Hotmail is the most popular one. According to Microsoft.com it has more than 280 million active accounts and therefore it is the largest email service provider in the world. Hotmail
Source : http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/newsroom/msn/factsheet/hotmail.mspx
Electronic Commerce (E-Commerce)
Electronic Commerce (or E-Commerce) refers to buying and selling goods or services not only over the internet but over any electronic system. There is a variety of organisations that provide e-commerce. One of the major ones is eBay.com. This is an online auction and shopping website, which is used by a wide number of businesses and individuals.
I will be writing about eBay.com because it is one of the most used website for buying and selling and selling goods/services on the Internet. The advantages of eBay.com is that you can buy products from anywhere around the world. This is often cheaper as in some parts of the world goods are cheaper than in others. However you would have to consider the posting costs.
EBay.com is a website which you can use to search for a wide variety of items that can be bought. You use the search tool on the website to look for any item. Once you found an item of your choice, you can bid for it. Usually the time, an item is available for auction, is 5 or 7 days. After this time is over, the user with the highest bid wins the item. The payment is normally done via PayPal, which is a business that transfers money via the Internet. It is owned by eBay and therefore is very secure in this.
The item is then sent by email or for some items (such as cars) the buyer has to collect the item by themselves.
EBay is open to everyone living on the earth. Although there is sometimes fraud going on, the feedback system helps buyers and sellers to send or buy items only from users that have positive feedback.
Also software is becoming more and more attractive on eBay, is selling things like software or online accounts for games or websites.
I think that the target audience of eBay are people over the age of 18 and under 50. I believe this because you cannot get an account if you are younger than 18 and people older than 50 often do not use computers or the Internet a lot. There might be more male users because they are often more familiar with the Internet and computers.
I also believe that singles would use it more often than married people because they have a lot more time to look for the best product at its cheapest price, which married people don’t have.
Advantages for using eBay.com:
- Most of the items are cheaper on eBay than anywhere else.
- You can buy items that are not available in your country from another country, which also might be cheaper.
- You can get the item easily sent home without having to leave your home.
- The feedback system reduces fraud and tells you, which user is popular and who gets the best feedback, making it easier for you to choose a seller, whose item you would want to buy.
- Almost everything is available on eBay.
Disadvantages for using eBay.com:
- The posting of the item can take a long time, depending on the place the seller lives.
- After bidding you may have to wait long until the auction ends. This could also result in you losing the bid.
- Some sellers defraud by not giving the exact details or type the exact details in very small font size so that nobody can read it.
- If the product you bought arrived damaged or if it was faulty, often you cannot send it back or you would have to pay the posting costs for it.
Alternative
An alternative to an online auction website would be an auction centre. This is usually a huge hall, where the supervisors hold the object up and people give their bids. This takes less time than on the Internet. The supervisor then waits until nobody bids more. This person then wins the auction. On these auction houses often cars or other big items are sold.
Advantages of auction houses
- You can see the item in reality. Therefore you can touch and see the quality of it.
- You do not have to pay any posting costs of the item as you can collect it immediately after winning the auction.
- Less fraud is possible.
- People feel more secure as they do not have to give out any bank account details.
- The auctions end much quicker than on online auction websites.
Disadvantages of auction houses
- It is a lot of time consuming to go to the auction house and find items and bid for them.
- You might not find an object you are looking for as there would be a limited number of items.
- They do not take place every day. Therefore if you are looking for something you might have to wait at least one week until an auction day takes place at the auction house.
- People who are working all day would not find any time for going there.
- Entertainment
Entertainment is something that is meant to give people relaxation or pleasure. There is a variety of examples of entertainment. The following are just a few of them:
- Music
- Videos
- Comedy
- Books
- Circus
- Sports
- Television
- Radio
I will be writing about Videos. There are a lot of websites that provide this service of videos. I have chosen YouTube. This is a video sharing website, where users can upload their videos. You do not need an account for watching videos. An account on YouTube is completely free. YouTube is the most popular video sharing website on the internet with more than 100 million videos being watched every day.
There are millions of YouTube users. Most of them have uploaded their videos on YouTube.com, and they share it with other users worldwide.
Advantages of YouTube
- You can share videos with any other user across the world that has an account.
- You can make new friends by subscribing to them or inviting them to be a friend of yours.
- There are a lot of educational video clips available, such as tutorials that teach you how to do certain things you would want to do. The most popular ones are tutorials about software.
- It can entertain you for a lot of time as it has billions of video clips.
- You can find any type of video clips, including tutorials, comedy videos, movies, and advertisements
Disadvantages of YouTube
- There is a limit of size for the videos. Users are not allowed to upload any video clips longer than 10 minutes or larger than 100 MB. So if you would want to upload a longer or larger video, you would have to split the video in more parts and upload it then.
- Often your videos get deleted with the reason that it breaks the copyright laws, even if you upload your own videos. This is because their computer deletes files automatically as it believes that the video is against the law to be published on YouTube.
- If you want to watch a video, it sometimes takes too long until the buffering is finished.
Downloading
Downloading is the term used to describe receiving data from a remote system, such as the webserver to your own system. On the internet you can download everything, reaching from software, to music and videos. You can either do downloading from the internet using peer-to-peer software such as Bearshare or Livewire. The trouble with these is that peer-to-peer (p2p) often contains viruses, which may harm your computer. The one I am going to use is Download.com. This website contains a lot of freeware and music, which can be downloaded for free. It contains more than 100,000 softwares that can be downloaded, without having to get an account and the website gets around 113 million users every year.
Advantages of Downloading:
- Downloading allows you to get software, music and videos without having to leave your home and going to a shop. Therefore it saves a lot of work and is much easier.
- You can almost download everything that can be used on a PC, software, music, videos, and eBooks are a few examples.
Disadvantages of Downloading
- There are many websites that offer free downloading, which however can be illegal and you may be prosecuted if you get caught.
- Often the files that are there for downloading have viruses or spyware with them, which can infect your computer if you download these files.
- The download, depending on the size of the file(s), can take more than an hour if you have a slow internet connection and therefore it can be time consuming.
- Information & Education
On the internet there are many websites that provide up to date information. These can be news or other information. One of the most reliable website for finding information on topics and up to date news is bbc.co.uk. There you find information on most scientific and other topics and news about every single topic. It is the officially 46th most visited website according to Alexa on 30th September 2008. Therefore its data is also very reliable.
Advantages of Information & Education online
- Information online is often up to date and you can find the latest news, etc on trusted websites such as bbc.co.uk.
- You can find information and learning topics for every topic/subject. There is a wide number of websites that offer these services, so if you can’t find what you were looking for, you can search for it on other websites.
- Learning online often includes multimedia or diagrams such as spider diagrams. These make it much easier for the learners to remember the stuff they have learned.
Disadvantages of Information & Education online
- Often the information is unreliable on websites such as Wikipedia.org. This can be because there are not experts, which are writing these articles.
- Many websites are too biased. Therefore you have to look for reliable and trusted websites.
- Incorrect information can lead to lower grades for the school/college that the student is studying at as he/she might trust the information, which however is incorrect.
- If you are looking for a certain area education in a certain subject, you might not find it on the internet easily, or you might have to pay a fee in order to use that service.
There are also a lot of educational websites on the Internet. Many of these are free, like bbc.co.uk again. On bbc.co.uk students can find help for their education. It includes help for students from the primary school up to the A Levels. Bbc.co.uk provides this service for completely free of costs. Educational games are also available there, which make it more entertaining for students. Also you can learn languages using multimedia, such as video clips. The main languages that you can learn on bbc.co.uk are French, Spanish, German, Italian, and a wide number of other languages. Multimedia helps people learn languages much easier and more entertaining.
On BBC Learning you can learn almost everything. A print screen below shows some examples.
How ICT has affected people’s lives
ICT has changed people’s lives in various different ways. The ones that I will be writing about are:
Communication
Communication
Communication using ICT has changed the way people lead their lives. Today people are using ICT more commonly for communication because it allows people to communicate to anyone around the globe a lot faster and cheaper.
One major way of communication is Instant Messaging. This has changed people’s lives as this has allowed people to communicate to others that are in a different country. As making phone calls costs a lot more, Instant Messaging has become more popular as it is often completely free of charge or very cheap. Also sending pictures to relatives living in a far country can be done by IM. This also reduced the use of postage. The main reason for this is that IM is much faster than post.
The other way of communication that has changed people’s lives is the use of email. Many people have subscribed to different mailing lists, which they can get up-to-date information from. This replaces the newspapers etc. that they get via post.
Crime and Crime Prevention
Crime prevention and detection has become a lot easier because of ICT. There are various devices that can detect and prevent crime. In 2006 the RSA’s Fraud Action Research Lab found out that “one of the most advanced pieces of crimeware” stole bank details of more than 500,000 online bank accounts. According to the RSA it was done by a Trojan virus
