Credit Card Debts: Causes & Prevention

Credit card debts result from when a client of a credit card company purchased an item or services through the card they use. Debts accumulate increase with interest and penalties for late payment had made the total amount due become larger.

Causes

• Poor money management. A monthly spending plan is essential. Without one you have no idea where your money is going. You may be spending hundreds of dollars unnecessarily each month and end up having to charge purchases on which you should have spent that money.
• Saving too little or not at all. The simplest way to avoid unwanted debt is to prepare for unexpected expenditures by saving three to six months of living expenses. With a savings, a job layoff, illness or divorce will not cause immediate financial strain and increase debt.
  

Prevention

• Do not carry balances. If you have this habit of carrying forward your balance owed to the credit card company to the next month, it is better that you stop using your credit cards altogether. You can submit it back to the agency or cut it down to prevent any usage on urge as well.
• Find the best card for you. When you want to switch to a new credit card, you should take complete care that the rate of interest is lower than your previous one. Also, make sure that there are no special penalties or fine in case you want to hop on to a new card.
• Pay off more than the minimum amount. Set up a minimum amount for yourself when you repay the money owed to credit card agencies. People usually get stuck in debts and carry balances due to the urge of paying only the minimum amount mentioned by them. However, you should try paying off as much as you can so that the debts are removed quickly.

Reference:

1. http://www.bankrate.com/brm/news/debt/debt_manage_2004/top-10-causes.asp
2. http://creditcarddebthelp.me.uk/top-10-ways-to-get-out-of-credit-card-debt/

Electronic Currency

Electronic currency (also known as e-money, electronic cash, digital money, digital cash or digital currency) means the money you use over the internet. Electronic currency allows its holder to buy the goods and the services that the vastness of the internet offers. Whereas Electronic currency trading means buying and selling of this internet money.

One of the primary benefits that I personally really like about electronic currency trading is that it allows you to do business and earn with only a few dollars of investment. In fact, some electronic currency trading experts even suggest that beginners should start with only a few dollars so that they can first learn the ropes about electronic currency. Electronic currency trading does not demand much and it is really up to you if you want to increase your investment or not. With electronic currency trading you are given many opportunities to profit without spending too much on investment.

The second thing I like about electronic currency trading is that it has a low transaction cost. Unlike other businesses that eat up your profit with exorbitant fees, electronic currency trading allows you to do business with minimal fees giving you more profit and more money for you.

The third thing that I like about electronic currency trading is its versatility and convenience to the persons involved. Since you do business online, you are given much leeway on how to schedule your day. You can work with any electronic currency trading market that best suits your needs for any time of days.

Reference :http//www.romow.com/business-blog/benefits-of-e-currency-trading/

The application of pre-paid cash card for consumers.

The concept of prepaid cash card is similar with credit card or debit card. It gives users the ability to buy goods and services without paying by cash. Users can only spend the balance that has been preloaded onto the card. At last, users will not run into debt like over used the credit card.

The most common prepaid cash card in Malaysia is Touch ‘n Go. Touch ‘n Go card is an electronic purse that can be used at all highways in Malaysia, major public transports in Klang Valley, selected parking sites and theme park. (Click here to know more places that can use the Touch ‘n Go.) The technology used by the Touch ‘n Go card is called Mifare contactless technology. The electronic card reader will reduce the balance stored inside the card when the card approaches to the card reader. (Click here for more information about Mifare technology.) The balance of the Touch ‘n Go can be reload at toll plazas, train stations, Automated Teller Machines(ATM), Cash Deposit Machines, Petrol kiosks and at authorized third party outlets. (Click here to search for the places to purchase and reload Touch ’n Go.)

The benefits of using Touch ‘n Go are increasing the speed of paying, eliminating debt risk with no chance to spend too much as the balance is limited to reloaded amount and the card can be used and top up in most of the places in Malaysia.

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Mobile payment systems in Malaysia: Its potentials and consumers’ adoption strategies.

Mobile payment is the service that use the mobile device (such as mobile phone or smart phone) to collect money from consumer. Mobile payment can be used to purchase any number of digital or hard goods. such as music, videos, ringtones, games, wallpapers and other digital goods, hard goods including books, magazines, tickets and other.

In Malaysia, Mobile Money International Berhad has developed the MMWallet as a mobile payment system at year2006. It can solve the limitation created by cash, cheques and credit cards. The registered user can use the mobile phone to consume goods or service whenever they wish to do so through the MMWallet. It is also a must for user to either have a saving, current or credit card account with participating bank. However it is safer than other online paying as the user is not required to give out their credit card information.

In order to attract more user, the Mobile Money International Sdn Bhd which develop the MMWallet introducing Mobile Money 0% Interest Easy Payment Plan (EPP) to customers with lower merchant interest rate. No additional equipments needed no deposit, no rental and no maintenance fee as well. Therefore, customers can choose for greater value products / services and pay by installment. With this plan, the consumers are believed to use this payment system and also, it’s because the mobile phone users are a great number. That’s way the system is believe to be spread very fast.

The application of 3rd party certification programme in Malaysia

The most famous application of 3rd party certification program in Malaysia is provided by the MSC Trustgate.com Sdn Bhd. MSC Trustgate.com Sdn Bhd was incorporated in 1999 and is a licensed Certification Authority (CA) under the operation of the Multimedia Super Corridor. Certification Authority is the body given the license to operate as a trusted third party in the issuance of digital certificates.

The objective of MSC Trustgate is to secure the open network communications from both locally and across the ASEAN region. Trustgate provide digital certification services such as digital certificates, cryptographic products and software development. The products and services of Trustgate are SSL Certificate, Managed PKI, Personal ID, MyTRUST, MyKAD ID, SSL VPN, Managed Security Services, VeriSign Certified Training and Application Development. The vision of Trustgate is to enable organizations to conduct their business securely over the internet, as much as what they have been enjoying in the physical world.

Digital certificate usually attach to an e-mail message or an embedded program in a web page that verifies that user or website is who they claim to be. The common functions of a digital certificate are user authentication, encryption and digital signatures. User authentication provides other security than using username and password. Its session management is stronger. Encryption can make the data transmission secured by using the information encrypted. The intended recipient of the data is only person to receive the message. Digital signatures are like the hand signature in the digital world. It can ensure the integrity of the data.

By using the digital certificate, the users will be able to make transaction on the internet without fear of having the personal data being stolen, information contaminated by third parties, and the transacting party denying any commercial commitment with the users. Furthermore, the digital certificates can assist the development of greater internet based activities.

The Website of MSC Trustgate:
http://www.msctrustgate.com/

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The threat of online security: How safe is our data?

Nowadays, the threat of online security has always trouble the user of inter net. It is a serious matter for internet user regardless of who you are as long as you have given out your private information such as name, credit card number or even bank accountnumber. Its say so because the moment you give out you information on the web, you are actually expose at the danger of losing personal data or theft of important data which maybe in form of business information, cash at your bank.

Furthermore, some of the illegal activities including hack into internet user’s computer through malicious software. Typically, these malicious software including virus, worm, rookit and Trojan horse application. These software are always can be found at the website that is more likely being trust by public to be visit even user surf the business website or download something from the web.

Also, the ‘private’ information of the user can also being track back notwithstanding the file has been deleted at the ‘recycle bin’. These fact show us that the data are actually available publicly for the ‘hacker’ once the data have been store in the computer.
In fact, the Trojan horse applications are also hard to be found through the software. For the internet user, the way to be protected from online threat including acquire a antivirus software product and also a firewall application. The benefit of using a firewall, is that even if your system were to become compromised, the design of the firewall's rules would prevent the connections from being allowed through it.

Phishing: Examples and its prevention methods.

Phising, is actually a variation on "fishing" but the idea behind this is almost the same as both of them are trying to tempt ‘fish/victim’ through the ‘bait’. The difference between them is that the ‘phising’ is trying to get the private or sensitive information criminally. A phishing technique was described in detail as early as year 1987, it can be carried out under the name of online business transaction website, such as Pay Pal, e Bay and online banks.

A phiser can conduct criminal activities by sending an email or instant –message to ask the potential victim ‘update their account’, ‘verify their user account’,or "confirm billing information" under illegal website such as e-bay, which in fact is an illegal website. The one who response in action to the email will then become the victim as the phiser can get the sensitive information through these ‘illegal website’. The phiser can do anything they wish for fraudulent purpose.

There are several different techniques to combat phishing, including legislation and technology created specifically to protect against phishing.

Internet user should not give out their private information easily on the web. They can always contact the company which the e-mail originates to confirm the action of ‘verify account'.
Use anti-phishing toolbars as it can display the domain name for the visited website.
The petname extension for Firefox lets users type in their own labels for websites, so they can later recognize when they have returned to the site. If the site is suspect, then the software may either warn the user or block the site outright
Another popular approach is to maintain a list of known phishing sites and to check websites against the list. Microsoft’s IE7 browser, Mozilla Firefox 2.0 , and Opera all contain this type of anti-phishing measure.
The users are also suggested to augmenting the login password.
Specialized spam filters can reduce the number of phishing e-mails that reach their addressees' inboxes. These approaches rely on machine learning and natural language processing approaches to classify phishing e-mails.
Several companies offer banks and other organizations likely to suffer from phishing scams round-the-clock services to monitor, analyze and assist in shutting down phishing websites Individuals can contribute by reporting phishing to both volunteer and industry groups such as Phish Tank.

how to safeguard our personal and financial data???

Data can be defined, or classified, with labels such as public, personal, sensitive, confidential, secret, top-secret, or other categories. The more valuable or sensitive the data, the more it needs to be protected. The following tips will help you to safeguard your personal and financial data:

1. Password-protect your access - Use a strong password or pass-phrase to protect access to your data.. A combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols will offer you more security.
2. Limit transportation and transmission of data - Refrain from transporting or transmitting sensitive/confidential data if you don't need to do so.
3. Restrict network or shared access - Do not allow anyone access to sensitive/personal data unless they specifically require access.
4. Temporary data storage - If you need to store sensitive/confidential data temporarily on a memory stick, laptop, or other device, remove that data from the device when you have finished.
5. Establish guidelines for computer use - If there are multiple people using your computer, especially children, make sure they understand how to use the computer and Internet safely. Setting boundaries and guidelines will help to protect your data.
6. Avoid accessing financial information in public - resist logging on to check your bank balance when working from a coffee shop that offers wireless access.
   Reference: http://www.msisac.org/awareness/news/2007-03.cfm
   
   

An example of an E-commerce success and its causes

One of the most popular activities on the Web is online-shopping. You can shop at your leisure, and even in your pajamas. Literally, anyone can have their pages built to display their specific goods and services. History of ecommerce is unthinkable without Amazon which was among the early Internet companies that allow electronic transactions. Amazon was founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos at Seattle, Washington (USA) and was recognized as a success example of the E-Commerce.
At the outset, Amazon.com was considered as an online bookstore, but in time it extended a variety of goods by selling electronics, software, DVDs, video games, music CDs, MP3s, apparel, footwear, health products, etc. In 1999, Jeff Bezos was entitled as the Person of the Year by Time Magazine in recognition of the company’s success. Although the company’s main headquarters is located in the USA, WA, Amazon has set up separate websites in other economically developed countries such as the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and China.

According to the research conducted in 2008, the domain of Amazon.com attracted about 615 million customers every year. The most popular feature of the website is the review system. For example, the visitor can rate any product on a rating scale from one to five stars and submit their reviews. Amazon.com is also well-known for its clear and user-friendly advanced search facility which enables visitors to search for keywords in the full text of many books in the database.

How E-commerce Can Reduce Cycle Time, Improve Employees' Empowerment and Facilitate Customer Support?

The implementation of e-commerce will bring the following advantages to the company such as reducing cycle time, improving employees’ empowerment and facilitating customer support.

Reduction in cycle time means that the process of business cycle becomes shorter. For example, the purchasing material, receiving the order and checking the delivery can be quicker by process them on the internet. In the traditional way, the customer must go to the retail shop to buy what they want even they got the product catalogs. By using the e-commerce, customer can buy the product by using point and click. This makes the process of buying easier and faster. On the other hand, the digital products and services can transfer in seconds by using internet.

Improvement of employees’ empowerment means giving the employee more authority and let them participate in decision making. Employees’ empowerment is part of the eCRM. ECRM stand for electronic customer relationship management. Employee is the front line between company and customers. Employees posses with the IT knowledge and skill can involved in the decision making for strategy of e-commerce. This makes the decision making become more efficiency.

Facilitating customer support can be done by reply customer inquiry. Customer can send their inquiry about the products and services by e-mail. However, company reply the e-mail manually is difficult and require a lot of time. The development of Autoresponders system makes the job easier. The Autoresponders can reply questions frequently asked and automatically send the answer back to the customer.

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An example of an e-commerce failure and its causes

Webvan was founded by Louis Borders in the year 1999. Yahoo and Goldman Sachs are considers as original investors of Webvan, who encouraged it to rapidly build its own infrastructure to deliver groceries in a number of cities. Webvan try to build a new image for grocery store by publish window delivery which take only 30 minutes to receive the groceries at over 26 cities in American.
However, there are a lot of complaints towards customer services provided which state that the orders have to take one day or more in advance. It is an error seriously compromises the concept of instant delivery and thus it become one of the reasons for demand drop.

In fact, the expansion of webvan is also view as growing too fast as the sales are insufficient to cover up its expenses. It has invested much of their money on the infrastructure which includes automated warehouses, a fleet of vans and logistics software. All these investment are in purpose to reduce the real estate fees and employees payment via the help of technology. Furthermore, the fundamental assumptions of Webvan are also a mistake. This is say so because the consumers don’t mind and won’t stop from step into grocery shop and stand in the long queue instead of online booking. Some analysts also claim that the senior executives are lack of management experience in the supermarket industry. Finally, the company unable to cover up its loss and file the bankruptcy in year 2001. Webvan is now recognized as one of the dotcom failure in history.

The History and Evolution of E-commerce

The logo of NCSA Mosaic.

The history of e-commerce is started from 1960s after the development of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). EDI provided a platform for the data transferring within company and make the data digitalized. However, the use of EDI required high cost in that time and in slow and complex development. In 1992, the appearance of Mosaic web browser moved the e-commerce to new era. This web browser was developed by National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). It is the first web browser can display the image and text in one window. This let the process of e-commerce become more easily. Afterwards, Netscape browser was developed and it is downloadable.

This is the Mosaic web browser 0.6 beta for Windows.

Another technology to boost the e-commerce was the development of DSL. DSL enable the connection to internet quicker so it can increase the speed of business transactions. The competition of Linux and Windows started after the development of Red Hat Linux. Users got more choices for platform other than Windows. In 2000, the merger of AOL and Time Warner provided a huge profit for the economic and this also one of the major steps of e-commerce. After the attack of hacker, the improvement of security becomes the biggest issue in e-commerce. On the other hand, the dot-com collapse attack the e-commerce market and made many online company disappear. Even though the issues of hacker and dot-com collapse, the improvement of e-commerce cannot be stopped.

The e-commerce normally was use for B2B (business-to-business) transactions in the beginning and it is also the largest profit maker in e-commerce market now. The C2C (consumer-to-consumer) becomes more and more popular in these few years. For example, the famous auction website such as eBay. P2P (peer-to-peer) is also one of the important model in e-commerce. It enables to share file and resource to each user. However, It is easy to offend the law of piracy.

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The self introduction of Choon Wah

Hi, let me begin by introducing myself, my name is Wee Choon Wah and I comes from Kepong, Kuala Lumpur. I am a guy and I was born on 24 October 2008. My friends like to call me ‘Wah Chai’, but I am not Andy Lau. I am a person who would like to know people of all over the world.
I like to watch movie and normally I will go cinema once every week. My top record is I watch 5 movies in one week. Although the price of movie ticket is expensive, but my friends still will accompany me watching movie. I am very lucky because I have these all freinds. I also like to listen song, watch drama, and eat. That’s why my good friend always asks me go many places to find and eat delicious food. This is the main reason of why my weight keeps increasing.
Normally I will online when I free. The 5 websites that I always visit are www.google.com, www.utar.edu.my, www.friendster.com, www.hotmail.com, and www.viwawa.com. Visit to Google website is most for me to find all information that I need. As a student of UTAR, I always visit UTAR website to get all information such as examination result and downloading the lecture note which posted by lecture. Friendster is my communicating tool to know people of all over the world. I was creating an email account in Hotmail and I always login to check my emails. However, Viwawa is an online game website and I was interested to login to playing online game.
That’s all about me. If any person is interested go watch movie with me, especially beautiful girl, you can leave a message to me, hahaha……

The self-introduction of Cheng Shun

I am tan cheng shun. Actually i would not mind that you call me tan nobby as i m so nobby at all time.It's always boring to introduce yourself especially when u step into 2+ years old.Now, let me start the introduce..My hobbis are swimming, gym, jogging, talking rubbish (this seem like what i am doing now) and sleeping. In fact,i also treat the scout as my hobby. Did you ever heard what the people said,?once you are a scout, you are always a scout?It's great and this really mean much to me because i spent most of my time in scout at the secondary school (that's why the scout become my hobby) I am really nearly crazy but not really crazy about it actually. Sometimes people ask me why i like the gym so much. Well, this is really a good question and i always tell them ,must because i like it? What i wonder is if i can have a huge muscle like a bodybuilder. This is a greedy hope and seem like crazy but i still pay the effort because i really like to work out without fear.I always surfing at forum such as cari,chsbp.net when i was free. Sometimes, youtube as well as the friendster will also be my choices. Unwillingly, i will also go to utar.edu or wble but it was forced to do so because the final exam result will only show at there. The cari forum is really full of knowledge, news, entertainment artcle. However, the incredible news become my first choice at the forum as well as the UFO news. There are so many weird, funny or even fake news that can satisfy your curiosity. You can find some article that claim they had seen the UFO. I don't know what they are talking about is true or false as you can find that they are describe it reasonably, but still, it would seem more likely they are talking the rubbish. Well....its enough for me to introduce until here.....god bless the Chinese whoever suffering from earthquake.....

The self-introduction of Foo Loong

Hello to anyone who are viewing my blog. It was raining just now and the weather is making me sleepy. Anyway, let’s back to the point of the post today.

Due to the first time blogging in my entire life till now, I prefer to do a short introduction for myself. I’m one of the bloggers in this blog with my other two group members. My name is Loh Foo Loong. My friends always call me Ah Loong and if you got any financial problem my contact number is 017-749XXXX(Just kidding! I’m just an ordinary UTAR student.). I’m 21 years old. I’m about 169cm height and 55kg weight. My hometown is Johor Bahru, Johor and I live in a 10 years old house with leaking rain sometimes. My hobbies are surfing internet and playing pc games.

The top 5 of my most visited websites are:
1. http://www.yahoo.com/ -- I visit this website for checking my e-mail and searching information for assignment purpose.
2. http://www.google.com/ -- Same as yahoo as for assignment information searching purpose.
3. http://www.friendster.com/ -- To check whether any of my added friends sent me a message and whose birthday is coming soon and leave some comment for friends’ blog.
4. http://www.gamespot.com/ -- Preview the news of the upcoming pc games and find out some hints for games that make me headache.
5. http://www.youtube.com/ -- To watch the tv shows and dramas that uploaded by other users.

I think these informations are quite enough for you to understand me briefly.
For more information please call 017-749XXXX

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