#week4blog

VELMA FOOD STAND

The owner of this business is Velma Ibanez she is 59 years old. They started their food business on year 2005. And also they are known of their best-seller soup which is "BATCHOY". They sell a a lot of foods also they have a "BOLA-BOLA" which is made in vegetables and etc.

There are lot of times when I was in high performing team but the one which I remember the most was in last year, when once our professor gave us a group project and gives us two weeks of time to complete that. We were group of 4 persons and we have to make a project on One company and make its financial statements like ledger, journal and many more. As we have very less time we divide the work among us and later on we decide that we would like to complete that by the end of this week and all of us agree to that point and thought that in the next week we can check our work. Luckily everything work as planned and we got A in that assignment. 

That team was high performing for me because we have very less time to complete that but inspite of that we still able to complete our work on time, moreover we got an A in that assignment. All the team members were very supportive and not a single member of that team was careless towards his work. Everyone was very serious about their work.

In that team my contribution was to prepare the ledger and post that into trial balance, everyone was given one particular statements but I instead of doing that regularly in touch with all the members about their progress in the work and was constantly looking for that. I was earlier not sure about how our team will perform as we all don’t know each other but luckily we all work so got and I feels lucky to be in that team. There are nothing much that I want to change in that team because everyone was so perfect in their work and moreover everyone was very supportive to each other.

I feel that during a conflict in a my team, I have to step out any we have to divide the work among each other and give everyone a same amount of work and powers so that no one feel little less important and everyone in that team feels equally important.  Another approach which I feel was that we have to talk together and try to remove any kind of conflict earlier before it become any big problem.

For my 4th week in my Technopreneurship class, our team presented our proposed project, Shipping Hub. Lovely was the one to pitch for our group since she is more knowledgeable about her own idea. She presented and explained about the answers to the five basic questions regarding our proposed project. After presenting, Sir Mabulay asked some questions about our Shipping Hub project. The questions were “Is this another logistics company?”, “What are we at the chain of logistics?”, “How do we execute?”, “How will we profit from this?” Lovely tried to answer those questions but her answers still wasn’t clear enough for the audience to understand.

After our class, we had a meeting in the library. Lovely discussed more about her idea. She made it clear to us that we are getting in between the sellers and the courier. She introduced the term corporate cash to us. We then came to an understanding that we need to invest corporate cash so that we could make a contract to the courier. A contract to which we would transfer our invested fund to the courier and we could also get our share in the delivery fee. We made it sure that we would gain profit from this market and not a loss as sir Mabulay thought during the presentation.

Leonel suggested that we should change our default title Shipping Hub into DropBuy. We all agreed to his suggestion. DropBuy flow for the buyer’s end is that it would let the buyer choose the sellers he/she has an order display the order’s status if it was already sent to DropBuy. On the other hand, the seller’s end flow would start the application viewing the lists of her buyers. Then, it would view the status of the package if it was already sent to DropBuy. Only the paid items of the buyers can be sent to DropBuy. Muznah sketched DropBuy’s flow for the team so that we would all easily understand the flow. We also cleared out DropBuy’s target marketplace is on Facebook groups and shops.

By Thursday, we thought of consulting Sir Mabulay but unfortanely, he wasn’t around in his office. So by Friday, we were able to formulate two survey forms using google documents. One survey form was intended for outside cdo buyers and the other survey form was intended to cdo based online sellers. Muznah sent the revised powerpoint proposal on Slack.

The following day, Saturday, our team met and Muznah told us to message our target respondents. By night, I messaged some CdO based online sellers and some outside CdO buyers found on facebook’s online buy and sells groups in CdO. Some people to whom I messaged the link responded to the survey and I think some ignored my message or was probably asleep. Some questions in the seller’s survey include “How many years do you sell online?”, “Have you done cross-shipping?” “What is your experience in cross-shipping?” and “Do you wish to support an application that will organize shipping data and will give you more convenience doing cross-shipping?”. For the buyers, we asked about his/her name and location. Some questions also include “Why do you shop online?”, “How many online shops do you prefer to visit and buy?”, “How much shipping fee did you cost for every transaction?”, “What such problem did you encounter when you order online from more than 1 online shop?”, “Do you mind to have cross-shipping from different online shops and wish to have lesser shipping fees?” and “Are you willing to support an application that will cater and organize all your orders from CdO online shops and will provide you lesser shipping fee cost?”

Modern media is continuously providing new ways to interact, create and delegate. In week 4’s lecture, we discussed how new media is providing opportunities for companies to outsource or “crowdsource” their projects. These participatory media projects are creating questionable methods of how labor is obtained or rewarded. So ultimately, the question is does participatory media and crowdsourcing, exploit its contributors, or is it, as previously discussed, all about choice?

Crowdsourcing is a term discussed as utilizing the resources of the collective, whether that be knowledge, money, creativity or time, to produce and/or resolve problems (Sauter, 2014). As new media has evolved, participatory culture has become quintessential for growth (Sauter, 2014). New media has transformed into a nature where “harnessing and harvesting the hive” can contribute towards the development and value of knowledge or a product (Bruns, 2007).

These new methods of consumption and production blur lines between once definitive roles like work and play and waged and un-waged labour (Sauter, 2014). For example, Facebook has made billions of dollars by relying on users interaction and participation; businesses pay Facebook to advertise, users ‘like’ their Facebook page, giving the companies access to personal interests and information, which then furthers the business’s opportunities and henceforth their profit. Zittrain extended this concept in reference to the site InternetEyes. This site offers live video feed of CCTV footage in the UK to users for free. What is their compensation? To earn reward money, possibly help to reduce crime, and potentially become a hero (Zittrain, 2009). Fuchs explains that this kind of “cloud labour” is synonymous with the use of social media and the Internet at large (Fuchs, 2013). http://youtu.be/UvfCq__uaWg

Despite some users feeling empowered by participating and contributing to the ‘greater good’, “cloud labour” and other “produsage” media employ exploitative methods in order to obtain product or knowledge (Bruns, 2008). In the Web 2.0 world, everything is accessible all of the time, creating a 24/7 working environment. Additionally, in order for media to engage with its users, it must first obtain personal information, creating privacy issues (Sauter, 2014). However, privacy breaches still take place on the Internet without any personal information being obtained. http://youtu.be/p7mTm_76B8Y

It is probably more realistic to consider that users and ‘produsers’ feel both empowered and exploited by new media forms. In the Web 2.0 era, perhaps these concepts are interdependent. Despite, private information being traded and lines between roles being blurred, it is worthwhile to understand that content generated by users is only done with the user’s explicit understanding that it could be used for profitable purposes. The new Web 2.0 world has opened up new means and purposes for creation and artistic exploration. Perhaps this is the main positive to focus on in the future.

  Bruns, Axel. 2008. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and beyond: From production to produsage. New York: Peter Lang. Available at: http://produsage.org/book

  Bruns, Axel (2007) Produsage: Towards a Broader Framework for User-Led Content Creation. In Proceedings Creativity & Cognition 6, Washington, DC.

Fuchs, Christian. 2013. “The Power and Political Economy of Social Media.” In Social Media: An Introduction, 97 – 125. London: Sage Publications.

  Sauter, M. 2014. “KCB206 internet self and beyond: Week 4 lecture notes.” Accessed March 19, 2014.

http://blackboard.qut.edu.au/bbcswebdav/pid-5279771-dt-content-rid-2260886_1/xid-2260886_1

The traditional notion and definition of media has been warped and transformed into what we now know as the modern age of media. This once distinctive and hierarchal system of producer down to the consumer has evolved with this process. What was originally a “trickled down” or hypodermic needle model has morphed into a new media age where participatory culture is key, and the audience holds more power than ever before.

With the birth of what Gauntlett penned Web 2.0, we have seen a change in the traditional ideals of what constitutes the media audience (2011). With Web 2.0, empowered audiences can now create, produce, distribute and consume media content in whatever fashion they see fit. We have seen a move from mass communication to mass conversation, where anyone can participate (Spurgeon, 2009). Audiences religiously consume and engage with media such as blogs, social media and YouTube, and then produce and publish their own content via these sites, and so the “mass conversation” continues (Spurgeon, 2009). Additionally, Web 2.0 has given birth to the blog entrepreneur. For example, Jessica Stein is the founder of Tuula Vintage, a fashion and travel blog that also has a strong Instagram presence with over 870,000 followers. Jessica gets paid to travel the world and take photographs plugging fashion labels, hospitality and tourism establishments, as well as making appearances at fashion events. This would have been extremely difficult to do before the new media age. However, due to the concept of “spreadability” in Web 2.0, “...audiences play an active role in ‘spreading’ content: their choices, their investments and their actions determine what gets valued.” (Green and Jenkins 2011, 116).

With the age of Web 2.0, audiences no longer fit the mold. They have the ability to take control, create their own content (like Tuula Vintage) and distribute it on any media source they wish. The users have evolved into what have been called “produsers” (Bruns, 2008). Furthermore, the rise of Web 2.0 relies on this “produsage”, creating a more disintermediated process from content to user and also eliminating the distance between these now interchangeable roles.

From printing press to blog, from radio to podcast, from TV to YouTube and from newspapers to personalized news feeds like Twitter, the face of media has changed drastically. As Green and Jenkins wrote “the collective choices of audiences make content culturally meaningful, socially fungible and economically valuable” (2011, 112). In Web 2.0, to consumer is to participate. Furthermore, the value of content is now determined by the “produser” by what they choose to ‘like’, ‘follow’ or ‘share’.

  Bruns, Axel. 2008. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and beyond: From production to produsage. New York: Peter Lang. Available at: http://produsage.org/book

  Gauntlett, David. 2011. Making is Connecting: the social meaning of creativity from DIY and knitting to YouTube and Web 2.0. Cambridge: Polity Press

  Green, Joshua and Henry Jenkins. 2011. “Spreadable Media. How Audiences Create Value and Meaning in a Networked Economy.” In The Handbook of Media Audiences edited by Virginia Nightingale, 109-127. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell

  Spurgeon, Christina. 2009. “From mass communication to mass conversation: Why 1984 wasn’t like 1984.” Australian Journal of Communication 36 (2): 143-158. Accessed March 21, 2014.