Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Project Overview
For this project we have to collect information about a new potential country, or activity
for the company to visit. As a researcher I have to find out information about my chosen
activity, we have to produce a report to the Managing Director of the company presenting
our proposal for a new activity to them. The adventure travel company is situated in
Northampton and provide gap years to students, giving them the opportunity to visit
numerous countries. Planning a gap year is something really relevant to me considering I
will be able to go on a gap year in two years, I will be able to use my knowledge of ICT
and group tour planning; as I have previously arranged visits to; Reading Festival 2008
and various theme parks across the UK.
The new activity I have chosen is flight training; due to the high taxes in the UK flying
training is quite expensive. At the end of the activity the participating students will have
achieved their Private Pilots Licence and will be a qualified pilot, able to carry non-paying
passengers. Considerations need to be taken about costs, it needs to be viable for students,
obviously if it costs £2000 excess, when the food, travel and accommodation is included
they will pay the extra £1000 to do the flight training at home. This is a strong project as I
personally would be interested in taking part and also members of my class expressed
interest in it also. This activity needs to take place somewhere visually interesting (scenic)
with low taxes and a good exchange rate to the British pound. I have chosen to visit
Hawaii for my gap year as it can offer cheap flight training and is very scenic.
Information I need
Search Engines
A search engine is a computer program designed to receive data from keywords that users
input, then produce a list of documents/ web pages as an output. Using a spider, so named
because it crawls the web and returns as many documents as possible, then an indexer
collaborates all the results and people can search through them to find what they want.
Before the days of search engines things were difficult to find online, web search engines
came about as a sort of web directory.
Meta tags are placed into the <head> of the webpage they are not visually seen on the
page, but when a crawler based search engine reads this information it processes it. A few
crawlers still support meta keywords, these are additional keywords which
Meta descriptions are also read but largely ignored by most search engines; Google
generates its own description based on page content.
Some pages that contain either sensitive or admin information can be blocked from being
indexed by crawler based search engines by using robots.txt
Basic Search
These are s0me of the s3arches I can d0 using my knowledge of logical operators:
These allow me to refine my search down, searching for specific items, the above searches
tell Google to only return results where the exact phrase flying training has been found, it
also then removes any results that contain the keyword Africa. This is useful as there is a
lot of cheap “flying training” in Africa, but I don’t want to go there so –africa cancels out
all the results.
If I want to search a specific site for content, I can modify my Google query, so that it
searches a website or a domain by attaching the prefix site:[URL here] without brackets
and the search term before or after it. For example I want to search the site
http://www.gapyear.com/ for flight training I would type into Google: flight training
site:http://www.gapyear.com/
Goggle has an inbuilt feature so that you don’t need to remember how to do all the
advanced searches, using the advanced search page link on the Google homepage you can
access the advanced search form. Although not all advanced operators are included on that
page it is very user-friendly.
Businesses can now communicate more efficiently, internally and externally now emails
are commonly used for internal communication within large businesses. This saves time
and also provides a digital copy of any requests, which can be replied to and followed up.
Emails are convenient as they can be picked up on a range of devices and at any time, this
allows businesses be mobile and individuals to work at various locations of there
choosing. Currently though the mobile telephone network has a larger coverage than
internet availability for both wireless and wired. Although there are satellites which can be
used to access the internet, they are usually are rather expensive making them unviable,
also network speeds vary due to the delay of transmission. So mobile phones obviously
remain the clear choice for mobile usage, this could change in the near future though.
Logistics companies and small businesses that are constantly on the move can benefit
from using mobile phones as communication can still be maintained on the phone. For
companies that remain in one central area of operations, fixed telephone networks are
typically installed as these are cheaper then using the mobile phone networks. Fixed
telephones do not give the re-readability of email but do provide instant responses, as it
requires the other used to be on the phone also. Fax machines used to be commonly used
to send data, using the existing telephone network these had an advantage over traditional
post, due to the speed of delivery. But faxes have been replaced by email, giving the
receiver flexibility whether to produce a hard copy, saving paper and company costs.
Many companies have taken advantage of VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol)
technology, where calls are routed over the internet as apposed to over a telephone line.
Costs can be lowered as VOIP can use already established communication infrastructures
to make calls. Although quality can be varied as packets are lost or delayed, conversely if
a dedicated bandwidth line is being used and an end to end connection is being used, this
may not be noticed. Quality is a big selling point on VOIP services, that and cost, Skype is
one of the main market leaders in VOIP giving users free calls to each other. VOIP can
save a company vast amounts of money that would usually be spent on telephone calls.
Skype can also provide video-conferencing, saving time and money which would have to
be spent on travel expenses, also creating a face to face visual environment in which to
conduct business in.
Electronic information has also changed the way businesses reach their target audience
and provide services and even sell products. Web sites can be used to promote and sell
products which would traditionally have to be sold face to face. This provides ease of use
for consumers and businesses, capital can be saved as staff don’t need to be employed and
consumers can shop from anywhere they have internet access. Many businesses have
embraced the ‘web 2.0’ social networking devices and used them as a way of
communicating with potential customers, using them as marketing tools and advertising
mediums. Using these social networking platforms as free advertising, allows businesses
to reach it’s consumers without paying expensive advertising/printing costs usually
entailed in advertising, while also reaching a potentially global audience.
Information is provided to anyone who wants it, it is easily accessible anywhere in the
world, whether in books or on the internet.
Conclusion
Communication technology has come a long way from the fax machine
Bibliography
Database Searches
Local Database
Database queries
-show logical operators, consider using aggregate queries where appropriate (ask teacher)
Database reports
Online Databases
Database queries
-show logical operators, consider using aggregate queries where appropriate (ask teacher)
Database reports
Spreadsheet
Purpose
Design
Testing
Presentation
Bibliography
http://searchenginewatch.com/2167931
9th December ^
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/276893_myspacemarket08.html