Innovativeness in Thai family SMEs: An exploratory case study

Over the past decade, academic research has revealed innovativeness to be one of the core components effecting SME performance. This research aims to study the linkage between innovativeness and “familiness” in family SMEs. The paper employs a qualitative approach and exploratory case studies, in collecting data on three categories of firms manufacturing, trading and servicing companies in order to identify how “familiness” effects the innovativeness of their family SMEs. To identify how “familiness” either accelerates or decelerates innovativeness in family SMEs, we adopted the F-PEC scale as a tool to study the connection between family and business values and also the impact of family commitments to the company. We found that power, experience and culture accelerate innovativeness in family SMEs. The paper illustrates the important role of family in firm innovativeness and how this can bring competitive advantage and success to family SMEs

Measuring a Commercial Content Delivery Network ∗

Content delivery networks (CDNs) have become a crucial part of the modern Web infrastructure. This paper studies the performance of the leading content delivery provider – Akamai. It measures the performance of the current Akamai platform and considers a key architectural question faced by both CDN designers and their prospective customers: whether the co-location approach to CDN platforms adopted by Akamai, which tries to deploy servers in numerous Internet locations, brings inherent performance benefits over a more consolidated data center approach pursued by other influential CDNs such as Limelight. We believe the methodology we developed for this study will be useful for other researchers in the CDN arena

Content Delivery Networks: Protection or Threat

Abstract. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are commonly believed to offer their customers protection against application-level denial of ser-vice (DoS) attacks. Indeed, a typical CDN with its vast resources can absorb these attacks without noticeable effect. This paper uncovers a vulnerability which not only allows an attacker to penetrate CDN’s pro-tection, but to actually use a content delivery network to amplify the attack against a customer Web site. We show that leading commercial CDNs – Akamai and Limelight – and an influential research CDN – Coral – can be recruited for this attack. By mounting an attack against our own Web site, we demonstrate an order of magnitude attack amplifica-tion though leveraging the Coral CDN. We present measures that both content providers and CDNs can take to defend against our attack. We believe it is important that CDN operators and their customers be aware of this attack so that they could protect themselves accordingly.

Dipzoom: the Internet measurements marketplace

Abstract. We describe DipZoom (for “Deep Internet Performance Zoom”), an approach to provide focused, on-demand Internet measurements. Unlike existing approaches that face a difficult challenge of building a measurement platform with sufficiently diverse measurements and measuring hosts, DipZoom offers a matchmaking service instead, which uses P2P concepts to bring together experimenters in need of measurements with external measurement providers. It then harnesses market forces to orchestrate the supply and demand sides in the resulting open eco-system. This paper outlines the overall design of DipZoom, and discusses payment, trust and security issues in the resulting open system. I

Content Delivery Networks: Protection or Threat?

Abstract. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are commonly believed to offer their customers protection against application-level denial of service (DoS) attacks. Indeed, a typical CDN with its vast resources can absorb these attacks without noticeable effect. This paper uncovers a vulnerability which not only allows an attacker to penetrate CDN’s protection, but to actually use a content delivery network to amplify the attack against a customer Web site. We show that leading commercial CDNs – Akamai and Limelight – and an influential research CDN – Coral – can be recruited for this attack. By mounting an attack against our own Web site, we demonstrate an order of magnitude attack amplification though leveraging the Coral CDN. We present measures that both content providers and CDNs can take to defend against our attack. We believe it is important that CDN operators and their customers be aware of this attack so that they could protect themselves accordingly.

Towards the use of Online Social Networks for Efficient Internet Content Distribution

Abstract—A large contributor to the growing Internet traffic is user generated content shared via online social networking websites. Our insight is that these websites can reveal valuable information that can be used in content delivery networks for better caching and pre-fetching performance. In this paper, we combine five different datasets from Twitter and other sources, and make several observations that can lead to helpful heuristics for better content placement. In particular, we study the temporal growth and decay, the geographical spread, and the social spread, of topics on the social network. We also describe in detail our methodologies for data collection, that can be useful for other researchers working in this space as well. In the future, we will use these observations to design heuristics for improved CDN performance. I