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The Internet is perhaps one of the newest and most powerful media that enables the transmission of digital information and communication across the world, even if there still exist important divides (digital divide) between and within countries in the endowment, access and use of this technology.

Ubiquitous Commerce

Ubiquitous commerce, also referred to as u-commerce or übercommerce, is the combination of electronic, wireless-mobile, television, voice, and silent commerce. However, its full realization would bring something more than the simple sum of its components. Ubiquitous commerce can be defined as “the use of ubiquitous networks to support personalized and uninterrupted communications and transactions between a firm and its various stakeholders to provide a level of value, above, and beyond traditional commerce” (Watson, Pitt, Berthon, & Zinkhan, 2002).

Type Justified

There is growing global need for quality online education with increased classroom engagement and student-focused teaching approaches. The present text-heavy approach dominating online education is wholly unsatisfactory as a learning experience.

Road Map to Information Security Management

Developments in multimedia technology and networking offer organizations new and more effective ways of conducting their businesses. That includes intensification of external contacts. Barriers between different organizations are becoming less visible. The progress gives advantages to competing forces, as well. In the past, an organization was directly exposed to competition only within its own region. Now, due to easy communications, a competitor could be located on the opposite side of the globe, having the ability to access or even disrupt the most sensitive information of a competing company. Hackers and other cyber-criminals are another part of the external threat.

Production, Delivery and Playback of 3D Graphics

Three-dimensional (3D) representation is one of the cornerstones of Computer Graphics (CG) and multimedia content. Advances in this domain, coupled with the highly fuelled progression of 3D graphics cards, have pushed the complexity of these representations into a whole new era, whereby a single real-time model can consist of more than a million polygons. Huge architectural buildings, everyday objects, even humans themselves, can be represented using 3D graphics in such detail that it is difficult to distinguish between real and virtual objects. Concurrently, and much towards the other end of the scale, many devices, such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), mobile phones, laptops and so forth, are now “3D capable” to enhance a user’s experience and to provide much more depth to the information presented. In many cases, these devices access the same content from the same service provider; for example, providing virtual maps/guides, multi-user games and so forth. It is this broadness of content and the heterogeneity of devices in terms of performance, capability, network connection and more that is the main concern in a continuously expanding market. It is also the concern of users to obtain the best quality for their device; that is, the general expectation of any device of higher performance is that overall the quality of the experience will be better.

The Online Discussion and Student Success in Web-Based Education

This article examines the performance of students in a Web-based corporate finance course and how the technologies associated with communication on the Internet can enhance student learning. The article provides statistical evidence that documents that the online discussion board in a Web-based course can significantly enhance the learning process even in a quantitative course such as corporate finance. The results show that ex ante predictors of student performance that had been found useful in predicting student success in face-to-face classes also had significant predictive power for exam performance in the online course. However, these predictors did not have predictive power for participation in the online discussion. Yet, online participation and exam performance were highly correlated. This suggests that the use of the online discussion board technology by the students enhanced the performance of students who otherwise would not have performed as well without the discussion.

A New Block Data Hiding Method for the Binary Image

Great advancements in Web technology have resulted in increase activities on the Internet. Users from all walks of life — e-commerce traders, professionals and ordinary users — have become very dependent on the Internet for all sorts of data transfers, be it important data transactions or friendly exchanges. Therefore, data security measures on the Internet are very essential and important. Also, steganography plays a very important role for protecting the huge amount of data that pass through the internet daily.

Network Intrusion Tracking for DoS Attacks

In recent years the Internet has become the most popular and useful medium for information interchange due to its wide availability, flexibility, universal standards, and distributed architecture. As an outcome of increased dependency on the Internet and networked systems, intrusions have become a major threat to Internet users. Network intrusions may be categorized into the following major types: • Stealing valuable and sensitive information • Destroying or altering information • Obstructing the availability of information by destroying the service-providing ability of a victim’s server

Multimedia Proxy Cache Architectures

The Web has become a significant source of various types of data, which require large volumes of disk space and new indexing and retrieval methods. To reduce network load and improve user response delays, various traditional proxy-caching schemes have been proposed (Abonamah, Al-Rawi, & Minhaz, 2003; Armon & Levy, 2003; Chankhunthod, Danzig, Neerdaels, Schwartz, & Worrell, 1996; Chu, Rao, & Zhang, 2000; Fan, Cao, Almeida, & Broder, 2000; Francis, Jamin, Jin, Jin, Raz, Shavitt, & Zhang, 2001; Paul & Fei, 2001; Povey & Harrison, 1997; Squid Web Proxy Cache, 2004; Wang, Sen, Adler, & Towsley, 2002). A proxy is a server that sits between the client and the real server. It intercepts all queries sent to the real server to see if it can fulfill them itself. If not, it forwards the query to the real server. A cache is a disk space used to store the documents loaded from the server for future use. A proxy cache is a proxy having a cache. The characteristics of traditional caching techniques are threefold. First, they regard each cached object as having no dividable data, which must be recovered and stored in their entirety. As multimedia objects like videos are usually too large to be cached in their entirety, the traditional caching architectures cannot be efficient for this kind of object. Second, they do not take into account the data size to manage the space storage. Third, they do not consider in their caching-system design the timing constraints that need moving objects.

Multimedia Information Design for Mobile Devices

There is a rapid increase in the use of mobile devices such as cell phones, tablet PCs, personal digital assistants, Web pads, and palmtop computers by the younger generation and individuals in business, education, industry, and society. As a result, there will be more access of information and learning materials from anywhere and at anytime using these mobile devices. The trend in society today is learning and working on the go and from anywhere rather than having to be at a specific location to learn and work. Also, there is a trend toward ubiquitous computing, where computing devices are invisible to the users because of wireless connectivity of mobile devices. The challenge for designers is how to develop multimedia materials for access and display on mobile devices and how to develop user interaction strategies on these devices. Also, designers of multimedia materials for mobile devices must use strategies to reduce the user mental workload when using the devices in order to leave enough mental capacity to maximize deep processing of the information. According to O’Malley et al. (2003), effective methods for presenting information on these mobile devices and the pedagogy of mobile learning have yet to be developed. Recent projects have started research on how to design and use mobile devices in the schools and in society. For example, the MOBILearn project is looking at pedagogical models and guidelines for mobile devices to improve access of information by individuals (MOBILearn, 2004). This paper will present psychological theories for designing multimedia materials for mobile devices and will discuss guidelines for designing information for mobile devices. The paper then will conclude with emerging trends in the use of mobile devices.