WordPress Guru Skypes into NYU Class
Posted on | December 6, 2010 | No Comments
OK, so he is one of our own, but it doesn’t diminish Tony Zeoli‘s commitment to WordPress since its early days. Tony skyped in our Digital Media Management class last Thursday night to talk about WordPress, the open source blogging turned content management system increasingly being used by corporeals and corporations alike. WordPress is currently being used for some 12% of the top million websites according to an interview with its founder, Matt Mullenweg.
Anthony Zeoli
What started out as simple weblog software designed to simplify the creation and maintenance of blogs has turned into a web content publishing and management system that is powered by PHP, a general-purpose scripting language and MySQL, a relational database management system (RDBMS). WordPress is supported by a wide community of designers and programmers that has continued to improve its capabilities for personal or large-scale publishing with their focus on design aesthetics, publisher usability and web standards.
Zeoli is now the lead developer at the Reese Felts Newsroom at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Anthony J. Pennings, PhD has been on the NYU faculty since 2001 teaching digital media, information systems management, and global communications.
Tags: Anthony Zeoli > Matt Mullenweg > MySQL > PHP > Reese Felts Newsroom > Tony Zeoli > WordPress
Addressing Game Addiction
Posted on | December 2, 2010 | No Comments
SEOUL (AFP) – South Korea’s government is close to adopting a “Cinderella” law to ban youngsters from playing online games past midnight amid growing concerns about Internet addiction, officials said Thursday.
A bill to be submitted to parliament as early as this month will require South Korean online game companies to cut off services at midnight for users registered as younger than 16, the culture and family ministries said.
Digital Distribution and the Future of Publishing
Posted on | December 1, 2010 | No Comments
Digital distribution, the electronic transport of media content by streaming or downloading, is a substantial area of growth for e-commerce and looks to significantly impact the future of publishing.
A Major Trend
Digital distribution has already been a major influence on the sales of music, movies, games, and the sharing of user-generated content. Music downloads from sites such as Apple’s iTunes continue to challenge CDs for sales dominance. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) recently said that digital music purchases would account for one-quarter of all worldwide sales during 2010. In addition, movie services like NetFlix dominant the distribution of DVDs via a mail-order e-commerce platform and increasingly stream films and documentaries from their computer servers directly to consumer PCs.
Cable TV and Telcos are also providing the digital distribution of video content via their on-demand services, while YouTube.com provides a fascinating arena of user-generated content. The game business, which has surpassed the film industry recently in terms of total sales, also distributes many games digitally directly to PCs or video game consoles. News and informational content such as periodicals and magazines have also moved to the Internet, although their viability has been questioned. Will the new mobile devices provide the difference?
The iPad and the Future of Digital Publishing
With newly available devices such as Amazon’s wireless reading device called Kindle and Barnes and Noble’s Nook, we can expect increased sales of digitally distributed publications. I already buy most of my books via the Kindle store but mainly to read on my Android-based cellphone.
Apple’s iPad has garnered first-mover advantage in the area of digital publishing, providing the technical environment, if not the business model for the future of newspapers and advertisements. Sir Richard Branson of the Virgin empire talked to media this morning about their new publication called “Project” on the iPad.
“Sadly for physically printed products, I think the future is in apps,” Branson told CNN.
Anthony J. Pennings, PhD has been on the NYU faculty since 2001 teaching digital media, information systems management, and global communications.
Tags: Digital distribution > International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) > iPad > Richard Branson > Virgin Media
Digital Destruction
Posted on | November 30, 2010 | No Comments
I was talking with a woman the other day whose husband is losing her job because “films don’t use film anymore.” Yes, I responded, another case of digital destruction.
She was intrigued by the term, so we discussed it a bit more. I take no credit for coming up with the name, but the conversation did make me wonder how I picked up the term and how it should be used. Of course I was familiar with theJoseph Schumpeter’s notion of “creative destruction” is used often by free-market economists to rationalize the economic penalties of new innovations. The term was coined by Joseph Schumpeter and is mainly associated with Karl Marx, who had used a similar notion to refer to the destructive tendencies inherent in capitalism. At the conclusion of our discussion I told her I thought “digital destruction” can help us understand much of what is going on in our current global economy.
Although I have often been quite optimistic about the changes brought on by these technologies at times, I don’t want to discount the destructive aspects of the microprocessor revolution and its impact on real people. As someone who monitors the effects of media and IT, I knew I wanted to pursue this notion of the destructive aspects of digitalization. So this is the start. I created this writing category, and a Google search quickly found the following presentation, which I thought began to address my friend’s situation and provides a powerful array of images.
Ⓒ ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Anthony J. Pennings, PhD is Professor at the Department of Technology and Society, State University of New York, Korea. Originally from New York, he started his academic career Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand before returning to New York to teach at Marist College and spending most of his career at New York University. He has also spent time at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii. When not in the Republic of Korea, he lives in Austin, Texas.
Tags: creative destruction > digital destruction > Joseph Schumpeter > microprocessor revolution
Former Special Assistant to President Obama Talks about Telecom Policy at NYU
Posted on | November 29, 2010 | No Comments
Susan Crawford, a former Special Assistant to President Obama for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy gave a lecture today about the state of telecommunications policy in the United States. Currently she is a professor at Cardozo Law School in New York City and a Visiting Research Collaborator at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. As part of the Evan Korth’s Computers and Society lecture series at NYU, Dr. Crawford addressed a crowd of about 60 people on challenges posed by the Comcast-NBC Universal merger and opposition to the Net Neutrality rules by lobbyists.
What did I take away from the talk? Regulation matters. Deregulation matters. In other words, it matters what stance the government takes on telecommunications issues. For instance, take a look at your cable television bill. That is a result of deregulation.
This was tweeted today Dec 1: FCC’s Chairman Genachowski’s remarks on preserving Internet freedom and openness, streaming at 10:30 a.m. ET at http://fcc.gov/live
Apparently his talk is creating quite a controversy.
Prepared Remarks of
Chairman Julius Genachowski
Washington DC
December 1, 2010
I don’t yet have the video for the talk so I’m going to embed a recent talk by Susan Crawford on Rethinking Broadband at the Personal Democracy Forum 2010.
Citation
Pennings, Anthony J. “Former Special Assistant to President Obama Talks about Telecom Policy at NYU.” Anthony J. Pennings, PhD. 29 Nov. 2010 <https://apennings.com/political-economy-of-media/former-special-assistant-to-president-obama-talks-about-telecom-policy/>.
Anthony J. Pennings, PhD has been on the NYU faculty since 2001 teaching digital media, information systems management, and global communications.
Tags: Comcast-NBC Universal merger > Julius Genachowski > Net Neutrality > Susan Crawford > telecommunications policy
How “STAR WARS” and the Japanese Artificial Intelligence (AI) Threat Led to the Internet, Part II
Posted on | November 28, 2010 | No Comments
This is the second part of my argument about how the Internet changed from a military network to a widescale global network of interconnected networks. It is abstracted from my manuscript on How IT Came to Rule the World and continues the examination of statecraft and its role on the development and impact of computerization and netcentric power.
In Part I of this series I wrote about how the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) or “Star Wars” provided a major funding boost to the development of “artificial intelligence” and particularly the networking capability to connect supercomputers that was a crucial step in transforming an obscure military network into the World Wide Web.
However, it was the Japanese when they announced their intention to take the lead in computer-based AI development that first alarmed US policy-makers. In addition to becoming a major economic and financial threat to the US, the Japanese announcement in 1982 that they intended to make major advances in electronic computing alarmed Washington and particularly the “Atari Democrats” who saw “high technology” as major US strategic objective for the US economy and defensive stance in the world.
The Japanese AI Threat
Along with the threat of nuclear war with the USSR, the other paranoia that spurred US government involvement in new data communications technology was the Congressional 
reaction to Japanese plans to develop artificial intelligence (AI) or as it was termed by Edward Feigenbaum and Pamela McCorduck, the “Fifth Generation.” In their book of the same name (1983) but with the subtitle: Artificial Intelligence and Japan’s Computer Challenge to the World,” they weaved a story about advancements in Japan’s computing and information industry policy. They argued knowledge industries were becoming “The New Wealth of Nations”, a term that originated from Adam Smith’s classic book (1776) An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Japan had already been conceived of as a major trade threat with its automobile industries and electronics such as its Betamax video cassette recorder (VCR) which dominated the market since it was first marketed in 1975. The book caught the attention of concerned Washington policy-makers who set out to work on a legislative response.
By the early 1980s, the US was beginning to experience massive global trade deficits, especially with Japan. They increased rapidly during Reagan’s first years rising from a negative US$28 billion in 1981, to $36 billion in 1982, and to $62 billion in 1983 (rising to US$160 billion in Reagan’s last year, despite a dramatically stronger yen).[1] These were partially sparked by the so-called “Reaganomics” tax cuts and government spending which created domestic demand beyond the manufacturing capabilities of a “deindustrializing” US. Reagan was also a strong proponent of free trade and promised to veto any trade protection legislation. Combined with a major recession, trade deficits started to become a major economic concern for US policymakers and computers were still a major export.
The US government and interested domestic sectors were concerned that Japan was making its way into “value-added” industries including chip-making, computer design, upscale automobiles and financial industries by exploiting certain advantages. It appeared that Japan was aggressively moving towards the more promising high technology areas and pulling out of areas such as basic steel, shipbuilding, and textiles. With a rapidly growing salary base and a heavy reliance on imported oil and other materials, Japan allowed other countries with lower labor and other resource costs to pick up these industries, often with their investment monies. Japanese companies were also seen to have benefited from protected home markets, considerable support by government, superior quality control and a social structure that allowed them to work together more efficiently. Although dismantled after World War II, their corporate structure still retained the legacy of the zaibatsus, “families” of companies organized around a bank that worked together to break into foreign markets and gain market share. They were helped considerably by their banks’ rapid ascendance into the top 20 largest banks in the world.
The US was also concerned that their export industries were led by MITI (Ministry of International Trade and Industry) that conducted extensive market analyses of foreign markets and coordinated trade activities. Japan had became a major export power and their government intervention was coming under increasing scrutiny by the US. Japanese semiconductor manufacturers for example were making inroads into US markets and were being accused of “dumping” them illegally at prices below costs. [2] But it was their threat of developing artificial intelligence system that really struck fear into US lawmakers.
With the establishment of the Institute for New Generation Technology (ICOT) in April 1982, the Japanese announced their interest in developing a new generation of computers that would be intelligent. The new computers would be able to converse with humans in “natural language” and would be able to “learn, associate, make inferences, make decisions, and otherwise behave in ways which we have always considered the exclusive province of human reason.”[3] The new generation would go way beyond the earlier computer generations that were based respectively on electronic vacuum tubes, transistors, integrated circuits, and very large integrated microprocessors (VLSI). The “Fifth Generation” would go beyond VLSI to produce “supercomputers” based on new concepts in parallel architectures, programming languages, storage techniques, and ways of handling symbolic and other non-alphanumerical information. [4]
The fear of the Japan’s entry into the computer and network technologies mobilized the U.S. government to take action during the 1980s to ensure that the technological edge in computerization and data communications stayed with American interests. In the next section, I will examine how Al Gore and the other Atari Democrats “took the initiative to create the Internet.”
Notes
[1] US deficit figures from Daniel Burstein’s (1988) Yen! NY: Simon and Schuster. p. 123.
[2] Japanese “dumping” chips on US markets from Paul Kennedy’s (1987) The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000. NY: Random House.
[3] Edward Feigenbaum and Pamela McCorduck, (1983) The Fifth Generation: Artificial Intelligence and Japan’s Computer Challenge to the World. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. p. 12.
[4] Feigenbaum, E. A. and McCorduck, p. 5.
Citation:
Pennings, Anthony J. “How “STAR WARS” and the Japanese Artificial Intelligence (AI) Threat Led to the Internet, Part II.” Anthony J. Pennings, PhD. Web. 29 Nov. 2010. <https://apennings.com/how-it-came-to-rule-the-world/how-“star-wars”-and-the-japanese-artificial-intelligence-ai-threat-led-to-the-internet-japan/> Date accessed.
Anthony J. Pennings, PhD has been on the NYU faculty since 2001 teaching digital media, information systems management, and global communications.
Tags: Atari Democrats > Fifth Generation > Institute for New Generation Technology (ICOT) > MITI (Ministry of International Trade and Industry)
Towards a Bachelor of Science in Global E-commerce
Posted on | November 28, 2010 | No Comments
A few years ago I was asked to develop a proposal for a BS in Global E-Commerce that I had researching. It has yet to be implemented like the BS in Digital Communications and Media and the BS in Information Systems Management that I created for New York University in 2002, but I always thought the area had potential and was worth exploring. Below is an abridged edition of the proposal.
Preamble
The “Bachelor of Science in Global E-commerce” is designed for those dynamic individuals who recognize that the complex interplay between business acumen, technological expertise, and global knowledge is driving an economic transformation around the world. Along with technical competence – exceptional business, project management, and collaboration skills are needed by modern enterprises to develop and implement global e-commerce strategies.
This undergraduate degree combines foundation business and technology classes with e-commerce classes designed to study actual cases within the global environment. Liberal arts requirements include classes that immerse the student in a wide variety of international economic, political and cultural topics to provide a global perspective to match the growing internationalization of trade in information, products and services.
Some areas in which e-commerce is having a major impact include:
Interactive Advertising
Job Searches
Financial Services
E-Government
E-Auctions
E-Learning
Video Gaming
Interactive TV
Supply Chain Mgt
News/Weather
Sportscasting
Travel/Traffic
Social Networks
B2B Exchanges
Music Distribution
E-Commerce Employment
This degree program prepares students with the business understanding and technical capabilities to find employment with organizations that focus on e-commerce or consider it an important part of their business activities. It has a major focus on the Tri-State area, especially New York City, which was recently ranked as the number one city in the world for global business. The geographical area is also rich with the creative expertise in advertising, public relations and merchandising that are integral areas of engagement for e-commerce professionals. A survey of “global e-commerce” on several Internet job sites listed a large number of relevant positions in the New York area including the following:
E-Commerce Project Manager
E-Commerce Strategy Consultant
VP of E-Commerce, Online Customer Acquisition
International E-Commerce
E-Commerce Web Producer
E-Commerce Coordinator
Director of E-Commerce
E-Commerce Manager
E-Commerce Integration Specialist
Executive Consultant e-Commerce
Sr. Mgr, e-Commerce
Marketing Director, E-Tail
E-Commerce Merchandising / Marketing Manager
e-Commerce Analyst
Internet/E-Commerce Marketing –
Financial Services
E-Commerce Director for
Skincare/Cosmetics Brand
Assistant Manager, E-Commerce
Websphere Commerce Consultant
E-Commerce Marketing Manager:
Strategic & Venture Initiatives
Site Manager, E-commerce Operations
Online Marketing Manager
Interactive Search Manager
e-Commerce Business Analyst
Program Objectives
A graduate of the Bachelor of Science of Global E-Commerce degree will have garnered expertise in the following areas: Management and Collaboration; E-Commerce Marketing and Social Media Strategies; Site Management; as well as Governance and Law. These four areas provide a new and distinct professional identity as well as a set of business, technical and global competences.
Management and Collaboration
Understand how to coordinate and interface with different business units to facilitate ecommerce solutions; Manage remote projects, collaborate with colleagues and partner B2B relations; Understand how to work with development, creative, production, and third party partners/vendors to construct working e-commerce applications; Learn how to work with senior management and Board of Directors to establish current and long range goals, objectives, plans and policies. Finally, engage in ecommerce project monitoring using methodologies such as SDLC waterfall, RAD, JAD, and Agile/Scrum.
E-Commerce Marketing and Social Media Strategies
Learn how to analyze eCommerce traffic patterns, site visits, customer loyalty programs, and email campaigns; Grasp how to research and discern best e-commerce practices within a specific industry; Develop the capacity to specify the functionality and organization of site sections; understand the strengths and weaknesses of social media technologies. Create geo-location and localization features; Develop marketing campaigns using CRM and community management, and advanced search and big data techniques.
E-Commerce Site and Media Management
Develop skills to maintain e-commerce site enhancements lists and provides support and direction to the site production team. Learn how to gather and/or write requirements for e-commerce site enhancements, defining the business goals, the scopes of the project and provide the technical team directions so that they can scope and execute. Ensure security is provided for payments and privacy. Develop the ability to manage teams of web designers and programmers; be able to evaluate various e-payment solutions for both B2B and B2C operations.
Governance and Law
Understand how the complex international legal environment influences intellectual property rights, consumer rights, privacy, and a various types of cybercrimes. Discern how trade policy effectuated by the World Trade Organization and other international organizations can have an impact on e-commerce operations and services. Begin to understand how e-commerce issues are handled by various national sovereignties that vary in their approaches to applicable jurisdiction, cross border coordination and judicial enforcement. Grasp how types of dispute resolution are used to alleviate international e-commerce problems. Understand how different countries specify, regulate, and audit security systems of network and information systems.
Global e-commerce is a dynamic and rapidly expanding sphere of business activity accounting for approximately 15% of global GDP in 2008 and growing at a rate of 4% per quarter at the end of 2010. Employment opportunities in the New York area and beyond will require a unique blend of creative and commercial expertise. As high speed broadband capabilities continue to expand around the world, new users will continue to take advantage of this telecommunications-based system of social networks, user-created content and electronic catalogs of consumer appliances and products. The challenge will be to create a new set of university graduates that can help to design and manage the future electronic environment of these digital services in the global economy.
Citation APA (7th Edition)
Pennings, A.J. (2010, Nov 28). Towards a Bachelor of Science in Global E-Commerce. apennings.com https://apennings.com/global-e-commerce/towards-a-bachelor-of-science-in-global-e-commerce/
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Anthony J. Pennings, PhD is a Professor at the Department of Technology and Society, State University of New York, Korea. From 2002-2012 was on the faculty of New York University where he managed BS degrees in Information Systems Management, Digital Communications and Media, and a MS in Systems and Management. He also taught comparative political economy and digital economics. He lives in Austin, Texas, when not in the Republic of Korea.
Tags: Bachelor of Science in Global E-commerce > E-Auctions > e-commerce strategies > E-Commerce Strategy Consultant > E-Commerce Web Producer > E-Government > World Trade Organization
Dominant and Emerging Models of Global E-Commerce
Posted on | November 24, 2010 | No Comments
The term “e-commerce” provokes connotations of computer users “surfing” the web and using their credit cards to make online purchases. While this has been the popular conception and will continue to drive strong e-commerce sales for the retail sector, other technologies and business models will also be important. E-commerce is as dynamic as the technologies and creative impulses involved and can be expected to morph and expand in concert with new innovations.
Unlike the traditional business model that aims to mass-market products and services to passive consumers by manipulating their perceptions and buying behaviors, the e-commerce “e-retail” or “e-tail” model strives to personalize marketing strategies with interactive and rich media technologies, giving the online buyer a crucial say in the dialogue among producers and consumers via more informed choices and opportunities to provide detailed feedback. The communication phenomenon termed “social media” is calling into question traditional e-commerce and media models and calling for new strategies and skills to conduct successful commercial and grassroots operations.
Social media uses the web to empower and mobilize individual choices and opinions through online applications and platforms that allow people to converse, collaborate, publish and share media content. These new online environments provide people with tools to join and build communities with shared ideals and missions. While the earliest tools included blogs, bookmark sharing, forums, podcasts, tagging and wikis; new applications available through platforms like Facebook, hulu, Second Life, Twine, and Xbox Live suggest that the creative capacities of social media are only beginning to be explored.
E-commerce technologies are now transcending geographical limitations, expanding the reach of market/product information and introducing new levels of price competition to millions of new customers. The traditional business model limited markets within geographical constraints, relying on large production runs of uniform products and hiding important cost and pricing information to maximize producer advantage. E-commerce takes advantage of network effects, where the value of goods and services increase the more people use it. Examples included the telephone and fax, and in the web world Facebook has shown its value increases with its growing ubiquity. But other aspects of network effects show that indirect or social network effects provide value via influential individuals and groups. The globalization of the Internet in the 1990s has provided a massive communication and distribution system where even smaller niches take advantage of the “long tail” of increasingly efficient and cost-effective storage systems to provide less popular digital products to specific users.
E-commerce continues to have a major impact on the commercial and communicative relationships between businesses, what is often called B2B electronic commerce. This involves some aspect or combination of the following: collaborative design and production processes; e-procurement and reverse auctions; direct sales and customer relationship management (CRM). B2B e-commerce involve the coordination of supply chains that can span the globe; transporting and storing raw materials, work-in-process inventories, and moving finished goods from point-of-origin to point-of-consumption. B2B is likely to be one of the most promising aspects of global e-commerce as it not only provides revenues but cost-saving efficiencies.
Anthony J. Pennings, PhD has been on the NYU faculty since 2001 teaching digital media, information systems management, and global communications.
Tags: e-tail > global e-commerce > m-commerce > social media
Referencing this Material
About Me
Professor at State University of New York (SUNY) Korea since 2016. Moved to Austin, Texas in August 2012 to join the Digital Media Management program at St. Edwards University. Spent the previous decade on the faculty at New York University teaching and researching information systems, digital economics, and strategic communications.
You can reach me at:
apennings70@gmail.com
anthony.pennings@sunykorea.ac.kr
About me
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