Starbucks Marketing Gimmick Designed to Raise Awareness of Brand.

This is nothing but a marketing gimmick designed to raise awareness of a brand. While in principal, the prospect of a more alternative and comprehensive method of payment could be interesting, in practice, Starbucks’ system falls short of being anything but a useful tool.  In fact, the larger implication here is that publishers and brands are willing to go to such elaborate lengths to make their products available to the lowest common denominator.

Today, in a consumption-laden populace, who wishes only to be entertained and not educated, capitalist producers and predatory marketers like Starbucks vie with more traditional institutions (in this particular case, credit/debit cards) in order to talk us out of our citizenship, and talk us into believing that all that is demanded from us as citizens can be achieved by us as consumers. The idea of allowing consumers to simply “pay for products by waving their phone near a sensor at the point of purchase,” may sound fun and convenient but it’s really just another ploy to turn citizens into drones of consumers who experience freedom not as a political virtue but as an exercise in the commercial activity of choosing a product. This has been the backbone of capitalist America for the last 30 years. Large companies like Starbucks, Coca Cola, and Microsoft have all helped create a system in which we have convinced citizens to yield their democratic power and their oversight and to treat themselves as private consumers and not as public citizens. In essence, Starbucks’ latest gimmick is a reductive treatment of people and a purposeful and intentional part of a business plan which all these companies (and many others) have been following for decades. The mobile device market is just another billion dollar channel advertisers can use to reach consumers directly and influence their spending.

People forget that we live in a world where information is not just vital to democracy, trade and our living, but is also the basis for the productive economy. That’s why information societies can catch up in a big hurry (as China has done) and modernize themselves very quickly. If anything, the ‘mobile flow of compensation’ here shows us the impact emerging technologies have on an unsuspecting public who are all too eager to compromise the stability of prevailing historical conceptions of interactive life  in favor of subversive influence. The real question then is: Should we allow capitalism to become dependent on unsustainable consumer spending?

To What Extent will Chinese Online Dominance be Tolerated?

The current online dominance wave from China is yet another example of how information societies have advanced so rapidly (which is largely why they have modernized so quickly) because of their mastery of the information economy. So much so, in fact, to the point where they're doing in 10 years what it took America 100 years to do. Only 23% of users are in North America, where it all started in 1969 when two computers — one in Los Angeles, the other in Palo Alto — were networked together. IT spending in China alone reached $51.2 billion in 2010. With so many Chinese users now making up the bulk of the entire global Internet user base, Chinese language could potentially become the dominant form of communication on the Web in less than five years. English, Chinese and Spanish are currently the top three languages on the Internet. However, emerging trends in translation technology (Google Chrome for instance) will probably make the rise of Chinese a net positive for most people, particularly consumers. Indeed, while English may have been sold as a possible universal business language, some may now be turning towards Chinese as its successor. Yet the true advantage of any trade language is in being able to speak to as many people as possible. No one can be an expert in every language of the world, but a computer can. China is going to open the floodgates for larger amounts of higher-quality content on the Internet as consumers demand access to higher quantities of information. Look at Facebook for example. Advanced translating tech is really just the tip of the iceberg. Essentially, we’ll all have more things to read about, more things to buy and enjoy – more satisfaction as a consumer. But is this good for democracy? Innovation will certainly be the key, however, the larger implication here is that Chinese hegemony will persist, grow and expand in international business. In fact, whether China wants to or not, it’s cultural ‘imprint’ will expand and export itself through the Web as more and more Chinese-based products, goods and services become available to the Western world. Of course, Chinese dominance is nothing new; China teaches and trains to defeat America as if they were a mortal enemy and we all know that the most productive, energetic, entrepreneurial, and economic system in the world belongs to communist China (the socialist revolutionary vanguard of the world) which is also the last totalitarian political system standing. So, putting aside the details of how to make the multi-billion-user Web work, the very fact that it's realistic to expect a second billion users points to interactive media's compelling value and the willingness of the Orient to dominate the West. People all over the world are experiencing unprecedented levels of empowerment: being able to do things is why the Web has grown so fast, and will continue to grow for years to come. However, the question here is: To what extent will Chinese online dominance be tolerated?

Is Music Piracy Illegal?

Copyright is a legal right that guard’s creative works from being duplicated, performed, or distributed without permission of the copyright owner.

Music Copyright is the limited rights approved to protect creative work of a music artist or record label, from being duplicated, performed and distributed without permission of the copyright owner. These rights can be licensed, transferred or assigned from one entity to another, while online music File-sharing is the practice of networking and distributing or providing access to digitally stored files online with the purpose of granting access to the public, also termed piracy by U.S copyright law copyright legislation. 

In today’s society piracy is considered as a form of theft, but however most people that download and listen to music have conveniently made it a life style to use one the popular file-sharing mediums, such as lime-wire, utorrent, Vuze etc to source for their latest/favorite song online. The question is, is downloading file (songs, video, software etc) from the file sharing site an act Piracy?

According to Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the answer is simply “Yes” because music is an intellectual property of the owner/artist., Posting or copying unauthorized sound files infringes someone else’s copyright, you might buy the disc in store or the file online, but technically you only own that disc or the digital file, but not the right to make copies or share it online.  You don’t own the song or the right to share it, the right lies with only the entity or organization that has the legal rights on

Piracy is one of the biggest problems faced by the entertainment and software industries, and therefore piracy most often involves violations of copyright law. As the entertainment and software industries suffer from the negative effect of piracy, the piracy industry grows bigger and bigger by the day, today the piracy industry has grown to be a multi-billion dollar industries.

Several legislators have made efforts in order to prevent the act of piracy across the globe, because it hurts the working people in recording industry & retail music trade entertainment industry and the local songwriters & artists. Most critically it erodes the entertainment industry’s profit.

 File sharing is also critical sector of the piracy; according to BBC news In the UK “the IFPI said it was supportive of the proposed Digital Economy Bill, which includes legislation to cut off persistent illegal file sharers”. As long as file sharing is still in existence piracy will still be alive and and growing, this is because the end users of this file sharing sites are already reluctant and possessed  by the free access to all the media files they desire. They feel lazy to go out and get CDs because they feel it cost too much and they only have few good songs. As a result of the effort immersed by RRAR to monitor file-sharing sites, they were successful in shutting down lime-wire one of the biggest file sharing sites in united state The legislator have made effort to monitor the file-sharing site, and was successfully in shutting down one of the biggest file sharing site (Lime Wire) in US, due to the firm plans to launch new services that adhere to copyright laws soon

In conclusion file sharing sites vastly affect the effectiveness of entertainment industries, and affect the local artists however it sometimes benefits some of the well established musicians, because the free access to their music creates a vast popularity and grows the number of their fans, which benefits them when it.

Online Privacy Invasion "Social Networks"

Most websites try to take steps in protecting personal information of their users, but mistakes do happen. “Privacy concerns with Facebook have put their concentration on online privacy as a whole”.

Social networking sites have widely spread around the world within the last five years. With the establishment of Facebook by “Mark Zuckerberg” and the continual status of MySpace have made many people have been giving out their personal information out on the internet. These social networks keep track of all communications and exchange used on their sites and they save them for future use. Most users are not aware that they can change the privacy settings and unless they adjust them, their personal information is open to the public.

Social networking sites have provided privacy procedures in order to provide their customers with protection on their personal information. On Facebook for example privacy settings against invasion are provided for all registered users. These settings include the ability to block unwanted individuals (friends) from seeing your profile, the capability to limit who has access to your profile and pictures. If you look at the recent academic papers, it explained that Facebook advertisers can, by process of elimination, glean private information about those who view on their ads.

It is said that there is not an inclusive law that protects consumer online privacy, maters in this area remains handled by FTC as mention by Prof. Miyazaki on his blog.

With United States to outline its privacy law, it has a few countries to learn from, who have recent privacy invasion alerts on Facebook, and these countries are, U.K, Germany Canada. They all had privacy laws that the online businesses have been violating.

In this 21^st century stage of digital information, consumers, marketers, the government are still working out what “privacy” means for online practice. The latest Facebook problems are possibly to be fixed more quickly, as the others online companies. And this will be one more situation for the Commerce Department to include in its solution file, as it’s looking through the most efficient way to involve the U.S government in online Privacy argument.