THE FUTURES OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN B2C MARKETING : From Business to Customers/Clients to Business to Community

The thesis is a continuation of my research on social media marketing, since I already wrote a thesis in this topic over 10 years ago. Social media, as a marketing channel, has become a staple part of the business world. B2C stands for Business to Customers/Clients but it also presents Business to Community. It is the purpose of this paper to examine possible changes and movement in social media B2C marketing, and from there develop images of possible futures of this phenomenon in the next 20 years. Aside from studying the interaction between business and customers/community, risks and unexpected events are also discussed and taken into account. The assumption of this thesis is that, there will be changes and prominent movements within the two-decade timeframe. There is also an assumption that current trends (for example the emerging of social media marketing and the risk of data leaking in social media platforms) would continue and produce alternative outcomes. They would not magically disappear or easily be solved, and there would be a long progress from the present into different possible futures. In order to answer the research questions, a focus group discussion was organized. Participants varied in occupation, age, work experience and working area backgrounds. They however all had hand-on experiences with social media marketing, both from the business standpoint or customer standpoint. Data collected from the discussion was fruitful and rich. From these data, I analyzed the phenomenon dividing into different themes: social media marketing as a phenomenon, risks of social media, corporate social responsibility, or the connection between business to community, and the last one is Wild Card events. Furthermore, I used Causal Layered Analysis to develop four different images of the futures with inspiration from Jim Dator’s Four Futures. There are positive, negative, preferable futures, and also an unknown future with extraordinary Wild Card events. To conclude, the research contributes to the understandings about social media marketing, including several important elements: risks, corporate social responsibility, and possible outcomes of social media marketing in the next 20 years

Improving the Security and Performance of Web Applications Running on the Distributed IPFS

While cloud computing is gaining widespread adoption these days, some challenges are emerging around security, performance, and reliability of centralized cloud resources. Decentralized services are introduced as an effective way to overcome the limitations of cloud services. Blockchain technology with its associated decentralization is used to develop decentralized application platforms. The interplanetary file system (IPFS) is built on top of a distributed system consisting of a group of nodes that shares the data and also takes advantage of blockchain to permanently store the data. The IPFS is very useful in transferring data between people. This project focuses on blockchain technology, distributed file sharing system IPFS, and their applications in software development. It talks about different types of blockchain, its advantages and challenges, and what we can do to overcome the challenges of decentralized technology

The Topology of Foliations Formed by the Generic K-Orbits of a Subclass of the Indecomposable MD5-Groups

The present paper is a continuation of [13], [14] of the authors. Specifically, the paper considers the MD5-foliations associated to connected and simply connected MD5-groups such that their Lie algebras have 4-dimensional commutative derived ideal. In the paper, we give the topological classification of all considered MD5-foliations. A description of these foliations by certain fibrations or suitable actions of $\mathbb{R}^{2}$ and the Connes' C*-algebras of the foliations which come from fibrations are also given in the paper.Comment: 20 pages, no figur