Commenticle

CSIS 2500 Group Term Project

Group Members:

Naoya Makino
Joy Lin
Elyn Zhang
Samuel Do
Kevin Espinoza
Ruwani Da

INSTRUCTOR
Fred Parvaz
 Table of Contents

Our website Commenticle.com is a company that sells free service to our registered
users. The website name is a combination of the words “comment the article”..........3
Our main focus is to enhance readers experience by reading and adding comments to
any uploaded quotations, articles and paragraphs..........................................................3
We have specialist to upload quality articles as well as all of our registered users
(members) can upload articles they wrote or read.........................................................3
On line dictionary will be provided at the right top corner of the screen......................3
Our specialty is that all members can comment on any lines of the article.
*There are will be small dots to remind readers that this line/paragraph has been
commented ....................................................................................................................3
3 Standard Operating Procedure (SOPs)..................................................................4
Service............................................................................................................................4
Free users have to register as well as premium user......................................................4
Auto-recommending service: based on your reading habits, the site recommends book
articles for each user......................................................................................................5
Expected revenue...........................................................................................................5
Premium user revenue ...................................................................................................5
Ad word revenue ...........................................................................................................5
Amazon associate revenue.............................................................................................5
4 Customer Relationship Management (CRM) .....................................................6
Customer Service (advertisers—customers)...........................................................6
5 Organization Chart.............................................................................................7
7 Distribution Method..............................................................................................9
8 Security Considerations........................................................................................9
9 Laws Involved.......................................................................................................11
I. Protection of Privacy............................................................................................11
Term Group Project- Commenticle® Digital Virtual Business Plan

Company Definition

1 Name of the Company

The newly established Commenticle.com offers printed manuscripts and articles

online anytime, anywhere. We offer all our services free of charge for our
members and they have access to all books and articles that we have purchased
from authors and publishers. Our main reasons for pursuing an online article
system is in an attempt to keep up with evolving technology and to save on
existing world resources by eliminating the use of tangible books. Also we
wish to be an online one-stop source of information for young adults without the
hassle of browsing through libraries and bookstores, thus increasing efficiency.
We offer a wide range of works on our pages as read only versions to enhance
their learning experiences. Registered members will be able to make comments on
these articles which will be available for view by other members as pop-up
comments, hence the name Commenticle

2 Product

Our website Commenticle.com is a company that sells free service to our registered users.
The website name is a combination of the words “comment the article”.

Our main focus is to enhance readers experience by reading and adding comments to any
uploaded quotations, articles and paragraphs

We have specialist to upload quality articles as well as all of our registered users (members)
can upload articles they wrote or read.

On line dictionary will be provided at the right top corner of the screen

Our specialty is that all members can comment on any lines of the article.
*There are will be small dots to remind readers that this line/paragraph has been
commented

*If a member click on the dots, then comments will appear in a box.

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Term Group Project- Commenticle® Digital Virtual Business Plan

*any members then can either add a new comment or reply to an existing
comment

*if member do not wish to see any comment—they can click "On/off Bottom" to
avoid any comments.

1) Target group is relatively young adults

2) Our business make revenue by selling advertising to other companies

3) Advertises will appear on the top and the bottom of the website

4) There is an initial cost to advertise. Cost varies depends on the size of the
advertising. Additionally, we charge 2 cents per click.

3 Standard Operating Procedure (SOPs)

Articles and books commenting service

Service

o Non-user(people who do not have an user account)

o Can read but not be able to comment on
o Can search
o Can purchase books from Amazon or other related services
o Common service among free and premium users

Free users have to register as well as premium user

o Can search books

o Can read comments on pages
o Can read and comment on pages of any books
o Can purchase books online, using Amazon or other book selling
services
o Each user has his/her own account pages, showing what they read and
what they comment on and they can save "favourite books" like does
in YouTube.
o Premium users service

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Term Group Project- Commenticle® Digital Virtual Business Plan

Auto-recommending service: based on your reading habits, the site recommends book
articles for each user.

o Can upload books

o Can monitor who are reading books, how many, and where they are
accessing from
o Can upload unlimited amount of books

• Page contents
o The site would look similar to Google book search
http://books.google.com/books
for example, each book has this kind of page
http://books.google.com/books?id=nLes5s4Pi-
QC&printsec=frontcover&sig=RGPziZ7R6us2uC6QjEoxfNgqNzA&s
ource=gbs_hpintrst#PPT9,M1 and any time users click on page, or any
of the phrases, a little small message box comes up on the page(but not
a separate window), then they can type comments on.
o First users go to the site, and log in to your user account.
and welcome page shows up(user page), showing recommended
books, most popular books and most commented books
type a book name in search box
o show articles at the main, the book title at the top, contents and links
to Amazon at the right
o at the bottom, sponsored links are shown using Google Ad Word
you scroll down to read next page
o There are comments of other people made as you read.
when you click on the page or any of the phrase, a message box shows
up and type a comment
o All content uploaded (books or comments) monitored by staff.
o premium user

When the user log in, the same welcome page shows up, but there are "upload books"
button, "your books" and "view report" describing detailed reports on your books
pages.

Expected revenue

Premium user revenue

Ad word revenue

Amazon associate revenue

Member Service (free users)

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Term Group Project- Commenticle® Digital Virtual Business Plan

• Customer name and personal profile

• Posting frequency
• Member inquiry center. Deal with member inquires such as problem with
registration, uploading articles.
• Contribution to the website, such as Member referral, quality and quantity of
articles.
• Member history ( posting history, inquiries, customer personal information)

4 Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Customer Service (advertisers—customers)

--decision support
--long term plan/ strategies
• Customer profile/history(address, name, payment history, inquiries history)
• Type of advertise purchased/ amount of payment we receive
• Trouble shooting/call center for inquiries, deal with customers/advertiser’s
request and trouble shootings. Similar with member inquiry center except
customer has priorities.
• Advice telephone line: when a customer calls a standard phone number, the
system routes the call to the correct service person, who input information
about the customer for only once , therefore any service representative can
help.( increase efficiency)
• Suggestions and complain center. Deal with customer and member complains
suggestions and improvements.

Employee relationship management

• performance management –Set annual objectives for employees
• Commission based on work performance—Member growth, revenue
growth, percentage of sale and etc)
• Employee training: dealing with customers complains, build relationship,
increase customer satisfaction

Sales force Automation

• Increase productivity by focusing sales efforts on the most profitable
advertisers
• Provide sales prospect and advertiser information, on line product information

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Term Group Project- Commenticle® Digital Virtual Business Plan

• Show customers previous and etc to help sales person make personalized
recommendation and sale strategies.
• Information are shared among all sales people

5 Organization Chart

6 Revenue Collection

We would be able to earn revenues by using two major revenue collecting services,
Google Ad Sense and Amazon Associates (explained more details below). Even
though it would not generate big revenue per user, the collection of revenues from
those two services would be able to generate profits. Since the visitors of our site are
highly interested in books, there is a high chance of clicking and purchasing related
books offered by Amazon. Also, we can fairly accurate the users' interests based on
their web activities, enabling to offer related advertisements by Google Ad Sense.
Therefore, I approximate positive profits due to the low cost of operating web
services as well as the revenues from the advertisements by the these services.
Here are the two major advertisement services I mentioned above.

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Term Group Project- Commenticle® Digital Virtual Business Plan

• Google Ad Sense (https://www.google.com/adsense )

Google Ad Sense is an ad serving program run by Google. Website owners can enrol
in this program to enable text, image and, more recently, video advertisements on
their sites. These ads are administered by Google and generate revenue on either a
per-click or per-thousand-impressions basis. Google is also currently beta-testing a
cost-per-action based service.Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdSense

How to get paid

You get paid whenever someone on your site clicks on one of the Ad Sense ads.
Advertisers can also bid to appear on your site on a CPM (cost per thousand
impressions) basis. Both CPC and CPM bids compete in our AdWords program to
ensure that you optimize your ad revenue.
How much you earn depends on a number of factors including how much an
advertiser bids on your site -- you'll receive a portion of what the advertiser pays.

Also, we can set up customized Google Search Engine

(https://www.google.com/adsense/static/en_US/Afs.html) to earn more revenue. Ad
Sense for search lets you offer your users Google web search directly from your
pages. By placing an Ad Sense for search box on your site, you'll generate earnings
from ad clicks made by users on the search results pages.

You won't, however, receive revenue from user searches through your Ad
Sense for search box. When users perform searches on your site, but choose not
to click on the ads on the search results pages, you will not receive any
earnings.

Amazon Associates (https://affiliate-program.amazon.com)

Add rich Amazon content such as product images, product descriptions and more to
your site, and earn up to 10% in referral fees.
Amazon MP3 Clips Widget
The MP3 Clips widget lets you play song samples from Amazon’s DRM-free
catalogue of over 5 Million songs. You can handpick the songs and albums you want
or display the latest Bestsellers/New Releases from the music genre of your choice.
And right now Amazon Associates will earn a 10% referral fee on each MP3
download they refer.
Amazon Kindle
Associates can now earn 10% in referral fees on the Amazon Kindle portable
wireless reading device and Kindle Edition books. With Kindle priced at $359 you
can earn $35.90 on each Kindle purchase you refer.

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Term Group Project- Commenticle® Digital Virtual Business Plan

7 Distribution Method

Our firm Commenticle makes profit based on selling advertisement to other

companies. Therefore our service is distributed through the internet to all of our
users. We do not sell any tangible goods. No physical distribution is used.

8 Security Considerations

The securities for our company is very important in order too keep it alive and to
protect the privacy of our users is our honor. The main following are many security
considerations our company will accomplish and maintain.

Our company will focus on the following security considerations:

• use strong encryption like HTTPS for the protection of the users
• Warn users from clicking on links coming from distrusted or unknown source
that other people post.
• Read the users report of any complaint that leads to spamming or some
unsecured related manner
• Review what the users are posting and have the system check each article that
is being posted before it gets posted
• Install filters or firewall software on the servers and other clients
• Have a Router act as a firewall in the network.
• Install security software such as anti-virus and spy ware
• Maintain many backups for the system and maintenance on a regular basis
• Each server should run a minimum number of services that is needed for the
organization
• Run a network based vulnerability scan for all the servers
• Avoid running web servers as root
• Review the articles to see if there is any spamming and delete them
• Switch from windows to Linux would be an alternative for better security
• Sending an activation code to the users email address for email Verification

The company we will use a strong web encryption for the users that are logging in
into the website, this is called HTTPS. HTTPS will be used for the protection of the
users that are in the login screen. This will protect the users identify such as any
personal information that is being send to our servers, this will prevent from any
outside attackers such as hackers from accessing it from the outside.

We will also send users tutorials on how to be more secure with their computers, we
will warn them not to click on links coming from distrusted or unknown source that

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Term Group Project- Commenticle® Digital Virtual Business Plan

other users are posting on our website, we will be notified and immediately delete
them. Our users can contact us by reporting each article they see that is suspicious,
we will take action from there, and we will contract people to keep on eye on each
article that is being posted by reviewing them on a daily schedule. We will review
each article to see if there is any spamming and immediately delete these.

After each user registers into our website will be send each user a activation code to
each user email address for email verification, this way we will see if the identity of
the person is the actual person registered by having them to check their email, and
this will prevent people from using fake email addresses to register

The network will be heavily protected, giving each server the security they require for
a network to work properly. Firewalls such as routers will be installed on our network
and also software-based firewalls will be in each of the servers and clients. These
routers will act as a firewall to protect the network, to prevent attackers from knowing
the inner functions of the network such as knowing the IP addresses from the
workstations using it as an example. Software-based firewalls will be used to protect
the servers and clients from any non-authorized permissions

Anti-spyware and anti-virus software will be a must in our company, each server and
client will be require to have one. Anti-spyware will be used to protect the privacy of
the network; this software will scan all files to detect any spyware that is running in
the system. An anti-virus will be used to detect any viruses that can be a danger for
the system, viruses can do many harmful things for example some viruses can delete
important files so it’s very important to have this type of protection for our network

For storage data security we will have a schedule of backups for our systems, and
maintain our systems with many updates. For security each server will be require to
run a minimum amount of services, each one will have specialized tasks that is
needed for the company. As part of security there will be a vulnerability scan for all
servers and clients on a giving schedule.

As an alternative our company could use Linux as an OS for our company, if we due,
we will avoid running our web servers as root. Linux is the most secured operating
system there is compare to any Microsoft operating system. With Linux we would
need to worry less about security concerns, and it’s free or very cheap.

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Term Group Project- Commenticle® Digital Virtual Business Plan

9 Laws Involved
I. Protection of Privacy
Privacy Policy-refers to the policy which claims individual rights, and free
individuals from surveillance or interference from other individuals,
organizations, or the state.

At Commenticle, we prioritize your privacy, earning and keeping your trust has
been part of our core ethical values and professional code of conduct. Your
personal information is strictly guarded and safe under our hands. It is important
for you to understand what information is collected, how we use it and who may
see it.

The Professional Codes outlines our promise to you, and is complied with Privacy
Legislation in Canada, which incorporates the following ten principles:
• Accountability
• Identifying purposes
• Consent
• Limiting collection
• Limiting use, disclosure, and retention
• Accuracy
• Safeguards
• Openness
• Individual access
• Challenging compliance

1. Accountability
We set strict policies and procedures for protecting your personal information.
Our management team is responsible and accountable for monitoring our
compliance.

Commenticle’s Chief Privacy Officer always takes part of our executive

management team and supervises privacy governance including scope and cost of
due diligence, policy, dispute resolution etc. and report to our Board of Directors
and Senior Management regarding privacy matters.

2. Identifying Purpose
When you become a Commenticle member, it’s important for us to retrieve your
personal information for the following purposes:
• To verify your identity and protect against fraud
• To determine which product and services are suitable for you
• To provide knowledge that benefits you the most

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Term Group Project- Commenticle® Digital Virtual Business Plan

• To comply wit federal and provincial legal or regulatory requirements

3. Consent
When you register for a new membership, we ask you for your consent to collect,
use or disclose your personal information. You are welcome to withdraw anytime
as long as:
• You provide us with a reasonable notification
• We are not legally required to collect, disclose or use your information
• You may not receive our full range of services after you withdraw
• There will be adjustment to how you will be charged after you
withdrew from your membership, discounts and promotions are mostly
available for members only

4. Limiting Collection
We only collect the information we need. We may ask you to provide the
following information:
• Gender, birth date and year, and occupation
• Account login information
• Home address, email and other contact information
• Billing information

You can choose not to provide us with these information according to your
situations. However, you may not be able to receive the information, product and
service you request. Your record of registration will be kept for our mutual
protection (e.g. to ensure accuracy, to document that we have made required
disclosures to you while also to maintain our customer service.)

5. Limiting use, disclosure, and retention

There are reasons for us to collect your personal information, and we only use or
disclose for important purposes. We will not disclose any of your personal
information to other third parties without your consent under any circumstances,
and if we obtain client list from other organization, we require the organizations
to confirm their compliance with all relevant privacy legislation.

6. Accuracy
Maintaining your personal information accurately is important to us; our
management team will always make sure they are up-to-date. If you discover
inaccuracies in our data, please notify us by email or our toll-free telephone
service immediately, so that we can make the necessary changes. As well, you
may challenge our decision to the changes of your information.

7. Safeguards
We can ensure you that your personal information is safe with us. We have
complete security control to protect you against unauthorized use, access,

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Term Group Project- Commenticle® Digital Virtual Business Plan

alteration, duplication, destruction, disclosure, loss or theft of your personal

information.

Safeguards include restricted access to our information processing and storage

areas, use of passwords, firewalls and encryption of electronically transmitted
information.
In addition, within our website, cookies and other information tracking devices
such as web bugs to improve your personal security, functionality, and your
online experience with us. And we can ensure you that the cookies only identify
your web browser software and track your visits to the Web site; they will not
capture files or data stored in your own computer.

8. Openness
Our Privacy Code is available online. If you are interested in reading more about
it, please request your brochure copy from us either through telephone or email.
Our Privacy Code serves the purpose of informing you what type of personal
information is required, how it is used and who is authorized to disclose it.

9. Individual access
If you are curious to find out whom we have disclose your personal information
to, or simply verifying it with us, please requesting it through telephone or email.
We may require you to provide specific information for verification purposes.
There may be a nominal fee depending on the situation, and we will notify you in
advance before we make any charges. However, under special circumstances, we
might not be able to make changes to your existing personal information, and we
will provide you with explanations.

10. Challenging compliance

We have full 24-hour telephone service to answer any questions you may have
regards our Privacy Code. If you have any further concern, please contact us at
our head office.

II. Collection Development Policy

Purpose of Policy

The main purpose of Commenticle is to “provide knowledge, recreation,

convenience and innovation for young readers.” The resources and collections we
have are there to fulfill this mission statement. This policy is also intended to
provide guidance for our staff members in order to achieve consistency in terms
of assistance and services to you.

Our Goals

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Term Group Project- Commenticle® Digital Virtual Business Plan

To be a major online reading resource for young adults and provide them the
convenience of accessing our information anywhere and anytime without going to
an actual library or bookstore.

To develop wide range of collections in various formats while carefully decide

which materials should be onsite and which may be obtained through other
means.

To deliver information, recreation and educational needs for the enhancement of

young adults worldwide in the pursuit of self interest and lifelong learning.

To diversify all individuals with different educational, cultural, ethnical, religious,

and philosophical backgrounds all over the world by identifying unmet needs.

III. Protection of Intellectual Property

Intellectual property is considered to be intangible property crated by individuals

or corporation. We are trying our best to protect writers’ copy rights since they
are the creators of intellectual property from having their work copied on our
website. We comply with Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) which was
developed to protect copyright issues. The DMCA implemented a World
Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) treaty that makes it illegal to
circumvent technology-based protections of copyrighted materials. The DMCA
set the agenda for copyright dissuasions in Canada on:

• Technological tampering-“devices” or “conduct”

• ISP liability
• Library provisions to be examined
• Database protection

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Term Group Project- Commenticle® Digital Virtual Business Plan

Network Proposal
Introductory Stage:

The first part is the introductory stage. In this stage we will be using Google App
Engine to jump-start our business without commitment to expensive infrastructure. It
will be used for hosting our website on Google servers for cost reduction and
efficiency purposes. This will be a free service and it will be a great way to start up a
business.

We will be using our own domain: "commenticle.com"

We will have a free account of up to 500mb of persistent storage and enough

bandwidth for 5 million views a month.

Here are the restrictions for Google App Engine from the Google Website:

Google's AppEngine environment allows developers to control a small subset of what

could be done on a traditional *NIX based operating system and presents challenges
to application development.

Developers have no access to the file system on AppEngine. Rather, the only way to
persist data is in the Datastore (a non-relational, highly scalable database). This also
means that most session storage systems that rely on the file system will not work on
AppEngine. However, Google has provided a Memcache API that allows applications
to store user data across requests during sessions. Google's documentation also
suggests developers build in Google Accounts authentication and use the
get_current_user() method to track logged in users.

AppEngine can only execute code called from an HTTP request. This means that
persistent processes or batch updates that take longer than a few seconds cannot be
executed. This has been seen as curious by some developers who have noted Google's
large use of MapReduce, a highly-scalable system of running parallel computations
over large data sets using clusters of computers. Many have speculated that once the
free quota restrictions are lifted, Google will introduce support for such operations.

Python is currently the only programming language available.

Growth Stage:

This stage will commence once we have more than 100,000 subscribers. We will be
buying our own servers and moving all the information from the Google App Engine
to our servers. The Network diagram below will show how the servers will be set-up.

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Term Group Project- Commenticle® Digital Virtual Business Plan

This will ensure security of our data instead of trusting our business with Google.
Controlling our own servers will be a good idea once we have established our
business.

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Term Group Project- Commenticle® Digital Virtual Business Plan

Market Share
Given below is a list of top ad server vendors in 2008 with figures
in millions of viewers published in a Attributor survey
Vendor Ad viewers
Google :1,107million
DoubleClick :1,079 Million
Yahoo: 362 Million
MSN: 309 Million
AOL: 156 Million
Adbrite: 73 Million
Total 3,087 Million
Wikipedia

• We will charge based on Pay per click. Each click will cost advertiser 0.2
cents
• Annual cost of our departments (based on our organization structure):
o Finance department: $180,000
o Customer Relations: $120,000
o Marketing: $120,000
o Information Technology: $150,000
o Server Investment and maintenances: $ 7,400
o Total cost: $577,400

• Based on 0.02 cent per click, click/viewer needed per year: 28,870,000
• Total of top ad server vendors in 2008 in millions of viewers is 3,087,000,000
• The estimate percentage of the market we need in order to survive is
28million/3087million*100%=0.9%
• If we are able to attract more viewers than above number, we can make a
profit.

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Bibliography

BMO Financial Group Canada. Privacy.

<http://www4.bmo.com/popup/0,4442,35649_49258,00.html?pChannelId=74876>

Laudon, Kenneth C.Management Information System: Managing the Digital Firm.

Chapter 4: Social, Legal, and Ethical Issues in the Digital Firm. Pearson Education,
Inc., Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, USA. Copyright 2006 by Pearson Education,
Inc. Page 116, 121-126.

Vancouver Public Library. About the Library. Policy & Procedures.

<http://www.vpl.vancouver.bc.ca/about/cat/C341/>

Vancouver Public Library. About the Library. Mission, Visions & Values.
<http://www.vpl.vancouver.bc.ca/about/cat/C445/>

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