Sunday, April 20, 2008

My Community Partner

This semester I am working with Project Open Hand. They are located on the corner of Polk and Eddy. Since 1985, Project Open Hand has been providing “meals with love” to people living with serious illnesses and to seniors in San Francisco and Alameda County and has served as a model for over 100 organizations all over the world.

I am specifically helping them create and distribute a survey to their volunteers to update their volunteer database with thousands of entries. In addition to that, I am helping them restructure and organize their database in hopes to help make it more user friendly. Currently they have to do a lot of tedious work to do certain things within their database. At the end of this term, I hope to automate most of the tedious work and make the database easier to use.

Sunday, April 6, 2008

Digital Information

Rhapsody

Rhapsody is a website that provides streaming audio on all sorts of genres of music. They make their money on monthly subscriptions on their service as well as advertisements on their website. Users basically pay a monthly fee for infinite usage and discounted downloading.

Consumers can only play the music using Rhapsody's software. That limits the amount of freedom that consumers have with the media content. Users can, however, burn CDs using Rhapsody's software.

iTunes

iTunes is a media player that also has downloading capabilities for music from Apple's content server. The catch is that users will have to pay a standard fee for each song. This can accumulate in cost quickly depending on amount of desired songs.

Consumers have a little more freedom with the media they download from iTunes. They can copy it over to their ipods and burn CDs. iTunes makes an attempt at restricting users to put their downloaded content into other mp3 players by making their content in another format. However, there are hacks to convert the files into mp3.

Hulu

Hulu is a streaming video website for modern TV shows, movies, and sports clips. I'm not sure if they really make any money, but they can provide their content as long as they show ads from the owner of the content.

Consumers don't have much freedom other than the ability to view Hulu's content only on Hulu. Hulu makes sure to only let users view content using Hulu's software. Users cannot download content from the website.