Final Blog Post

This semester in IT class was very informative. We learned about a variety of different facets of information technology- simple skills such as making charts in excel, to more complicated tasks like using a dynamic web template in Microsoft Expression Web.
I noticed through out the semester that often times with technology, things did not go according to plan; a sum in excel was not working, Filezilla was not connecting, international project partners were not responding. Many times these obstacles were very frustrating, but I learned the importance of being persistent in finding solutions either on my own, of through other resources. With the example with the collaborative project with Romanian students, a huge roadblock for my team was that the Romanian students were not contributing and were not communicating effectively with us. Collaboration was a significant part of the project, and the team was doomed without it. Web 2.0 is a great tool to facilitate collaboration, but I learned that this tool is only helpful if all parties involved are making a genuine effort.
Web 2.0 topics were covered for a great deal of the course, and made me realize the magnitude to which the web contributes to our lives. Through experimentation with different web 2.0 websites, and by attending a presentation by Chris Penn about branding yourself on the web,I came to the conclusion that a strong online presence is nearly as important as a strong offline presence. As the world turns to the Internet more and more, anyone who is not represented online will find themselves falling behind.

I had a great semester in technology intensive IT101, and I look forward to implementing my newly attained skills and knowledge in years to come.

Facebook Mashup

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Collaborate Project USA/Romania

Our IT class was divided into teams comprised of a few students from Bentley, and a few students from a similar class in a Romanian university. My partners were Daniel and Matt from my class and Adela and Ana from Romania Here is what we came up with.

Buzz into Business

How do we use all these social Networks to be useful?
How can they bite me in the ass?

What to disclose online?
-It's not enough to set your profile to private. Technical glitches happen
-Tools exist to find anything about anyone online
-Put up things that you think you can contribute to society
-If interested in marketing, blog about marketing. Blog about what interests you
-Make it constructive and creative!
-Put something that will act as bait
-Create public and private accounts


what is the most interesting thing you have done on facebook from a business perspective?
-finding people who might be beneficial for us down the road in our career

two ways to make money:
-create something everybody wants
-do something nobody wants to do

"Shit is gold that floats"

Explain what/who you are in one text message

To figure this out:
Take a notebook and a bottle and write out your life story
Become a really good writer
take a marketing course
Without writing skills, will not succeed in 21st century!

Online resumes
ask people to write recommendations and testimonials
linkedin very powerful. cuts down job search time

This presentation was very useful and inspirational to me. Chris Penn spoke about the strategy of adapting one's lifestyle to an increasingly web-driven world. Penn cautioned his audience to make sure that the information on the Internet, however, is consitant with the persona that we want people to see. This piece of advice resonated with a lot of us, and also got me thinking about the degree of control that we have over the material about us displayed on the Internet. Our future employers can and will Google our names to see what kind of information is out there regarding us, and if they find unfavorable content, chances are good we will not land the job. Because of this easy searching capacity, it is crucial for us job applicants to not only take an active role in participating in the online domain, but also making our mark a positive one

Twitter in Business

Last week, business consultant Laura Fitton came to Bentley to speak to the two sections of IT101X about twitter and how it is helpful for businesses. She spoke for a while about how twitter is an incredibly powerful tool to transmit information. If one person tweets a compelling post and everyone in his/her network re-tweets it, and everybody in the new people's networks continue re-tweeting, eventually that one person has creating a tweeting phenomenon.
Personally, I am still a bit skeptical in the extent to which twitter is useful to businesses. I have not been on twitter for too long, but from what I gather most people do not tweet their thoughts about companies. This means that the vast majority of a person's tweets are not relevant in any way to market research. So why put such an emphasis on twitter instead of the conventions such as focus groups?

Technology is Our Business

This is my first attempt to live blog. I am at the CIS Technology is Our Business event. I came here because I am curious about technology, and also entertaining the idea of either majoring or minoring in CIS. The announcer just said that we will get started in three minutes. I will keep blogging about the event as it goes on.

The people that will be speaking are:

Tom Koulopoulos. "When I am talking to you, I am talking to the future". How do adults answer the question how do you picture the world? Jetsons? Blue? Opening picture from Google Earth? That map on the wall from grade school? Stuff in motion...sattelites, cell phones, internet, networks. Every one of us is a technology geek, except it is not technology to us because we grew up with it. Technology is the "stuff that comes after". We erroneously think of CIS. It is "the glue that holds this world together". CIS is the cornerstone of leadership- "that superglue" of our society. It is no longer accounting. "Pick a lense that you want to wear for the rest of your life. Don't stop looking just because you are good at it". Core competency- what puts YOU in the 99th percentile? Get a mentor. You need someone that you can trust. What will the world be like in ten years? advanced, faster, different, connected, cool, ridiculous, innovation, depends on who wins tomorrow (VOTE!), chaotic, gone. We will define what it looks like. WE WILL.
Q: If you were a CIS major today, what technical skills would you focus on?
A: Understand some of the technology at a "nuts and bolts level". Immerse ones self in the language to learn how people who work with the language think. Will be at an advantage if you understand how developers thing. Next, learn what it means to manage a project from human side and technical side. Project management is very important and indispensable skills. Some courses on innovation. Innovation can be taught and learned.
Q: What global tecjhnological innovations do you see in the near future
A: More connected. Advancements in physical telepresences. Influx in consumer robotics. Implementation of technology in the human being.

Edwin Guarin. Writer about trends, consultant, innovation. Creator of Delphi Group. Technology has expanded manyfold and will continue to expand. Self driving cars?! Capactiy to purchase items that you see on TV via touch screen. Deep zoom demonstration: incredibly high resolution, gigapixel image, so can scroll in enough to see how many people are standing on top of a tower in the picture. If like what you see, text W4 to 23000. Speech recognition demo. Even technologu has some glithces, as we saw when Guarin said "click references" and instead of selecting references, word typed "click references"
imaginecup.com


Carol Vallone. Demographics show that over the next four years, population is aging such that older population is increasing, younger people decreasing, shortage of people lacking technical skills in the work force. Engineers with business savvy. People who are technically competent and business background will be very valuable in the work force. Business perspective + consumer perspective. Future is in

Lisa Hoffmann. Went into IT because best paying jobs. Was struggled at coding ,excelled in management courses. Programming and coding is not IT for the future. Future for IT is leadership. Was successful because of superior presentation skills. Learning experience: being responmsible for a network, watching it fail, having investors threaten her life. Was recruited out of IT into business. Became business leader for fixing Y2K. After 9/11 went into operations, got very prominenet role. Don't necessarily need to love coding, but don't be afraid of outsourcing. Start at the bottom, work your way up. Coding + Project Management are key!

Joshua Marine. Works for Fidelity, corporate finance sector. Why should we choose CIS? It provides with necesasry skills that we can implenet first day on the job. On knowing business and IT: "If you can speak both languages, you will be at an advantage at your job". When there is a large busines problem, companies look to IT to figure out how to solve the problems.

Brian Heemsoth. One of the real misconceptions is that CIS entails coding. Can be as technical or not technical. Leverage technical skills from CIS program in conjunction with business core skills to solve real problems. Bentley was foundation to keep learning. Understanding of systems is important because technology is key to the future. Even finance and marketing people need CIS background.

Question and Answer section
Q: Since men seem to dominate technology fields, do women have more opportunity to attain leadership positions?
A: Yes. Lack of women in IT, therefore they are sought out.
Q: If you could go back to college and do one thing differently, what would it be?
A: Internship opportunities. Get experience in different careers. Don't avoid courses you hate- try to make yourself as well rounded as possible. Don't pass by any opportunity that comes. Take morecommunication courses. Networking is powerful! Take a course on presentation. Soft skills vs. Hard skills. Both are extraordinarily important
Q: What major would you recommend for a CIS major
A: Finance
Q: If you want to go into Marketing, which is preferable, major in marketing, minor in CIS or vice versa
A: Major in marketing with a CIS minor is preferable if you want to be in the marketing department

Brickfish experiment

I am doing my Web 2.0 company project on Brickfish, which allows users to submit their original work, competing to have it featured in a campaign for various topics.
To experiment, I submitted a photograph that I took last year to the campaign called "Photoshoot Out 2". After I submitted it, a page came up suggesting that I post my submission to a blog of social profile, so I decided to embed it here.

Photo Shoot Out 2 Brickfish

Anti spyware programs

I used Ccleaner and Ad Aware to analyze any spyware on my computer, and clean it up. I knew that I had to have some spyware because I downloaded the latest version of AIM, which comes with a lot of unfavorable programs. So when I ran CCleaner and Ad Aware I was expecting them to find a lot of malware. The top screencap is from ccleaner, showing which unnecessary files should be deleted. Most of these are cookies and other temporary internet files. I was quite surprised to see files having to do with music on my computer. These .lnk files are shortcut files for executable programs on my computer. What surprises me the most regarding these is that as I was loading and using them, I did not even realize that these are pointless files for my computer that need not be there. In fact, for the short amount of time that I have had this laptop, the sheer amount of un needed files is appalling. Of course as expected further down the list on Ccleaner were my AIM spyware files, that I was very excited to get rid of.
As for Ad Aware, I was very surprised because...it found nothing! Though I do not understand why the results of the two programs are so drastically different, I am not complaining. Maybe I should be complaining, though, since this could mean that Ad Aware is a less intensive program than Ccleaner

Crossloop in business?

This week I explored a program called Crossloop, with which I accessed a classmates computer and made a video tutorial of how to use a new feature in Windows Vista. Crossloop is a very safe and powerful tool that can be very helpful for tech support, and projects that require group collaberation.
In the case of technical support, as technology gets more and more complex, it becomes increasingly harder to describe over the phone. With Crossloop, a technical support representative in Texas could take over and control the computer of a client in Boston, and see for themselves what the problem is. Sometimes experimenting for ones self is much easier than doing so transitively through the client.
Group projects can also reap benefits from Crossloop. If two people can not physically be in the same location at once, Crossloop is one of the several methods that the team can collaborate on a project simultaneously, especially if the project involves programming a complex piece of code, or any other computer based task.

One entrepreneurial thought to close with. One might venture to start a business fixing and or customizing people's computers without the need of the client's presence. Of course serious contracts would have to be involved prohibiting the entrepreneur to access the client's personal information: the transaction would take place on a professional strictly business level.

Using Jing to create a video tutorial

http://www.screencast.com/users/sweetyulz/folders/Jing/media/e270c364-82bf-4e73-b522-df30274f3bc6

Thank you to Brandon for the instructions on how to use the new sound mixer option in windows Vista!

And for a video of me actually using crossloop:

http://screencast.com/t/PCG7fROt

First video post!

Suffering from a lack of ideas regarding what to say, here is what I came up with:

First Class Thoughts

I am very excited to be a part of the IT101x course. We all just created blogs specifically for this class, and at the same time learned about OpenID. I just created my own from claimID even though I get an OpenID by default with the creation of this blog. I am very excited to learn more about technology and web 2.0!