My name is Matthew Schatzel. My family calls me Matthew, my classmates and co-workers call me Matt, and my friends call me Schatty, so feel free to call me whatever you like. I was born in St. Petersburg, FL, and I am 22 years old. I have very supportive parents, two loving sisters, Madeline, 25, and Margaret, 20, a beautiful girlfriend, Sara, and two of the cutest little puppies you'll ever see, Toby and Abbie. I graduated from the IB program at St. Petersburg High School in 2004, and am set to graduate from the University of Florida this May with a bachelor's degree in journalism (with a focus in editing) and an outside concentration in computer science. I hope to work in book publishing, magazines or public relations, and my ultimate goal is to one day become a novelist. My passions are music, writing and sports. Currently, I work at Old Navy as a logistics associate, and intern at Satellite Magazine as a copy editor and distributor. If you would like to see my resume, please click here.
In order for any business, big or small, to survive in today’s global market, having a presence on the Web is crucial. Since the early 1990s, the proliferation of the Internet has created new and exciting opportunities for any business seeking to reach a larger audience. Nearly every kind of business and organization has its own Web site now. If a business hopes to remain competitive in today’s cut-throat society, it must go beyond newspapers, billboards, magazines, phone books, and all the other 20th century methods of advertising. The Web has billions of users searching for an unlimited variety of goods and services all day, every day, and the best way for a business to reach this ever-expanding audience is to have its own site. Without one, a business will fail to create awareness for itself, and will eventually fall by the wayside in today’s high-speed, high-demand market.
Please click here to check out Schatty's Shady Video Rentals podcast.
As aforementioned in Part 1 of the Computing Portfolio Project, the Internet has made it possible for businesses both big and small to reach out to a much more expansive audience than ever before. Many businesses now employ specialists who concentrate solely on the technological advancement of the company on the World Wide Web. These employees create, edit and update Web content, field questions and concerns from site users, and attempt to optimize the number of visitors to the site. An increasingly important tool in business advertisement and business education is podcasting. A podcast is, according to Wikipedia, “a collection of digital media files which is distributed over the Internet, often using syndication feeds, for playback on portable media players and personal computers.” Essentially, a podcast is like a radio show for computers, only it can be played back several times with the ability to pause, rewind and fast forward. It can also be transmitted to a much wider geographic region, which creates a much larger audience. There are several implementations of podcasting that could advantageously affect the business environment. First of all, podcasts can be subscribed to, so any time a new episode is made available, the subscriber will automatically be notified of the recently updated content. That being said, businesses could subscribe to other businesses’ podcasts to stay aware of what’s going on in that particular sector of business. For instance, if Company A recently devised a new method of increasing the speed on its conveyor belts, and it states in a podcast that it has done so, Company B might want to be aware of this so it can set out to increase the speeds of its own conveyor belts. If it does not do so, it might fall behind Company A and lose its share of the market. Additionally, if businesses have branches in several different cities, it would be feasible for one branch to share information with another that is on the opposite side of the nation through a podcast. A company like this could hold clinics and conferences utilizing podcast technology as well. While it is true that this news, and most of the other news that a subscriber might gain from a podcast, can be retrieved from a professional journal or business magazine, podcasts are more current because they can be updated daily, even hourly, and listened to immediately. Businesses aren’t the only entities that could benefit from podcasts. Consumers might also find business podcasts very useful. Companies could provide podcasts on new products, big sales, extended hours of operation, job opportunities, stock tips, press releases and any other information that seems pertinent to a company’s shareholders and common consumers. While it may be awhile before podcasts catch on to the extent that the Internet did, it seems likely that within a reasonable time they will, and those companies that caught on early and have begun podcasting already will be way ahead of those who jump on the podcast bandwagon later down the road.
The days of phone calls, post offices, and face-to-face meetings are dwindling rapidly. Now, we live in a fast-paced, high-demand society in which waiting for a reply for a week, or even days, is far too long. Communication is growing ever-closer to instantaneous, thanks in large part to the advancement of technology. We rely on instant messaging, text messaging and e-mailing to get the quickest responses possible in our personal lives, and the necessity for a speedy response time is the same in the business world, if not more so. Instant messages and text messages, however, are often too informal for the business environment, so the most utilized form of communication is typically e-mail. There is a vast difference, though, between the “Hi buddy, how are you?” e-mails we might send a friend, and the serious memos, documents, trade secrets and intellectual property (just to mention a few) e-mails sent from one businessman to another. Because of this, a need arises for a more secure method of sending e-mail than the conventional means. The average Internet user may assume that an e-mail sent to a friend, associate, co-worker or colleague will be viewed by only two people: the sender and the receiver. Why would anybody expect that others would be able to access these seemingly private e-mails? According to Wikipedia, the biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet, “because e-mail connects through many routers and mail servers on its way to the recipient, it is inherently vulnerable to both physical and virtual eavesdropping.” In the business world, security and privacy are often crucial to the operation and success of any company. Whether they are inter-office e-mails from a superior to an employee, or interstate e-mails sent from one branch of an office to another on the opposite side of the country, there is an utmost need for a secure means of sending them. These e-mails could contain information on employee raises or bonuses, a new platform for a secret project, stock options or incentives, lay-offs and cutbacks, or any other number of private matters that should only be viewed by their intended audience. If a business’s main competitor got access to some major trade secret, or a disgruntled employee found out that someone hired a year after him got a much larger raise, there could be serious repercussions and consequences. Because of all this, encrypted e-mails are becoming more and more popular in the business environment. Encryption relies on public-key cryptography, according to Wikipedia, which utilizes two keys to keep messages from being decoded by anyone but their intended recipient. There is a private key and a public key. The public key can be widely distributed, as in the case of our class’s e-mail assignment, in which the public key was sent to all students in the class. The private key is kept secret, and is used to decode the encrypted message once it has been received. In the example of our class assignment, the professor has the private key, and uses this to decode the messages sent by the students. This system works the same in the business world. The president or C.E.O. of a company might hold the private key, while all other employees have the public key. So long as the private key is kept secret, the company can expect total confidentiality in its e-mailing correspondences, which in the business world, is comforting as well as necessary.
Business interaction is no longer confined within the walls of the office building, with employees stuffed inside tiny cubicles hunched over the same desk straining to see the plans for the next company project or business model. The increases of Internet speed and technology have now made it possible for anywhere from a handful to dozens to hundreds of workers to collaborate on the same project simultaneously. Collaborative computing may be one of the most useful technological business tools to come about since the inception of the Internet in the early- to mid-1990s. I had the opportunity of experiencing the benefits of collaborative computing first-hand while working on a group project creating an advertisement for a Gator’s championship-winning basketball team DVD (there is a link to this advertisement at the end of the essay). With the help of Sharepoint software, my five-member group was able to successfully put together a one-page advertisement for our team’s (fictional) Gator sports video. The final ad itself, however, was just a small element of everything our group was able to accomplish using collaborative computing. We utilized the group discussion board to share ideas and opinions and constructive criticism while narrowing down the topics for our video. We used the survey-creating tool to allow each member of the group to vote on the options narrowed down through our discussions. The announcements section allowed us to post information pertinent to due dates and project requirements. We were also able to share files such as photos and word-processor documents through Sharepoint, which enabled us to create many versions of our advertisement and finalize a solid, well-rounded end product. In addition to aiding in our educational efforts, collaborative computing can easily be applied to a business setting with similarly productive results. For instance, suppose a managing executive wants to put together a project proposal for a potential investor to sell a new item the business has been working on. He wants to form a team with the organization’s most creative, critical-thinking employees, but there’s only one problem: His key proposal designer works for the organization’s home branch in Tampa. The top-ranked number-cruncher works at an off-site in Ocala. The graphics specialist works in the newest branch of the organization in Miami, and the ad copy writer freelances for the organization and only shows up to the main branch a few times a month. Now the executive is faced with the dilemma of grouping together a team that spans across the state. With collaborative computing, organizations’ team members can span the entire globe, and still be able to work with each other as if they were all under one roof. Now the group can put together a great proposal without worrying about time and travel constraints, all thanks to collaborative computing.
Please click here to see my group's Collaborative Computing final advertisement.
For this particular project, I had to do several different tasks using Microsoft Excel. I was given a workbook on Excel with three different sheets of data. I had to manipulate this data using groupings of text functions, which I was taught about through the online lectures. Specifically, there were cells that contained cities, states, and Zip codes, and I had to separate each of these into its own individual cell. I learned that the function button can be used to do complete numerous data manipulations that require little actual work by the user. I also had to create a pivot table, which contained a hierarchy of information, and then format that table into a presentable graphic to put on my Web page using the print screen function on my computer. The pivot table may have been the most complicated part of the project, as I had to determine which particular parts of the data to include in the table, and where they should go in relation to one another. After creating this table by dragging and dropping groups of data onto the table layout, I used the print screen function to make a copy of my table, which I saved as a jpeg image so that I could put it onto my Web page as it appears now (please see below). In my opinion, the goal seek function was the easiest to use on Excel. All I had to do was highlight the information that I wanted to change, and input the amount that I wanted to change it to, and Excel altered the numbers for me. Overall, Excel can be incredibly useful for business owners, or anyone who has to handle a lot of different data that is constantly changing. The only problem is learning how to utilize these functions, as Excel can be a difficult application to use without proper training.
Please click here to see my Excel workbook in its entirety.
The database project was easily the most difficult project I have attempted the entire semester. Up until this project, I have had no exposure to Microsoft Access, and very little experience using Microsoft Excel. Having never used Access before, I found it very difficult, in spite of the handful of lectures covering the topic, to familiarize myself with the application. I watched the lectures several times, and still found myself questioning how to do many parts of the project. This project called for us to import two tables from Microsoft Excel into Microsoft Access. Although this may seem like a very basic function, I found even this to be a challenge. It took me well over half an hour just figuring out how to open the files in Access. Once I was able to, things got a little bit easier, but not for long. The only thing I found myself able to do without any true difficulty was adding descriptions to the fields in the table. Everything after this seemed very foreign to me. I had trouble making the drop-down box, and it took my several tries to get the validation rules to work. We were also required to show relationships between the data in the tables, and create queries that displayed particular information. Finally, we were asked to design reports that put all of this information in a readable format. Admittedly, I did not start this project nearly as early as I should have. I did not realize how much time it would take me to learn the software, and although it was said that Access is very user-friendly, I did not find this to be the case. I became very frustrated trying to put this project together, and I wish I had looked into the requirements for it weeks in advance, instead of days before the due date. In retrospect, with a lot more time and a little more patience, I may have been able to complete this project successfully. I tried for hours and hours to figure out what I was doing wrong, but in the end I submitted only what I was able to figure out, which was relatively not that much. I’m glad to have had some exposure to Access, however, and I learned that in the future, I need to take much more time figuring out applications that I have never used before I try to complete projects with them.