farzal.ecommerce.spring2008.iba.khi.pk

Update: Deadline is now Monday, February 4th, 5pm. See your emails..

If you are developing your amazon web-services integration site using PHP (which you should be if not already – I found it to be easier even when I didn’t know any php, probably due to extensive online help), you can host your php website on pkeducation server

I have sent the 6 group communicators (those you sent me group name + members + ideas) the user-id and password and other connection information.

Simply upload a php script (millions of free php pages exist – just pick a simple one you can read through) and see it in action.

This assignment should require about 10 lines of “real” coding or code modification – find a way to do it.

IF, and this is a big IF, you cannot Continue reading »

written by Farzal (Admin) \\ tags: Amazon, C#, farzal, java, php, pkeducation

We have confirmation on 2nd guest lecture. It will be on Feb 20th (Wednesday) from 8:45 to 9:45am

The speaker is Mr. Nauman Sheikh, Director Technical Operations at CreditChex, a venture into credit bureau services for Pakistan. You can read more about it on http://www.credit-chex.com/

This will be a very engaging session and go through various technologies and back office processes that enable E-Bill payment. Nauman was part of the company which pioneered this in the US. He has so much to talk about, and is very willing to share his wealth of knowledge with you.

Stay tuned!

written by Farzal (Admin) \\ tags: Credit-Chex, E-Bill, Experian, Nauman

Three students disagreed or had questions about their grades - please email with proof of data and/or clarification to receive the extra point (those 3 only!)

The average is between 5.5 and 6.0 - very poor show. Only maybe 5 people had done the reading assignment on Amazon S3 SLA. I can see a very quick, easy to grade mid-term where I get tons of blank sheets of paper.

written by Farzal (Admin) \\ tags: Amazon S3, Quiz

I need to hear from you what you like and do not like about the class, lectures, my style of teaching, etc.

We have done 6 lectures, so about 20-25% done with semester along with 1 guest lecture (2-3 more in pipeline). Give your feedback as “comments” to this blog entry. Just put a dummy name/email combination if you want the feedback to me anonymous. This is purely for your benefit and a small effort from 37 of you can go a long way to improve the remaining 75% of the semester.

Thank you in advance.

Guest lecture suggestions are also welcome here:

written by Farzal (Admin) \\ tags: Feedback, semester

Due date: End of day Monday, January 14th 2008

Submission Instructions: Email Farzal at his yahoo address with following format:

I want to receive 1 email per group. It should come from 1 of the team members, ideally the project coordinator.

• The subject should be of format: E-Commerce:Project:TeamName
  • replace TeamName with what your team name is
• The body of the email should contain
  • Business Idea or Ideas (if already available)
  • Team member names, 1 member per row, in the format:
    • Member Full Name (member_email_address)

written by Farzal (Admin)

The first assignment:

Due date: End of day Saturday, January 13th 2008

Submission Instructions: Email Farzal at his yahoo address with following format:

• the subject of the email should be: E-Commerce:HW1:YourName
  • replace YourName with what you would like to be called by me in the class, ideally your first name
• the body of the email should contain link to your blog, the user-id and password for the administrator account so I can check your settings, etc.

Assignment:

1. Create your own blog or wordpress.com or blogger.com or any of the other free blogging services
2. Put minimum 1 post with your picture and name plus additional information about yourself, your aspirations, etc
3. If you already have a blog, change it to match the assignment requirements, and post an additional entry as per point#2
4. The blog should have 6 out of following 8 features:

1. Email subscription
2. Comments threading
3. Comments notification
4. Password protection
5. Stats display
6. Latest comments on front page
7. Categories
8. Google ad-sense or some other ad program

Please remember IBA code of conduct related to plagiarism. There is plenty of help available on the internet - don’t have someone do this for you.

written by Farzal (Admin) \\ tags: blog, blogger, wordpress

Everyone gets an extra hour to sleep on Wednesday (except those who depend on shared transportation):
The class for January 16th (Wednesday) will take place as follows:

9:30 to 10:00 (Farzal - lecture)

10:00 to 10:45 (AirBlue MD Mr. Syed Nasir Ali)

10:45 to 11:00 (Q&A)

Update: Presentation File (important for mid-term?)

Update: pictures from event

written by Farzal (Admin) \\ tags: AirBlue, Syed Nasir Ali

Our first guest lecture will be related to E-Commerce in Travel Industry

Mr. Syed Nasir Ali, MD of Pakistan’s largest and fastest growing airline AirBlue will be speaking to all of you about AirBlue in general, and about investment in technology and its subsequent usage by the airline, its partners and its customers.

This will be during out fourth session on Wednesday, January 16th. The class will be rescheduled by 1 hour due to match his desired timings. See posting related to scheduling.

written by Farzal (Admin) \\ tags: AirBlue, Airline, Pakistan, Syed Nasir Ali, Travel

Anyone has ideas on who should be invited to come for guest lecture? I was thinking it should be a 30 to 45 minute interactive session.

1 person from the financial industry (bank, stock exchange, brokerage, etc)

Couple of people from start-ups, ideally IT start ups

1 person from Teleco/FMCG/Oil & Gas/Shipping etc

Suggestions - names?

written by Farzal (Admin)

A suggestion came from Adnan (PixSense) on doing case studies, and seems like a very reasonable set of topics. Any suggestions on web 2.0 failures?

I think the course should cover case studies of e-commerce sites in the
Web 1.0 world first

1) Amazon - Success
2) Ebay - Success
3) WebVan - Failure
4) Pets.com - Failure

Then the course should look at Web 2.0 companies
Continue reading »

written by Farzal (Admin) \\ tags: e-commerce, Web 1.0, Web 2.0