The application of 3rd party certification programme in Malaysia

Tuesday, February 3, 2009



Third party is called as certificate authorities (CAs), who issue digital certificate to provide verification that your website does indeed represent your company. One of the application of third party certification programme in Malaysia is MSC Trustgate.com Sdn. Bhd. It is a licensed Certification Authority (CA) operating within the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC). It is incorporated in 1999 under the Digital Signature Act 1997 (DSA). It offers complete security solutions for individuals, organizations, government, and e-commerce service providers by digital certificates, encryption and decryption.

The objective of MSC Trustgate is to secure the open network communications from both locally and across the ASEAN region. The products and services provided by Trustgate are SSL Certificate, Managed PKI, Personal ID, MyTRUST, MyKAD ID, SSL VPN, Managed Security Services, VeriSign Certified Training and Application Development. The vision of Trustgate is to enable organizations to conduct their business securely over the internet, as much as what they have been enjoying in the physical world.


Digital certificate usually attach to an e-mail message or an embedded program in a web page that verifies that user or website is who they claim to be. The common functions of a digital certificate are user authentication, encryption and digital signatures. User authentication provides other security than using username and password. Its session management is stronger. Encryption can make the data transmission secured by using the information encrypted. The intended recipient of the data is only person to receive the message. Digital signatures are like the hand signature in the digital world. It can ensure the integrity of the data.

Why is the 3rd party certification needed? The reason is there are threats of internet security spreading over the net nowadays. For example, with the increase of phishing on the internet; customers want to make sure that whether they are dealing business with a trusted party. They are afraid of their personal information such as ID number, passwords, credit card numbers and so on, will be sent to those companies which do not exist in this real world. Thus, the certification from 3rd party is needed to ensure their information traveled over the Internet reaches the intended recipients and is safe.

Beside that, those parties are needed because they can provide e-mail protection and validation, secure online shopping carts and more services in order to avoid being spammed, hacked and attacked by the macilious software such as virus, trojan horse and worms.

In conclusion, by using 3rd party application, all the users or customers can have more safeguard to shop online without afraid of their personal information being used by other people in the internet. The confidentiallity of customers towards the internet will also be enhanced and the company can be protected.
The Official Website of MSC Trustgate

An example of an E-Commerce failure and its causes


Story of Webvan

Webvan was an online “credit and delivery” grocery business. Webvan tried to have a total customer satisfaction model that involving a 30 minute window delivered products to customers' homes after their choosing.It was founded in the late 1990s by Louis Borders who also co-founded the Borders bookstore in 1971. Webvan's original investors included Goldman Sachs and Yahoo!, who encouraged Webvan to rapidly build its own infrastructure to deliver groceries in a number of cities. It was headquartered in Foster City, California, USA which near Silicon Valley. It offered service in ten U.S. markets such as Los Angeles, Chicago and Portland. The company had originally hoped to expand to 26 cities. However, Webvan went bankrupt in 2001.

What causes Webvan failure?

While Webvan was popular, the management used the money spent on infrastructure that far exceeded sales growth. Furthermore the company eventually ran out of money. For example: Webvan placed a $1 billion (USD) order with engineering company Bechtel to build its warehouses, bought a fleet of delivery trucks, purchased 30 Sun Microsystems Enterprise 4500 servers, dozens of Compaq ProLiant computers and several Cisco System model 7513 and 7507 routers, as well as more than 80 21-inch ViewSonic color monitors and at least 115 Herman Miller Aeron chairs which over $800 per each. Besides, some journalists and analysts blamed that none of Webvan's senior executives (or major investors) had any management experience in the supermarket industry such as CEO George Shaheen who had resigned. On the other hand, the ineffective customer services such as failed to deliver the order on time. This will make customer has a negative impression to Webvan. Some of the comments from the customer will also lead people put less confident to buy products from Webvan. These are some of the factors made Webvan went bankrupt in 2001.

In conclusion, e-commerce companies in order to avoid failure should have useful of business strategies which are 4P’s (product, price, promotion and place), organizational structure, customer relationship and sensitive to the external factors such as technological and competitive environment.

A success story of E-Commerce and its causes

Monday, February 2, 2009



There are a lot of successful stories of e-commerce in business world today. One of the most successes is e-bay. eBay is a company which started in year 1995 to connect hundreds of millions of people around the world every day, empowering them to explore new opportunities and innovate together.
Despite differences in language, culture and economic status, people around the world are united in their fundamental need to connect, discover and interact with each other.People seek fulfillment of these basic needs in their day-to-day activities. As we explore, learn, shop, share and talk with each other, we are also aspiring toward a more emotionally satisfying experience as human beings.
eBay's original vision was to create the world's first global economic democracy. We saw a "people's market" in which anyone in the world could sell or buy just about anything for a fair price. And today on the eBay marketplace, trust, honesty and efficiency are rewarded more than size or status.
eBay has built an online person-to-person trading community on Internet, using the World Wide Web. Buyers and sellers are brought together in a manner where sellers are permitted to list items for sale and the buyers are allowed to bid on the items which they are interested on. All eBay users can browse through listed items in a fully automated way. The items are arranged by topics, where each type of auction has its own category. They are having both streamlined and globalised traditional person-to-person trading. Their facility is easy for the buyers to explore and enables the sellers list an item for sale immediately within minutes of registering. The binding contract of the auction is between the winning bidder and the seller only.

Causes of success

According to the spokesperson of eBay, Kevin Pursglove, he thinks that people really enjoy the experience of the shopping bazaar. He also thinks that the buyers are enjoying the hunt and the competition of the bidding process. Everybody likes to get a bargain and they would like to negotiate a little bit over the price. So eBay auction format can allows users to do so.
Furthermore, the great majority of people who are selling on eBay are really warm, decent, trustworthy and honest people. Therefore, a lot of people would like to do transactions at eBay. eBay also provide eBay security centre and Pay Pal system to ensure all the transactions are in the safety condition. Other than that, eBay might be the first example where a commerce site has actually been built around a society where people exchanging information and also goods, services and merchandise.
references:

The history and evolution of E-commerce

Introduction to the History of E-commerce

By definition, e-commerce means the buying or selling of goods and services over the Internet. From the research we found that there are 66 percent of the adults online have purchased something over the Internet, whether it's books, shoes but the the number of adults who participate in e-commerce jumps to 93 percent if we extend e-commerce's definition to include researching products and services online without buying anything, or bidding on an online auction but not winning.Even with a slumping global economy, online retail sales continue to rise. According to recent forecasts by Forrester Research, online retail sales will increase 17 percent in 2008 to reach an annual total of $204 billion, with the biggest sellers being clothing, computers and cars.

The evolution of E-commerce

As far back as the 1960s, businesses were using primitive computer networks to conduct electronic transactions.Using something called Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), a company's computer system could share business documents -- invoices, order forms, shipping confirmation with another company's computer. In the beginning, each company had its own standards for formatting these documents.

But in 1979, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) came up with something called ASC X12, a universal standard for sharing business documents over electronic networks.

By the early 1980s, individual computer users -- still mostly at major research universities -- were sending e-mails, participating in listservs and newsgroups, and sharing documents over networks like BITNET and USENET.

CompuServe was one of the first popular networking services for home PC users, providing tools like e-mail, message boards and chat rooms. In the mid-1980s, Compuserve added a service called the Electronic Mall, where users could purchase items directly from 110 online merchants .While the Electronic Mall wasn't a huge success, it was one of the first examples of e-commerce as we know it today.

In 1990, a researcher named Tim Berners-Lee at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN, from its French name) proposed a hypertext-based web of information that a user could navigate using a simple interface called a browser. He called it the "WorldWideWeb". And in 1991, the National Science Foundation lifted a ban on commercial businesses operating over the Internet, paving the way for Web-based e-commerce.

In 1993, Marc Andreesen at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) introduced the first widely distributed Web browser called Mosaic. Netscape 1.0's release in 1994 included an important security protocol called Secure Socket Layer (SSL) that encrypted messages on both the sending and receiving side of an online transaction. SSL ensured that personal information like names, addresses and credit card numbers could be encrypted as they passed over the Internet.

In 1994 and 1995, the first third-party services for processing online credit card sales began to appear.First Virtual and CyberCash were two of the most popular. Also in 1995, a company called Verisign began developing digital IDs, or certificates, that verified the identity of online businesses. Soon, Verisign switched its focus to certifying that a Web site's e-commerce servers were properly encrypted and secure.

The two most successful e-commerce merchant

In July 1995, Jeff Bezos boxed up the first book ever sold on Amazon.com from his Seattle garage. Within its first 30 days of business, the self-proclaimed "Earth's largest bookstore" sold books to online shoppers in all 50 U.S. states and 45 countries.With Amazon, Bezos tapped into a powerful new e-commerce market. Amazon went public in 1997, and as the dot-com boom reached its pinnacle in 1999, Bezos was named Time's "Person of the Year." Amazon has expanded its offerings beyond books. It currently offers music, movies, electronics, toys, home and garden equipment, clothing, jewelry, video games and digital downloads.

Pierre Omidyar, a software programmer, started coding a simple Web site he called AuctionWeb. Omidyar was curious if people would use the Internet to bid on each other's used items. Looking around for something to sell, Omidyar picked up a broken laser pointer. Within a day, it had sold for $14.83. Omidyar e-mailed the buyer to make sure the guy knew it was broken. The buyer's response? "I'm a collector of broken laser pointers". Welcome to eBay.

eBay leveled the e-commerce playing field. You didn't have to be a Web entrepreneur or an existing business to sell things online. All you had to do was raid your attic, post a listing, and there was a good chance that someone, somewhere, would pay money for your old junk. In 1996, with two full-time employees, eBay sold $7.2 million worth of goods. By 1997, with the help of a Beanie Babies frenzy, eBay sold $95 million in goods. In 2007, eBay sold $52.5 billion in auctions, had more than 220 million registered users and 13,000 employees.

Both eBay and Amazon paved the way for today's e-commerce merchant. Consumers can buy almost anything online, including shoes, home goods and even a real shark's tooth. Just type "unusual items for sale" in a search engine, and see what comes up.

http://www.amazon.com/
http://www.ebay.com/
http://communication.howstuffworks.com
http://www.muslim-programers.com

How E-Commerce can reduce cycle time, improve employees’ empowerment and facilitate customer support




Electronic commerce on the Internet -- e-commerce, for short -- may not revolutionize the petroleum industry. But it's already changing the way the industry does business.

E-Commerce is basically an electronic system that enables all the suppliers, manufacturers or even the consumers to sell or purchase the products or services through a convenient ways. Besides that, they also can communicate through this web site.




Cycle time is the total time from the beginning to the end of your process, as defined by you and your customer. Cycle time includes process time, during which a unit is acted upon to bring it closer to an output, and delay time, during which a unit of work is spent waiting to take the next action. E-commerce can reduce cycle time by eliminating the time taken to process in between supplier, intermediaries and customers. Through e-commerce, the customer can directly order the material needed no matter in what time zone and wherever they are with an access to the internet, because the e-commerce website is operate 7-24-365, hence the customer no need to wait until the shop is operate. E-commerce reduces time taken from shipping, inventory level, it also shortens the time taken to verify registration, account entry and transaction authorization.



E-commerce can improve employees' empowerment. Employee empowerment can be described as giving employees’ responsibility and authority to make decisions about their work without supervisory approval. Since internet is growing rapidly nowadays, employees can access to internet conveniently to search the information that they required so as enable them to make decision about their job. In other ways, employee can work from anywhere at any time whenever they like. This is because through accessing the internet they can do everything online. It is more flexibility to employee. Productivity eventually increases in these circumstances.



Moreover, customer demands are improving from days to days. Traditional ways of doing business seem not really applicable for the current situation. They required for more sophisticate and efficiency ways of dealing with their daily demand. E-commerce is a way where the firm can fulfill every customer with their different demands and requirements. Nowadays, everyone is more emphasizing on the quality of services than the physical product. This is because the customer is willing to have a better service than have a bad service. Ordinary customer required more than what the web page provide, they required immediate response for their request. For examples, FedEx and other shippers allow customers to trace the status of their packages. Using Customer relationship management (CRM) methods, customers can order online more easily, check their orders and accounts, and collaborate with the company better.



INFI space Group Members

Thursday, January 22, 2009
This is our group members of INFI Space.

From left to right: Soon Ching( David ), Hooi Sien( Sien ), Hau Yee( Hau Yee ), Chee Han( Ryan )

Myself (ryan)

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Myself (ryan)

My name is Lee Chee Han, you can also called me as ryan. I am come from batu pahat, Johor. Actually, there is nothing much to say about me. I am just as simple as others that like playing the online game and just online to search for new information.

After STPM, I choose UTAR to further study, because its fees will be cheaper than others private university. I feel that Entrepreneurship will be quite boring because all subjects were base on theoretical. However, it was quite interesting while having friend around, doing research and practical it such as start up the small business in third year. So that is so much about me.

The top 5 websites that I used to surf are:
1. www.hotmail.com ( check mail and share the special information to my friend.)
2. www.facebook.com ( online to play some flash game and to know more friend that come from different country.)
3. www.friendster.com ( check on how my friend’s life especially my secondary school friend.)
4. www.google.com ( it will be my search engine for doing research purpose and learning the new knowledge.)
5. www.sinchew.com ( it can provide me a lot of news that happen in local and international.)

The top 5 internet activities that I do are:
1. Check and send the mail to my friend.
2. To search any information at anytime.
3. Playing the online game to idle away the free time.
4. To listen the latest music and share it to my friend.
5. To view the interesting clip, photo or information that share by others peoples.
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