Media & Economy Assignment

For this assignment I got inspired by my design group work for the same course, so I decided to make my web-based mini-enterprise assignment a continuous mock-up for the debate community offering debaters for both sides of the environment related debate for a good bargain, so that they can focus their own resources elsewhere.
The general business idea is to offer a social media platform for individuals and companies involved or interested in participation in the everlasting environment debate.
The target audience for my made-up business consists of two major categories: the counterparts of the environment debate, and the freelance debaters, protesters and on-demand rally teams.
Technical platform consists of forums, newsstands, catalogue of members and advertising spaces and the IRC based chat embed to the platform. E-payment options are added and the portal also accepts all major credit cards to its secure link banking formula.
Basic admission to the portal is free, but charges apply for debater marketing and merchandising for the freelance individual debaters and for recruiting and employer promotion services for the companies and interest groups from both sides of the debate.
During high seasons, such as elections, WTO and G7 meetings extra rates apply and ad hoc services for both sides of the debate are provided, including deals with vegetable wholesalers for rotten tomatoes and spike wire for the companies.
Company legal responsibility claim is that it takes no responsibility whatsoever for the content and messages provided by its customers and their respective action. In a really fine print is added, that in case of a conflict a paying customer is always right.

The author of this mock-up takes no legal responsibility if the business logic is too similar to any existing company.

You are welcome to join by going to Think Green today!

Business Intelligence - Finding Out Today What People Will Want Tomorrow

Many of us have seen the James Bond movies about the intelligence community trying always to take the upper hand on their opponents. Though there are some similarities in the business world, the main task of business intelligence is to find out what will the stakeholders want tomorrow.
Finding out what other people think has always been an important piece of information during decision making and it usually determines whether your business shall emaciate or prosper. But on digital era it’s even more crucial since all the processes have speeded up and it’s constantly becoming harder and harder to achieve a breakthrough.
In this situation Opinion mining and sentiment analysis by Bo Pang and Lilian Lee seems more than useful book to read and to post a blog entry about.
The authors point out the new aspects brought forth by the emerging information society and how it influences the public opinion as there is different levels of content, relevance and prominence.
Prior to social media once opinion was formed based on mass media, immediate opinion leaders and ones physical socials network but today ones mindset is largely manipulated by a number of unacquainted opinion leaders who reach the person through internet and social media alongside with the opinion leaders and the mass media. But as I already pointed out in my post about the Blogosphere, people tend to go for an “honest opinion” of a fellow member of an information society rather than to believe an advertisement. Thus it is of utmost importance to the interested party to find out what is the public opinion regarding the brand, product, political idea in question and how to manipulate the brand/product or public opinion for a maximal overlap and the book gives you a fair hint how.

A Draft Design for an Online Community

Every beginning is hard, even if it takes place in such a constructivist environment as our IMKE course.
Thus our group work for the design for an online community resulted in a number of designs and in chronological order is as follows:
Design assignment posted by Ilya
Mock-up assignment posted by Kirke
Mock-Up Assignment (updated) posted by Jakob

Looking at the development one may recognize that our team made a long way since the initial idea suffered the communication cap in the beginning that lead into rivaling solutions and reached the consensus at the end that built us into a stronger team. Perhaps that was the real assignment after all.