E-auction fraud prevention

Recognizing the possibility of fraud caused by asymmetric information, online auction sites have begun to offer various services that are aimed to encourage trustworthiness and reduce fraudulent transactions in the online auction market.

One of the methods used to prevent e-auction frauds is by using the feedback systems. Generally, auction participants can use feedback systems to publicly rate their satisfaction towards their trading partners. Specifically, the feedback system is a measure of a user's reputation in an auction community. The auctioneers encourage all users to check their trading partners' rating before transactions and leave feedback about their trading partners after their transactions. In fact, the system tries to use one's reputation as avoidance of cheating behaviors. For instance, if one develops a bad reputation, other auction participants may not transact with the person anymore. Therefore, it is an incentive for the participants in a transaction to be trustworthy because acquiring a bad reputation can have damaging.

Besides, purchasing an insurance or guarantee is another way to prevent e-auction frauds. Normally auctioneers will offer free or low-cost insurance to protect buyers if they are proven to be victims of fraud. An item is covered by the insurance when the buyer sends money to the seller but does not receive the item, or the item received is significantly different from the item described in the auction. Undoubtedly, this method can promote trust in the online auction business to some extent.

Also, e-auction frauds can be prevented by providing escrow service. Escrow service such as escrow.com acts as a trusted third party in a transaction, providing secure methods to transfer items and payments to both parties. Firstly, the escrow collects payment for the merchandise from the buyer. When the payment clears, the seller is notified to ship the item. Secondly, the buyer notifies the escrow when the merchandise is received and is satisfactory. Finally, the escrow will then release the payment to the seller. Escrow services are particularly useful for large sales, which need a guarantee of a safe and pleasant transaction.

Corporate Blogging :: A new marketing communication tool for companies ::

Corporate Blogging become popular in these recent years. This indicates that a new style of communication will be mastered soon. Now, with entrepreneurs developing lots of creative new uses for business blogs, the technology appears to become the next big thing in business communication.

One of the example is the department blog, a common style or kind of blogging, which is very popular and ultimately essential for large organizations. Cases in point are Microsoft, Sun, blogs in any particular space. Google’s extensive array of product blogs across their different product offerings probably is another great example.

Firstly, unlike corporate websites, blog are cheap to launch and easy to maintain, thanks to powerful, easy-to-use tools. Unlike spam, or junk e-mail, blogs are not intrusive that users must click to them. Indeed, blogs provide a fast, informal way to share information like project updates, research or test results, product-release news, industry headlines inside and outside the company.

Besides, corporate blogging provides a clear mind map or editorial guidelines of overall marketing or communication strategy to its employees and third parties with organization communication plan and media mix.

Corporate blogging encourages employee participation in contribution of expertise, free discussion of issues or topics and deal with it, collective intelligence, be a direct communication between various layers of an organization and shares their views with others employees, teams or spokespersons publicly.

Furthermore, it can be used to announce new products and services, explain and clarify policies of the company and to react on public criticism on certain issues. Business blog can interact with a target market on a personal level by building a level of credibility and asking for their feedback on products and services.

However, blogs are also deceptively tricky to manage. If the company do it wrongly than it could embarrass company, bore or make unfriendly customers or prospects, contribute to information overload, and potentially even wind up on the wrong end of a lawsuit.

In conclusion, corporate blogging is widely used nowdays and published by an organization to achieve its organizational goals through internal, external and CEO Blogs. Thus , it has become a new marketing communication tool for companies.

References:

1. http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/28/news/companies/pluggedin_fortune/index.htm
2. http://www.thenewpr.com/wiki/pmwiki.php/Resources/CEOBlogsList

E-Government in Malaysia: Its implementation so far and citizen's adoption strategies

As internet technologies rapidly matured and found increasingly important in public’s daily life. The question to implement electronic government (E-government) by most of the countries is increasing due to its potential and positive impacts carrying towards the developed countries. Nevertheless, the complexity surrounding this implementation of E-government is similar in every corner of the world. As the challenging arising from the implementation of E-government are broad, Malaysia is now focusing on MSC (Multimedia Super Corridor) which is a huge technology park that is considered crucial for Malaysia to achieve a knowledge based economy.

The driving forces for the implementation of E-government in Malaysia are related to the strategic importance and focus on reinventing the government machinery and achieving the ultimate vision 2020; developing multimedia industries and attracting foreign investments, especially expertise and technologies. The overall progress of the execution of e-government in this country matches the label of the “Silver Medalists” category which indicates that the policies to implement e-government are in place although there are highly visible governments Websites, many of them are in the test phase.

Besides there are clear policies and strategic projects of e-government for the G2C, G2B, and G2G dimensions. However, many of these projects are still on the very surface or experimentation and implemented in phases which mostly in the urban areas and certain states such as Kuala Lumpur, Selangor and others. Thus, there is still much room for improvement in terms of the overall achievement of e-government in Malaysia where in the case that, G2C dimensions, the actual usage of the services by the citizens is minimal.

The most important factor that drives the implementation of e-government services to another greater height is the satisfaction of customer. “give the people what they want” is the phrase that drives the adoption of online government services. As government executives focus on tailoring online services to meet the needs of specific customer segments, just as businesses do, e-government programs will be more successful and deliver greater returns on the investments.

Review on a local e-commerce site: MayBank2u.com

Domain Name

The first point of entry to access any public website is the domain name. Business's are born and die because of domain names. Needless to say they are crucial. MayBank has not registered its company name as a domain name, maybank.com is registered by "Beauty, Success & Truth International" in Hong Kong until 2010! Any large company must have its own domain name these days, without it you confuse your customers and allow possible security risks from "Phishing", the art of stealing another company's private data by impersonating that company. Instead of paying a premium price for their domain name, they registered MayBank2u.com and in doing so started a fashionable wave of Malaysian websites all using the "2u" suffix. It was a bad move to be honest and it has had a bad influence on the IT industry in Malaysia, who trusted and followed the whole "2u" idea.

First Impressions & Usability

When I first loaded the website into my browser I was disappointed and confused. I had premeditated some actions I wanted to perform on the website:

1. Find out if there are any bank branches abroad.

2. Send an Email to MayBank

For the first task, I tried navigating the site for ten minutes without being able to find any information on overseas branches. So the site has failed the first test, if there are no overseas branches it could say so, or at least offer a search facility so users can search for such information. Ironically I know there is a branch in London - why information about it is not easily accessible on the website is anyone's guess.

My second mission, to email MayBank2u. Sounds simple enough (stop laughing at the back!). From the home page I found the "CONTACT US" link after a couple of seconds. One click took me to the contact page. Next I find the the "Email Us" link. I click it and discover I am being nudged down the same page to "Use our Online Feedback Form to e-mail to the following MayBank departments and subsidiaries:" yet another link! One more click and suddenly - pop! Two new windows explode onto my screen, one is blocked by my pop-up blocker. I force that one open and find it's a message for people who have lost their credit cards. Not good. If you don't know how to enable the blocked window then you won't be able to access that information. The other window that opened is finally the "Online Feedback Form".

It took three clicks and two pop-up windows before I could even get to the page to email MayBank.

DocType Declaration (DTD)

This website has no DTD. Web browsers will not know how to parse the web pages and will normally default to processing as HTML4 Transitional DTD.

Markup Language

HTML4 is depreciated. The latest XHTML standards should be observed in order to guarantee future web browser compatibility. HTML4 is also a bulkier and slower markup type, because the code:content ratio far higher than for example XHTML.

Meta Tags

This website has Meta tags for SEO, but there are too many entries for keywords which will damage SEO in most cases. Meta tags are not dynamic, and are repeated on every page - they have no relevancy to the actual content, which defeats the purpose of keywords and description Meta tags.

JavaScript Usage

This website heavily relies on JavaScript for even basic functionality such as the inclusion of CSS files. If JavaScript is disabled or not supported, visitors to this website will not be able to use even the most basic features.

Looking at the source code, Maybank2u seems intent on using JavaScript to perform tasks on the client side instead of performing tasks on the server side. 99% of the JavaScript used could be removed and processed server side, saving bandwidth and improving loading times of the web pages. The amount of JavaScript in the web pages seems to be more than 3 times the amount of content in the pages. Is MayBank secretly trying to publish a JavaScript book!?

MayBank2u uses JavaScript pop-ups. These are annoying to users of the website and make pages inaccessible to users who do not use JavaScript. Pop-ups are also often blocked by web browsers. Once MayBank2u pop-ups are generated, their window size and options are often disabled so users can't re-size or use the windows / tabs as they would like.

Proper Use Of CSS

The Maybank website does not make proper use of CSS. Most style is not separated from content, but totally confused with it. Colors and sizes are mostly all determined in depreciated HTML4 tags.

Website Layout

Layout is determined by improper use of HTML tables. Tables should not be used for design layout but should be used for tabulated data. Div tags should be used in conjunction with CSS instead.

Website Text & Context

There is not much text and content in the website, which kind of puzzles me about the point of the website. I thought Maybank would want to save money by using the Internet to post information instead of using telephone and face to face solutions. Reading through the website makes visitors just want to give up and go down to their local MayBank branch (- smoking at the ears).

Website Images

Images are often have distorted dimensions, either because of incorrect HTML or because the images were poorly created in a graphics program. Images appear at too low quality / resolution in most cases. There are so many flashing animated .gif images blinking around, you can dig out and turn up your old 90's techno cassette tapes and start dancing like the millennium is just 6 years away.

Website Navigation

No surprise here, too much of the navigation is confused or inaccessible. The structure of the site is almost impossible to determine. Menu items are cryptically named, such as the "TELL ME MORE" menu at the top of the page. Tell me more what? I keep asking myself that, but I still don't feel like clicking that link. Perhaps they should just label all their links with "CLICK ME" instead.

There is no structure to this website, its missing the "web" part and is just a "site". Any ideas why MayBank is using JavaScript drop-down boxes as menus? I'm also confused, but it could be because they don't want people to access the links contained inside. MayBank2u goes to great lengths to make the website as inaccessible as possible.

I am not surprised to discover that even plain and simple HTML links are replaced by JavaScript events and yet more infuriating pop up windows.

Browser Compatibility

This site is best viewed with IE 6.0 and Netscape 7+ in 800 × 600 screen resolution.

Any website that states it is best viewed in a specific browser is just drawing attention to the fact that it fails to function or display properly in all web browsers. Web sites should appear and function correctly in any browser on any operating system on any device.

800x600 Resolution was the most common screen display resolution in the 1990's. Now its is 1024x768, but the point here is that websites must display well on any resolution screen. You can't tell your users to find an 800x600 monitor and PC running Internet Explorer, just because a so called "web developer" used a system with that specification to make the website.

The Verdict

I cant find any single aspect of the website to award even one point. At the time of writing I found another Maybank website - maybank2e.net and it is even worse than their main website. In conclusion, they need an urgent and complete overhaul from top to bottom. With the front-end in such a mess I can imagine the back-end is just as bad. For such a large company, and online banking portal this website is a dismal failure.

Reference:

http://www.hygen.net/main/index.php?q=node/10