Group 3 Chapter 1

1. Group 3 Chapter 1 Laura Prine, Brandy Sailers-Dow, Luke Johnson, Justin Gore

2. Culture of Sharing Compare and contrast these technologies: Culture sharing technologies have come a long way in the last 10 years. Now-a-days you can choose how, when, and for how long you want to take part in this community of giving. Some people use the sharing community as a means of generous giving while others use this community as way to earn some extra income. The three companies that I chose to research are: Uber, AirBNB, and Couch Surfing. While Couch Surfing has been around the longest, it has, in no way, limited the boundaries of sharing, rather opened the door to this new idea. If you belong to the Couch Surfing network you are among the unique group that is giving freely of their time and space. Uber and AirBNB, on the other hand, are ways to earn some extra income. With Uber, you share your car, with AirBNB you share your home. On the flip side, Couch Surfing as very little in the way of security. You can essentially sign up, provide a credit card number and prove that you have a home and you can begin having guests over to sleep on your couch. While Uber runs a background check, and Air BNB requires proof of identity.

3. Pros and Cons of these services: There are many pros to these services and fewer cons, in my humble opinion. To me, these companies are similar to Facebook except they encourage face-to face interaction, creating a connection between two individuals, a becoming foreign concept in our technology driven age. Majority of these interactions begin online and branch out into some type of human connection. Pros of these services include a massive savings potential for travelers, new friends in new places, and the ability to experience a new place from a perspective that you normally would not have access to. Cons of these services are that people that have been providing traveling services for decades are now being forced to fight for their jobs. Taxi drivers compete with Uber, hotel chains fight AirBNB and Couch Surfing. But the reality is that these sharing options allow people to travel on a much smaller budget.

4. Does having these change the culture of sharing as far as goods, services, and ideas? YES! I remember my mother training me and constantly telling me to be wary of strangers. This idea of sharing, essentially, debunks everything my mother taught me. I still believe it is smart to take caution with strangers (so, not to discredit my mother), but these communities of sharing show you that sometimes, it is okay to trust a stranger. Now, the neat thing is that you can decide how much you want to trust these strangers. So if you are feeling very trustworthy, you can sleep on someone’s couch or you can share a room with another traveler. If you want to trust them on a much smaller scale you can rent their entire house and only meet them if they give you a ride somewhere. Goods and services are being exchanged much more easily and readily.

5. Cloud Storage Cloud StorageCloud storage is a model of data storage where the digital data is stored in logical pools, the physical storage spans across multiple servers, locations, and the physical environment is typically owned and managed by a hosting company

6. What security issues are there?Cloud providers ensure that applications available as a service via the cloud are secure by specifying, designing, implementing, testing and maintaining appropriate application security measures in the production environment. As with any commercial software; the controls they implement may not necessarily fully mitigate all the risks they have identified, and that they may not necessarily have identified all the risks that are of concern to customers. Consequently, customers may also need to assure themselves that cloud applications are adequately secured for their specific purposes, including their compliance obligations

7. What privacy do you have?Providers ensure that all critical data (credit card numbers, for example) are masked or encrypted and that only authorized users have access to data in its entirety. Digital identities and credentials must be protected as should any data that the provider collects or produces about customer activity in the cloud

8. Compare and contrast cloud storage services. I. Windows Live SkyDriveThe Good: The feature set is simple and concise. Windows Live SkyDrive gives you 25GB for free. It integrates with Windows Live Mail (a.k.a. Hotmail) and other Windows Live services, like the online version of Microsoft Office. It comes with nice viewing options for photos and videos, and makes it easy to view and share your files across platforms.The Bad: The feature set is simple and concise. Aside from a massive amount of free space, you don’t get much with SkyDrive. It’s pretty much just storage. If you need more than 25GB, you’ll need to look elsewhere because what you get for free is all you get in general. Additionally, while you do have 25GB of space, you only have 50MB per file. If you want to upload a file larger than 50MB you’re out of luck, which is a big disadvantage for the service.The Verdict: SkyDrive is essentially 25GB of storage—for free. While it doesn’t have the most compelling feature set if you’re not using it with Windows Live Mail and the online version of Microsoft Office, it is a whole lot of space for a whole lot of nothing. Value-wise, you can’t really beat it…unless you have files greater than 50MB.

9. II. DropBoxThe Good: Dropbox only gives you 2GB for free, but you can bring that up to 16GB by referring your friends, family, and complete strangers you can coerce into signing up using your referral URL. For $100 or $200 per year, Dropbox will up your storage to 50GB or 100GB, respectively, and that’s not including your referrals (which are doubled when you’re a paid customer). Dropbox storage not only includes your stored files, but also keeps copies of deleted files in case you want to get them back. For an extra fee you can keep an unlimited number of copies for easy recovery.The best part of Dropbox, however, is that it syncs to all your computers. If you keep everything important in your Dropbox, that means you’ve got a backup of all your important files automatically by virtue of them being on multiple machines as well as up in the cloud. If you are syncing between machines, Dropbox will first sync files over your local connection first, making sync a lot faster when all your computers are on the same network. Dropbox has apps for pretty much every mobile device, so you can easily access your files from virtually anywhere. Dropbox also makes file sharing easy as you can simply right click to share virtually anything in your Dropbox or share it from the mobile app.The Bad: If you need more than 100GB of storage (or, really, 132GB with referrals), you’re sort of out of luck. Unless you want to sign up for a team plan (which starts at $796/year for 350GB), you’re stuck with a 100GB cap and that may be too low for people who have a lot of stuff they want to store. Dropbox also does not let you store files outside of your Dropbox (although you can work around that limitation). You also won’t want to use Dropbox for backing up or syncing any complex files or system files to avoid conflicts that could cause serious problems. For example, syncing iTunes with Dropbox across multiple machines can cause problems with your library since iTunes saves your library in a single file. (We have a workaround for this, too.)The Verdict: Dropbox is really great if your needs include syncing and you can limit your storage to 100GB, but if you need more space or just don’t want to pay for it, you may want to look into another option.

10. III. Amazon Cloud DriveThe Good: Amazon’s offered storage for awhile now, with their Simple Storage Service (S3), but that was geared towards developers. This is relevant because developers have not only been using S3 to store tons of big files you upload to their webapps regularly, but some have even created cloud storage services built on top of Amazon S3. Amazon’s launch of Cloud Drive is really an extension of their long-implemented storage service and that should give you a good idea of its reliability.Feature-wise, Amazon Cloud Drive wins for music lovers because of its companion app, Amazon Cloud Player. Cloud Player is available as a native Android app and also as a webapp. This is great if you want constant access to your music and have an always-connected device like a 3G smartphone. Cloud Drive offers 5GB of free storage, which is a little on the slim side. Fortunately, Amazon is offering 20GB of storage for a year if you buy an MP3 album, which means you should save at least $10 off the cost of a 20GB account. Amazon has plenty of storage tiers, offering anywhere from the free 5GB to an entire terabyte of cloud storage. As a comparison, you’ll get twice the space on Cloud Drive as you would on Dropbox for the same money.The Bad: While there’s a native app available for Android, there’s nothing for iOS. You can’t even use the webapp in Safari without forcing Cloud Player to load the desktop version of the webapp. This is disappointing for iOS users, but it’s worth noting that Apple’s held up app approval for competition before and it wouldn’t be a surprise if they were holding back Amazon here.While Amazon has the ability to scale, offers a music player, and does all of this for half the cost of Dropbox, it still can’t do much of what Dropbox can do all by itself. If you’re looking for a bunch of features beyond a music player, they’re not quite here yet.The Verdict: If music is your thing, Amazon’s got a well-priced service that’s still a little rough around the edges. You might want to hold off if your priorities don’t include a cloud-based music player and massive amounts of cheap online storage.

11. Online Payment Systems What are the Pros and Cons for each system? All of the sites that I researched used companies that are considered safe and reputable. Crowdfunding, which has perhaps the most need for a payment processing solution of all of the topics featured, has proven to have a robust variety of options available. GoFundMe, which specializes primarily in funding individuals and causes, uses a third part site called FirstGiving.com (GoFundMe, 2010). Kickstarter, a site devoted primarily to funding ideas and artistic projects, accepts donations though Amazon Payments (Kickstarter, 2014). Kiva, which is a micro lending type of crowd funding site, uses Paypal (Kiva, 2005). The benefit to using a reputable site is that you can feel relatively sure about the security of your information. All of the sites had https websites, indicating security.

12. What happens to sellers and buyers in a conflict? For crowdfunding, each of the examples that I researched accepted the payments as independent agents. It is really up to the funder to do their due diligence. Also, all of the crowdfunding sites that I researched used specific wording in their agreements that put the onus on the individual to not only make sure that understood the funding situation, but also to agree that they would not hold the organization responsible for any loss or damages that may result from their decision to use their service. Go Fund Me and Kickstarter both approach their funding opportunities as charitable donations to a worthy cause. It’s up to the individual to determine what they deem worthy. Just like someone doesn’t know what happens to the money that they donate to brick and mortar charities, ultimately the money should be considered a donation to the cause.

13. Which would you recommend and why? Personally, I would recommend either Amazon Payments or Paypal. I could find no information to suggest that that FirstGiving.com was not a reputable company, and my recommendation to use the other two is based solely on one thing- perceived security. Amazon is one of the largest, if not the largest, online retailers in the world. They know how to keep data secure and if my data were compromised, I feel that they would have the resources necessary to fix the issue and make it right. Paypal elicits the same type of confidence. They have been around for quite some time and they process millions of ebay transactions. I feel that if something were to happen with them also, that they would do the right thing and find a solution. Perhaps if FirstGiving.com had more time and experience under its belt, I would differently.

14. Portable Operating Systems Even though most debates in the cell phone world start with Apple or Android, most don’t dive deep enough to understand the capabilities and limitations of each operating system. There are other options when talking about portable operating systems, such as Windows Phone and operating systems found in media players, but I will stick to the main two since I will be giving my recommendation at the end.

15. How similar are their functions? Android and iOS are surprisingly similar in function.  It makes sense. Each portable operating system has the same kind of responsibility – manage the RAM, launch apps, surf the web, multitask, make phone calls,  and more. Each has their personality and look as to how those functions are called or initiated, but the common functions remain the same. Again, it pretty much depends on the underlying hardware the OS is supposed to manage. Since the portable device is scaled down to small, battery powered, and under $1,000 prices, their  OS functions are limited compared to desktop or enterprise systems. For example, desktops might need hard drive management, failover, drivers for third party hardware, etc., where their sophistication and flexibility shows. Portable device simply do not need the complexity since their purpose is a dedicated subset of common workstations.

16. User interface and prices The iOS UI, or User Interface, is very easy to get a hang of. If you have ever used an iOS phone, you will be able to use every phone they have ever come out with. Although there have been some large improvements in iOS7 with design, all user functionality stays present and they do a great job of not mixing things up on you. This same strength, to some, is also known as their weakness. Android presents the idea of choice. Although there is  Apple’s revolutionary “App” idea throughout Android’s phone, Android has also allowed you to customize your UI with widgets of your favorite websites, clocks, calendars, and a lot more. This means that you may feel lost when picking up another persons’ Android. Nonetheless, it is up to the user whether or not they choose Apple’s comfortable, consistent UI or Android’s free roam interface that lets you do what you want . Apple has throughout its history set it’s prices to the higher side while Android and its derivatives address the lower end in pricing.  I believe the higher priced iOS devices seem to have a greater attention to detail and reliability at the expense of the full open source Android.

17. Recommendations For those that do not know too much about software or technology in general, I would recommend iOS. Its user friendly interface won’t scare you and the hardware is far more than you will need. For a developer, or someone who appreciates freedom in their software, Android saves the day. The Android Operating System is used in all their products of all different shapes and sizes, you have the ability to directly access your files on your phone, and you can personalize it to fit YOU. There is no wrong choice only a preference.