com.
2000	The U.S government extended the moratorium on Internet taxes until at least 2005.

ViNceNt hEr3 ^^

Hello, I am Tan Boon Chun, you all can call me as Vincent. Currently I am studying in University Tunku Abdul Rahman, Year 3 Semester 1 with major in Accounting. I am 21 years old and come from Ulu Yam Baru, Selangor.

Normally after school time, I like to surf internet for searching information for updating my knowledge every time. This is because I must keep myself with the trend in around the world. Other than that, I also a super crazy football fan of Manchester United, every weekend you all can search me in D’Chola Restaurant.

Since I like to surf internet, there are some websites I like to visit Yahoo, Cari Forum, Manchester United official website, Friendster, and Youtube. I use Yahoo for check mail and reading some news. Cari forum used for leaving some comment at there with some issue I interested. Then for manutd.com, which is the website I like to visit as I can get the news of the club anytime. Friendster, the number of user has reach to 70 million around the world. It helps me to reconnect with my old friend and also know the new friend from other places of the world. While I boring, I can visit Youtube for watching some funny, interested video.

That is all for me, you can add me in MSN as vincent_tan87@hotmail.com ~

About me.

Myself as Wong Chee Onn, prefer called David currently persuing in University Tunku Abdul Rahman year 3 sem 1 with major in Accounting. Before UTAR, i was a KTAR graduate in Sabah. Not to mention that, my hometown is in Sabah, Kota Kinabalu (KK).

Well my hobby last time was basketball, i quit it since my wrist hurt. And lucky i found another hobby past few years, many male youths should know this, it is DOTA.

What i hate most is petrol price rises again. With each sen rises, i need to consider to save money to drive far or spend more on petrol. Can anyone out there do anything to lower the petrol price. We have road closed down last few days and i voice out is not i like chaos or havoc is because our consumers' struggle with low paid salaries.

That all about me. yoroshiku.

Now proceed to the top 5 web sites i visit the most. There are yahoo.com , friendster.com , youtube.com , tudou.com and utar.edu.my. Now i briefly explain why i like to visit those sites. For yahoo.com, where i can find interesting news such as science and political issue such as Obama VS Clinton. Next friendster.com, needless to say is for friend and most of you know about it. And then youtube.com and tudou.com are just an entertainment for me to watch dramas and interesting video. Utar site where we must logged in especially during the result. That all about it. Thanks for viewing.