CoRpoRate BloGging : A New Marketing Communication Tool for Companies

Corporations are increasingly looking for opportunities to make them stand out in order to maintain a competitive edge. Although traditional media serves a medium to disseminate company message to the world but it ain't not enough as it lacks the ability to directly connect with a company to its customers. Thus, here comes the CORPORATE BLOG which represents the company's values, beliefs, philosophy and direction. Corporate blog can be categorised into 2 types; internal and external.

Internal Blog

A weblog whereby all the employee can view and accessed through the corporation's Intranet. It encourages employee participation. All the employee may also free to discuss any issues as well as to build rapport with one another. Besides that, it also may encourage collective intelligence. This is crucial for an organisation as employees are able to generate their own point of view which in turn may help out the organisation for improvement. In addition, it may be a source of direct communication between various layers of an organisation.

External Blog

A weblog where company employees, teams, or spokespersons share their views. It is often used to announce new products and services to the public. From here, company can get feedback and suggestion from customers about the new product being introduced. The blog is also flexible enough to allow a conversation and sharing of idea about the company products. Next, corporate blog creates opportunites for the company to meet its prospective customers. In short, corporate blog enables company to connect with their customers, to build trust, and resulting in strengthen the relationship between customers and company.

As a conclusion, corporate blogging is crucial for a company. It can expand a business to the entire world through blogging. However, there are some drawbacks where the company has to be aware of.

Top 10 Corporate Blogs

1. Google

2. Adobe

3. Flickr

4. Facebook

5. Yahoo! Search

6. Dell

7. Digg

8. Linkedln

9. Ask

10. General Motors

Related link :

A Guide to Corporate Blogging

How to Saveguard Our Personal and Financial Data?

Some people think that financial security only relate to a well-refunded retirement plan, a good health insurance or the sufficiency of income to meet their expenses. However, the meaning of financial security brings us to further than that. Today, financial security is also means protecting your privacy and knowing that you are safeguarded against crimes that could rob your money, your good credit rating and even your identity.

As science has spawned new and exciting technologies, from online shopping to mobile payment, it has opened up new opportunities for frauds and swindles, from computer hacking to identity theft. Every year, consumers and financial institutions lose millions of dollars to credit cards and debit card theft by unauthorized users pretending to be legitimate users of the cards. It may not possible to stop this fraudulent activity entirely, but it is possible to protect your personal and financial data by taking proper safeguard.

To safeguard your personal and financial data, you SHOULD always:

• Install a firewall - This is a software program that blocks unauthorized users to access your data. Majority of the new computers come up with firewalls integrated into their operating systems. Unless you are using a older computer or dial up, in such case, you may need to buy a firewall separately and install it by yourself. Click this link for more understanding on firewalls.

• Install and update antispyware and antivirus programs - Protecting your data against viruses and Trojan Horses that may steal or modify your data on your own computer. Besides, many operating offer automatic updates, you should turn it on as it is available for you.
  

• Lock your access - Use a strong password or pass-phrase to protect access your confidential data.

• Limit transportation and transmission of data - Avoid transporting or transmitting your confidential data if not necessary to do so. For instance, transport your confidential data via email.

• Avoid accessing financial information in public - Refrain logging to check your bank balance when you are using the wireless access that offered by the coffee shops.

• Encrypt stored confidential data - Whenever is possible, encrypt stored confidential data, no matter it is stored temporarily or permanently.

In order to protect your privacy now and ever, you should aware the latest fraudulent activity exists and take accurate and consistent prevention against it. It then can lessen dramatically the opportunities of your confidential data being stolen.

Related links:
- http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-budgeting/article/103893/Six-Ways-to-Safeguard-Your-Online-Assets
- http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/tips/ST06-008.html

Prepared by Carrie Hon.

E-Government in Malaysia: Its Implementation So Far and Citizen's Adoption Strategies

When we first mention about e-government, I believe that most people will connect and associate it with the new online income tax return system, namely e-filling. Nonetheless, the term e-government actually encompasses a much broader scope in which the government strives to improve its internal operation, provide information and services to the public more conveniently and efficiently, enhance the accessibility and quality of interactions with the public in all different kinds of departments. Since the launching of Malaysia Super Corridor (MSC) in 1996, the implementation of e-government in Malaysia has jumped start and gathered pace as it is seen as one of the seven flagship applications of MSC to move Malaysia into the Information Age.

Briefly, the 7 pilot projects of our nation’s e-government flagship applications include:

1) Project Monitoring System – Monitor the entire lifecycle of the country’s national developmental programs.

2) Human Resources Management Information System – provide consolidated HR data such as best global HP practices for Malaysian Public Service

3) Generic Office Environment – a powerful web-based office management tool providing users the solutions to effectively and efficiently manage their office environment.

4) Electronic Procurement – enable suppliers to advertise, present pricing, process orders and deliveries and ultimately to sell goods and services to the government.

5) Electronic Services – allow public to conduct transactions with government agencies such as Road Transport Department and utilities companies such as TNB.

E.g. http://www.myeg.com.my/

6) Electronic Labour Exchange – one-stop-center for labor market information.

7) E-syariah – a case management system to improve the services of Syariah Courts.

During the early years of e-government implementation in Malaysia, as in accordance to a survey carried out by market information group TNS in 2003, citizen adoption is growing but at a slow pace. For instance, as shown in the study, about 15% of Malaysians have used online government services in 2003 as compared to 12% in 2002. Furthermore, Malaysia is ranked 25 out of 32 countries in terms of e government usage growth. Such slow growth rate can be attributed to inhibiting factors such as lack of public awareness, IT literacy, and citizen’s perceived security and privacy risks. Specifically, citizens are generally concerned about the security of e-services transactions as they are fearful that their credit card or banks account details are intercepted. In addition, privacy concern is also a major issue as citizens are worried that their specific personal information would be exploited by companies, government agencies and so forth.

Nonetheless, in the past few years, the government has been undertaking various initiatives to overcome the barriers of e-government implementation. For example, several cyber laws such as Personal Data Protection 2004 and Electronic Government Activities Act 2007 have been introduced to mitigate the security and data concern. Besides that, numerous advertisements on services such as MyEG have also been rolled out to increase the public awareness about the availability of online road tax renewal, driving license renewal and so forth.

Example of myeg online tax renewal form:

As a result, citizen’s adoption of e-government has been growing positively as according to survey done by Brown University in U.S in 2007, Malaysia was ranked 25 out of 198 countries in terms of international e-government ranking, leapfrogging from 157 in 2005! As evidence, Inland Revenue Board has announced that e-filing of income tax return has increased by 30% to 1.25 million in 2009, gradually increasing from 78,718 (2006) to 538,558 (2007) and 881,387(2008). Source: TheStar

If you’re interested to know more about income tax returns and e-filing, click here.

EleCtrOnic CurReNcy

In these recent years, electronic currency has taken the place of credit cards and become the most popular means of payment on electronic commerce. The main problem causes the decrease usage of credit card is that the purchasers are required to give their personal information and credit card number to merchant or payment service provider when they purchase online. The customers have the feeling of unsecured as they are afraid of losing anonymity and privacy and this contributes to the success of electronic currency.

What is electronic currency? Electronic currency (also known as electronic money) is a money or script transferred electronically. It involves use of computer networks, the internet or digitally stored value systems. Examples of electronic currency which commonly used by public are Hong Kong's Octopus Card and Malaysia’s Touch n Go card. Hong Kong’s Octopus card, for example, can used to pay for public transport and even purchase in offline store. What the users need to do is just simply deposit the money into. After the Octopus Card Limited receives the money, it will deposit into banks, which is similar to debit-card-issuing banks which redeposit the money at central banks.

The advantage of using electronic currency is that, it is totally anonymous whereby the perpetrators are unable to obtain information about customers when the electronic money sent from a customer to a merchant. Besides, electronic currency payment which is working with password operating system is much more secured compared to other payment methods. Anyone who wants to operate it must give the passwords in prior. The password might be the biometric print of user’s finger, signature or others. Thus, if the electronic currency is unfortunately lost or stolen, the perpetrator will not be able to operate it also as he/she does not have the owner’s password. This feature, in turns, helps to enhance the confidence and security of users when using electronic money. In short, electronic money is securer and easier than other payment methods.

On the other hand, there are some drawbacks with the usage of electronic currency as well. For instance, the transfer of electronic money may raise the local issues on how to levy taxes on the users and merchants and the possible ease of money laundering. Furthermore, the usage of electronic currency may tend to a potential macroeconomic effect whereby the shortage of money supplies may occur as the demand for electronic money may exceed the real cash available.

If you are interested to know about electronic currency, feel free to surf the websites as below:
i) Future of Electronic Currency

ii) Electronic Money Development

E-tailing – A review on the post ‘Digital music sales increase 50%’

E-tailing refers to the primary use of Internet as the platform for consumers to shop for goods and services and it can be classified into pure plays and bricks and clicks. Specifically, pure plays retailing involves Internet as the sole medium for transactions and other commercial activities, for examples, Dell and Amazon; whereas brick and clicks, while using Internet to facilitate businesses, still incorporate the traditional use of physical store for goods display.

One of the major examples that depict how e-tailing has transformed consumers’ purchasing method involves the sales of digital music. According to the current trend, digital music is gradually and inevitably replacing the traditional physical album as a mean for consumer to purchase song tracks. For instance, in the first half of year 2007, the sales of digital tracks surged 49% up to USD$ 417.3 million while sales of physical albums have suffered a plunge of 15%. The rise of online music stores such as iTunes and Amazon is expected to further increase the popularity of digital music and on April 3 2008, iTunes store has surpassed Wal-Mart as the largest music retailer in the US, marking an unprecedented record in history that online music has outperformed the physical music format

Apple iPod

In order to further expand the online music market, companies such as Amazon and Apple has initiatedcollaboration with music records such as EMI to sell songs that come without copyright protection (DRM-free) and such moves have enabled consumers to transfer their purchased songs to any computers and music playing devices as well as burn their own CDs freely.

Digital rights management (DRM) is an access control technology which works to ensure compliance with intellectual property in respect of digital content. For example, Fairplay is a DRM technology created by Apple Inc to digitally encrypt audio files to prevent them from being played on unauthorized computers/devices as those files are only playable using QuickTime multimedia software. If you’re interested to know more about how the technology works, here is a useful link. Currently, the collection of DRM-free songs is still relatively limited as major music labels such as Universal Music, Sony BMG, and Warner Music have not advocated to selling unprotected music. This is one of the disadvantages of online music which limit consumers’ option to only a certain playing device.

As online music continues to grow, consumers need to be constantly aware of protecting intellectual property and are widely encouraged not to share and download uncopyrighted music. Just a couple of weeks back, a woman in the US has been ordered by the court to pay a bizarre amount fine totaling USD$ 2.92 million for willfully infringe music copyrights by sharing 24 files on Kazza. To read more about the story, click here.
Here are links to some of the pioneer online music stores:
http://www.apple.com/itunes/whatson/
http://www.amazon.com/MP3-Music-Download/b?ie=UTF8&node=163856011
http://free.napster.com/

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

Do you truly believe that your data is well protected? If your answer is a yes, now you should be aware that as we continue to derive countless of benefits from the Internet, the main issue that continue to concern us is online security, which once compromised could prove to be extensively disastrous and damaging. In fact, online and data security threats continue to grow in number and sophistication, therefore it is an enormous concern which bears the potential harm of collapsed computer system, lost confidential data and so forth.

One of the most common types of online fraud involves identity theft, which simply means the private information of victims such as credit card number is being intercepted illegally when it is transferred over the network due to the vulnerabilities of computer security. As a result, the thief can do whatever that they desire using the stolen number. Another category of online fraud takes place in the form of data theft which encompasses the theft, perusal and manipulation of private data. In order to illustrate the startling adverse impact of this fraud, we look at a case in U.S back in 2001. What happened was two employees working in the accounting division of Cisco Systems managed to broke into the company’s system which handled stock distributions and successfully transferred shares worth US$6.3 millions to their private portfolio.

Next, we shall discuss some of the underlying threats to online security. First, Malware, is a software designed to penetrate and damage a computer system without the owner’s informed consent. Generally, Malware includes computer viruses, worms, trojan horses, rootkits, spyware and so forth. Specifically, computer viruses are small software programs which intent to interfere with computer operations and they may corrupt and damage your data or even erase everything on your hard disk! On the other hand, worms are self-replicating programs which do not required to be attached to other programs as it spread by exploiting security loopholes of operating system. For instance, Windows ExploreZip worm, is a destructive software with malicious purposes of crippling the file system by writing invalid data and destroying files on hard disk.

To know more about the devastating impact of Malware and to get information on Trojan horses, these are some helpful links:

Malware: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10257277-83.html

Trojan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_horse_(computing)

Today’s viruses spread and are created at a faster rate as they capitalize on the increased network services such as Word Wide Web and e-mail. For instance, the statistics below (Microsoft Security Intelligence Report April 2009) shows the startling total number of new unique samples of virus detected in the second half of 2008.

Hence, preventive measures are definitely needed to be in place. The following are some suggestions:

1) Firewall- Firewall is a part of computes system useful in preventing unauthorized access to networks especially private network such as company’s Intranet. All messages going into the network must first be screened by the established firewall and meet its security criteria.


2) Anti virus software is capable of detecting and eliminating known viruses, hence it is vital to install a good package with comprehensive protection and ensure that it is always updated.

3) Data encryption- Encryption involves transfoming text into some unreadable form of codes and only the intended recipient posseses the key to decode the document back into a readable format. Thus, encryption should be widely used especially when the transmission of documents entail top security data.

4) Never open an e-mail attachment from someone you don't know.

5) Avoid opening an e-mail attachment from someone you know, unless you know exactly what the attachment is. The sender may be unaware that it contains a virus.

ReView oN a pOst oN Internet Security

Recently, I have come across a blog in ecommerze.blogspot.com. This blog is mainly talking about "What are the passwords commonly used by most of the Internet users?"

Based on a statistical analysis of 28,000 passwords from a US website, the result reveals that people often do the easy things. Why say so? This is because, after the research has been done,it was found that 16% of Internet users preferably took their first name as a passwords and another 14% relied on easiest keyboard combination such as 123 and 123456. Not only that, there are 5% of Internet users like to use the name of movie or name of popular star as their password. This is particular true to the young teenagers. Besides, the words such as "password", "Yes", "I love you" or even "I hate you" are commonly used by the users.

Robert Graham, researcher who did this analysis and published the conclusion advises the users that to better protect against cyber intrusion, users are encouraged to choose a password which is longer than eight characters with one capital letter and one symbol.

Passwords that show no imagination and distinctiveness are easy prey for information pirates.

For more information, please visit to the links below:

- Technology News