Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Zuji

Website: http://www.zuji.com/


ZUJI, Asia-Pacific’s most comprehensive online travel company, puts the world of travel at your fingertips. It is a well established travel coordinator that organizes tours on well trodden path to the road that are rarely used by; popular tourist spot or an unusual destination. With their wide network of global partners, ZUJI makes traveling easy. Gain access to over 400 airlines, 77,000 hotels, 50 car hire companies plus 3,000 activities and attractions. They provide helpful travel planning tools and destination information that make your trip wonderful and well planned for. However, the most apprehensive matter that clients or customers may have is probably the online security done for Zuji, as many of their transactions are done through the internet. Customers are assured by them as they have engaged themselves with Verisign, which is the global leader in online security for e-commerce payments. Customers’ interests are well vested of. Although Zuji is operating through the web, they still provide excellent customer care as they are well reached and accessible through email, phone and fax – 7 days a week if there are any queries with their online booking. They provide value-added service, the price guru, for customers to tracks the lowest return airfares for up to five chosen destinations and alert the customer via e-mail when it hits or betters the amount specified by the customer. In the following paragraphs, we’ll provide more information on the online agency provider.

Zuji is a website that allows the consumer to plan their own overseas trips with best economical prices. However, they do not cater to the consumers who wish to take budget airlines. Zuji provides consumers to view different ranges of airplane tickets, hotels, railway tickets, cruise, car rentals, packages, deals, activities, insurance and travel tools. In addition, they also have a market place that allows consumers to buy gifts on the run, learn scuba diving, etc… Hence, Zuji is a transaction broker. Zuji approaches in a business to consumer (B to C) and business to business (B to B) function. On its upfront, Zuji is a B to C company as consumer directly purchases their air ticket from them. On the other hand, Zuji deals with the airline companies, hotels and many others. In short, Zuji is an agent that links up consumers’ wants and needs to their preferred airline companies, hotels, transportations, activities and insurance. Zuji shows many different packages, promotions and deals around the year. It also associates with car rentals companies and railway tickets. For instance, if the consumer is going to Europe, he or she might want to buy Euro rail tickets for easier traveling in Europe. Conversely, if the consumer is going to America, he or she might want to rent a car for travel convenience. This allows the consumer to have everything pre-planned and organized before he or she reaches the destination. The consumer does not need to worry about traveling methods when he or she just arrived at the destination. Zuji promotes its packages by lowering the total cost of hotels and flights fees. This enables the consumer to save a sum of money. Therefore, they are customer-orientated, which illustrates that Zuji possesses a behavioral approach. One of the evidences that Zuji possesses a behavioral approach is that it also offers activities like sightseeing, tours, attractions and events to be booked online. For example, if the traveler decides to tour in Singapore, he or she would like to go sightseeing at the zoo, night safari, sentosa, etc. Zuji caters to these events by selling electronic tickets (e-tickets) to them. As a result, Zuji cooperates with tour agencies from all over the world to organize these activities. One of the essentials to purchases before the tour is insurance. Zuji make the purchasing of insurance convenient to the customers. They even separate the insurance into different category like medical and comprehensive insurance. The ability of purchasing insurance online is a great advantage to Zuji as it suits the working theme. Travel tools such as arrival/departure information, currency converter, weather information, and visa requirements are provided in the Zuji website. Last but not least, these transactions are made by VISA or master card (credit card) payments. Thus, Zuji have to collaborate with banks to ensure both tight security and smooth transaction to take place. In the Zuji website, it presents both privacy and security policy therefore; it gives the consumer a sense of security when purchasing through the internet. On top of that, Zuji’s website gives help and customer care, to support this feature; they even have hotlines and emails provided.

With Zuji’s well designed and user friendly website, this enables consumers to have a well navigated experience while surfing their website. They have designed the website in such a way that it caters as a one-stop-site for all purposes to satisfy those traveling consumers. Hence, with its easy accessibility, this creates convenience for their potential and existing customers. It has installed tight security measures and a third party secure transaction provider such as VeriSign to enhance their security system. This has thus make their customers feel safe to do transactions online. Moreover, they are well recognized by the awards they proudly presented on their websites. As their well-established business-to-business relationship, they are able to create and offer attractive promotions and packages to their consumers. Clear and well-defined interactive efforts for example feedbacks and polls are put in to engage with the customers. Zuji is competent to create the “flow of spaces” for its clients as everything is done online. Clients made transactions online, they will sent them the paid air tickets via mail to them. This saves a lot of hassle for their consumers to be physical there to make payments or collect their tickets. Zuji has made an effort to understand their customers by creating a customer care page to gain feedbacks from their consumers and also to answer any enquiries posted by them. Enhancements or add-on services are provided for instance car renting or booking. Once the consumers named their requirements, they will handle properly and settled the administrative work for them. Lastly, a good website is one that has a sitemap. Zuji provides a good, well-defined and helpful sitemap to assist their consumers while browsing their website.

Although, there are many positive points of this website, we noticed a few down sides of the zuji website. For instance, some pages requires much longer loading period then others, hence for those who are rushing for time may find it as convenience in this case. On the other hand, we also discover that it does not cater for lower tier or those who have budget constraints, there are no packages or airlines found on the site that caters to this needs. Moreover, there are also certain advertisements that are quite misleading, for example prices are not stated clearly even until the stage of payment. Therefore, this should be clarified in order to curb more confusion and misleads. Hence, all of the negative factors that are mention above should not be over looked and we think that the website have more room for improvements and that they should act on it to improve the quality of the website so that both their customers and themselves can benefit from it!

With Zuji’s well designed and user friendly website, this enables consumers to have a well navigated experience while surfing their website. They have designed the website in such a way that it caters as a one-stop-site for all purposes to satisfy those traveling consumers. Hence, with its easy accessibility, this creates convenience for their potential and existing customers. It has installed tight security measures and a third party secure transaction provider such as VeriSign to enhance their security system. This has thus make their customers feel safe to do transactions online. Moreover, they are well recognized by the awards they proudly presented on their websites. As their well-established business-to-business relationship, they are able to create and offer attractive promotions and packages to their consumers. Clear and well-defined interactive efforts for example feedbacks and polls are put in to engage with the customers. Zuji is competent to create the “flow of spaces” for its clients as everything is done online. Clients made transactions online, they will sent them the paid air tickets via mail to them. This saves a lot of hassle for their consumers to be physical there to make payments or collect their tickets. Zuji has made an effort to understand their customers by creating a customer care page to gain feedbacks from their consumers and also to answer any enquiries posted by them. Enhancements or add-on services are provided for instance car renting or booking. Once the consumers named their requirements, they will handle properly and settled the administrative work for them. Lastly, a good website is one that has a sitemap. Zuji provides a good, well-defined and helpful sitemap to assist their consumers while browsing their website.

Zuji being one of the most trusted online travel company has own its success to its wide network of partners. This is also the reason why they can still have gain hold with competition from many others players in the industry. They provide one of the cheapest service due to their economies of scale from their vast customer base. Zuji also gained its popularity through all the prestigious award that they received from; for example, No.1 on hitwise company, the world’s leading online competitive intelligence service and many others. We can see from the above that Zuji with its successful events, they too have their downsides of the service. It is both an informational and behavioural system, however, it slants more towards behavioural system. As their activities are mainly performed online, their transcation involves reading and accepting of terms and condition stated to the customers. Lastly, to conclude, with the massive competition around, Zuji has to keep up with the latest technology and try to source for the best low prices for their customers.

Thursday, October 4, 2007

Apple

Website: www.apple.com

Apple is a multi-national company. It deals and produces its own electronic products. In addition, they are environmentally concern. They have wide range of product lines that keep improvising on their existing or new products. They have many existing products for example, iMac, iPod, etc… Under iPod, they carry three generations. They came up new products for instance, iPhone, iTouch. Apple also provides value add services like, iLife, iTunes and iPhotos, etc… More details will be discussed in the following paragraphs.

Apple produces many products that is well liked by its consumers, and one of the newest product is iPhone. It is not only a combination of an iPod and a phone. It possesses the capability of a camera, Internet, wireless data transfers (Bluetooth, EDGE, Wi-Fi), video playable and multi-touch display. Multi-touch display is one of the newest technologies. Apple is one of the first companies to discover and implement this function. In addition, iPhone uses high technology like the accelerometer and proximity sensor. The accelerometer detects when you rotate iPhone from portrait to landscape, and automatically changes the contents of display, so that consumers immediately see the entire width of a web page or a photo in its proper landscape aspect ratio. Three elements are used to function it. They are silicon mass, silicon springs and electric current. The silicon springs use electrical current to measure the position of the silicon mass. Rotating iPhone causes the fluctuations in the electric current passing through the silicon spring. The accelerometer registers these fluctuations and iPhone adjusts the display. The proximity sensor activates during a phone call. When the iPhone is lift to the ear, the proximity sensor immediately turns off the display to save power and prevent inadvertent touches until iPhone is moved away. Another power-saving feature is the ambient light sensor. This intelligent sensor automatically adjusts the display’s brightness to the appropriate level for the current ambient light. Hence this function conserves battery life and prevents accidental touches. This also signifies that Apple produces environmental friendly products. The iPhone is also capable of logging into the internet. The internet is a worldwide, publicly accessible network of interconnected computer networks that transmit data by packet witching using the standard Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). It is a “network of networks”. With the access of internet mobility, this aids the consumer to go online as and when he or she wants. Being able to connect to the internet on the phone allows the consumer to communicate and reach globally. The iPhone features the internet function with Safari, mail, widgets and Youtube. The Safari web browser allows web pages the way they were designed to be seen. It works together with the multi-touch function and accelerometer function which permits easier viewing and zooming of the display. iPhone uses a rich HTML email client that fetch the email in the background from most of the POP3 or IMAP mail services and displays photo and graphics right along with the text. Maps are also inputted in the iPhone. With Google Maps and iPhone’s map application, consumers are able to view maps and satellite images or get direction and traffic information. With the help of internet and the widget application, it provides helpful information on the go like stock reports, weather reports, and more. One of the highest hits video streaming website, Youtube is also featured in the iPhone. Hence, consumers are able to browse Youtube videos wherever they go. The iPhone are both portable music and video playable, to add on, Apple has featured a Wi-Fi store for music to be purchased and download music on the go. iPhone is also a mobile phone which allows calls, sms, voicemail, photos, mms and ringtones. Therefore, Apple not only uses high technology to create this product but also considers about the environmental issues, which is now one of the main concern for everyone.

Apple iPod have introduced four sophisticated devices namely iPod shuffle, iPod nano, iPod classic and iPod touch. Apple iPod is designed and made in a way no matter where or what you want to play for instance ranging from songs in your music library or videos to maybe just wanting to grab some tunes to run. The one gigabytes iPod shuffle allows an estimate of two hundreds and forty songs to be stored and with a battery life of up to twelve hours of audio available in five interesting colours to choose from. It lets you wear on your sleeve or your lapel or you can clip on and wear it as a badge of musical devotion. Next, it’s the small iPod with one very big idea of video: iPod nano comes in two kinds of capacity four gigabytes and eight gigabytes. Now the world’s most popular music player that permits you to enjoy TV shows, movies, video podcasts, and more. In details, lets you stored up to a thousands songs, up to three thousands five hundreds photos, up to fours hours of video and up to two thousands songs, up to seven thousands photos, up to eight videos respectively. Having the larger, larger and colourful display of two-inch means amazing picture quality. Moreover, the battery life last up to twenty-four hours of audio and up to five hours of video and available in five eye-catching colours for your pick. On top of that, Apple came up with iPod classic to hold everything. With up to one hundred and sixty gigabytes of storage, iPod classic lets you carry everything in your collection – up to 40,000 songs or up to forty thousands songs, or up to two hundreds of video. They have modified this modern iPod classic in a completely new, even thinner and all metal design. Lastly, iPod touch features the same revolutionary interface as iPhone. Built to take full advantage of the large 3.5-inch display, the multi-touch interface lets you control everything using only your fingers. So you can glide through albums with Cover Flow, flick through photos and enlarge them with a pinch, or zoom in and out on a section of a web page. And iPod touch features a touch screen QWERTY keyboard perfect for browsing the web in Safari, searching for videos on YouTube, finding music on the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store, or adding new contacts. The iPod touch display has an ambient light sensor that automatically adjusts brightness to suit the ambient light in your surroundings. It is a better experience and battery-saving efficiency for iPod touch. An accelerometer detects when you rotate iPod touch from portrait to landscape, then automatically changes the contents of the display, so you immediately see the entire width of a web page, your music in Cover Flow, or a photo in its proper aspect ratio. With Apple’s Safari browser built in, iPod touch is the only iPod that gives you wireless access to the web, everywhere you go. View websites the way exactly the way they are displayed. Sync your bookmarks or add a few as you go. Enable you to search the web using the touch screen keyboard. Zoom in and out by tapping the gorgeous 3.5 wide multi-touch display. With iPod touch, you can discover new music anywhere. Built-in wireless capability gives you access to the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store, where you can buy songs with a tap. Browse New Releases, What’s Hot, Genres, and Top 10 selling songs or do a quick search.

iMac is one of the latest members that had just joined the Mac family. It is a all-new, all-in-one iMac packs a complete, high-performance computer into a beautifully thin design. Available in 20- and 24-inch widescreen models, it includes built-in wireless, Mac OS X, and the new iLife ’08. So within minutes of opening the box, you’ll be doing everything from sharing photos to creating movies to building websites. More than ever before, iMac allows you to live a digital life. Loaded with iLife, the new iMac makes it easy to turn your photos, movies, and music into blogs, podcasts, books, and calendars. All the other essentials are built in as well, including an iSight camera, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth.
The design of the imac is very light and slim, it is portable and the design is slick. iMac has everything you’re looking for in a computer. Brains and beauty come together in this amazingly slim, desire-evoking, all-in-one design. With iMac, your workspace turns from cluttered desktop to brilliant display podium, instantly.
From the technology aspect, its is well equipped with functions. As you might suspect, design doesn’t supersede performance. The new iMac is more powerful than ever, with a faster processor, next-generation graphics, and larger hard drives. And it’s loaded with everything you need to make use of that power, including a built-in iSight camera, Wi-Fi, and SuperDrive.
One highlight of the iMac is that is consisting of Intel dual processor.iMac has always made it fast and easy to do everything from surfing the web to making home movies to video chatting. Now iMac offers greater performance than ever thanks to faster dual-core Intel processors and a speedier front side bus. iMac features the Intel Core 2 Duo processor at speeds up to 2.4GHz. And for maximum power, you can upgrade the 24-inch iMac to an Intel Core 2 Extreme processor at 2.8GHz. There is also turbo charge component, with their 64-bit processor architecture, the Intel Core 2 processors can manipulate data and execute instructions in large chunks to deliver advanced computational power to iMac. That adds up to exceptional speed and agility, improved performance you’ll notice when working with photos in iPhoto or Aperture, creating Keynote presentations, editing video in Final Cut Pro, playing HD video, or holding four-way video conferences. Augmenting the advanced Core 2 processors is equally advanced system architecture. It includes, for example, an 800MHz system bus and 4MB of shared L2 cache. With such substantial L2 cache, data instructions can be kept close to the two processor cores, greatly increasing performance and allowing the entire system to work more efficiently.

Apple has well advanced their standing against its competitors by providing value-added applications like iLife, iWork and iTunes for their customers. This is probably one of the reasons that explain for their wide base of customers from all parts of the world. iWork is a newly launched application for their Mac computer users, which “work wonders without the work”. iWork is the perfect catalyst for presentations, it has 3 programs provided for the precise application that the user may need i.e. Pages’08, Keynote’08 and Numbers’08 each for their specific functions. Pages’08 offers an intuitive way to create beautiful, media-rich documents using impressive features you know how to use right away. For example, one of their functions allows users to switch easily between word processing and page layout modes effortlessly. Keynote is another amazing program that you can effortlessly astonish your audience with cinema-quality presentations that are so easy to create- tell your story effectively and dramatically. Allowing you to do everything from setting up your family budget to completing a lab report to creating detailed financial documents, is what the Numbers’08 can do for you. iLife is an application where it allow users to document their photos, create movies, make music, websites to connect with others. This may be a well given example for ‘flow of spaces’, people do not need to be physically there to interact with one another.

After viewing on the website, we discovered that it’s both an information and transaction broker. Under the information category, it has provided detailed product features and specifications which allow customers' enquiries to be answered almost through the website. There are frequent and latest updates on their new products. The website is well organised and categorised that enable the users to be well navigated in their website. As compared to their competitors, they provide a range of prices as references while others does not. There are also helplines to call for further enquiries. Advertisements efforts are put in to attract and educate their customers. Much effort has been seen in engaging with their consumers. They also set up a discussion forum to exchange their experience or encounter of their product, regardless if it’s a good or bad experience. Under the transaction category, it provides a channel for people to purchase their products. Although this is not their main specification, however they provide a service for those who are interested in purchasing online. It is both a technical and behavioral approach. However, it slants more towards the behavioral approach. For instance, as mentioned above, during the purchasing, customers are prompted to accept the terms and conditions stated.

Environmental protection is a priority for the conservation of precious natural resources and the continued health of our planet. Apple recognizes its responsibility as a global citizen and is continually striving to reduce the environmental impact of the work we do and the products we create. From the earliest stages of product design through manufacturing, use, and recycling, Apple takes care to keep their activities and our products environmentally sound. Four areas of particular attention are product and packaging design, responsible manufacturing, energy efficiency, and recycling. Each aspect of the design cycle provides significant challenges, yet their efforts in these areas have resulted in some impressive results. Next, design dictates the quantity of raw materials, type and recyclability of materials, energy consumption required for manufacturing and use, and the ease of recycling. Apple continually refines its product design to maximize efficiency while minimizing waste, following the requirements of programs such as Energy Star as well as our own high standards. Apple helps to safeguard the environment as well as consumers’ safety by restricting the use of environmentally harmful compounds in our materials and manufacturing processes. For example, Apple plans restricted substance program to limit the use of heavy metals and ozone depleting substances in their products and manufacturing processes. In addition, a device’s greatest environmental impact is often its energy consumption over time. Apple has made great strides in recent years to optimize the energy efficiency of their hardware and created tools, such as the Energy Saver feature in Mac OS X, that allow consumers to manage the power consumption of computers. Lastly, Apple’s holistic approach to recycling encompassing a product’s entire lifecycle which includes extensive take-back programs that enable consumers and businesses to dispose off used Apple equipment in an environmentally sound manner.

Although, apple had portrayed a positive and well- organized image but certainly there are down sides of it. For instance, the web pages of apple did not have many contents and the descriptions were pretty vague and not precise. Hence it will hinder some potential customers in purchasing their products as it might not answer the enquires that the customers might have. The websites might be too congested for novice users and it might cause confusions for the consumers. Therefore , they should improvise it and make it more user friendly.Many had complained that the loading of videos and flash demonstration are very slow, especially when the consumer has slow internet connectivity. Thus, consumer might find that it’s a hassle to load and view the demonstrations. Some critics has pointed out that the products are not as good as they claimed in those web pages. For examples, the average life span of an ipod battery is around one year and the ear phones are also not as good as what it should be, it cannot fully bring out the fine tune of the music. Some also complain that apple should come out with scratch proof material ipods. Hence, it did not cater to the needs of the vast majority.

Being one of the largest multi-national companies (MNC), Apple not only connects the customers to them and considers about the environmental issues. Apple’s website is both a information and transaction broker. However, it is more focus on being an information broker. Apple performs the business to consumers (B to C) approach and lean towards the behavioral approach. Apple produces many advance technology electronic products and is responsible to its consumers. In addition, it is concern about the globe and thus, produces environmental friendly products. Apple also allows consumer to interact with each other, which helps them to communicate and discuss about their products.

PCKLL group members

ISORG - Wed Morning Class (AA)

Group Name: PCKLL

Group Members:
Phoon Hui Shen
Kelly Chia siew chuan
Ling Yan Jun
Loh Qi
Chia Tze Wei