CS73N Freshman Seminar: The Business of the Internet

Spring 2011-12.
Page last updated 11 February 2012.

 
Instructors: Gio Wiederhold, Emeritus Professor CSD, EE & Medicine, Stanford; Avron Barr and Shirley Tessler of Aldo Ventures, Inc.  Administrative assistance is provided by Marianne Siroker.

This course focuses on the use of the Internet for scholarly and commercial communication. Enough technology will be presented to give participants a sense of the possible, the pitfalls that exist, and the future potential. For instance, buyers lose hands-on inspection of goods, but gain access to the entire world market; impressive security technology can protect legitimate users from crooks, but it protects the crooks too. The balance between preserving an open society and maintaining protection from snoopers, competitors, and marketeers is in flux. Still, our dependence on the Internet grows, and all of us must learn to deal with it effectively, and express our ideas within that setting.

Students will develop a business or not-for-profit concept and create a substantive website to support that concept. This course fulfills the second-level Writing and Rhetoric Requirement (Write-2) and covers oral presentation in class as well as writing and multimedia presentation for the web. Refined web design is not emphasized and programming is not required.

This course carries 3 units of credit. Enrollment is limited to 16 students; freshmen have priority.
The course is graded.  Two thirds of the grade is based on a project containing web pages of your design. We expect attendance at each session. 

We are using wiki-based classnotes -- you are reading those now. 

This page is http://cs73n.editme.com/ and can also be located via Gio's home page http://infolab.stanford.edu/people/gio.html  or via http://cs73N.stanford.edu/ at the CS department.  However, older pages for the class will still refer to the class notes kept on the  http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/gio/CS99I/ directory.  So, in order to conveniently return to these pages, keep bookmarks or favorite entries for the pages you use from this wiki. Sorry for the inconvenience, but such is progress of  Business on the Internet.

Meeting time and location:

We meet in the Computer Science department building (Gates Information Sciences), so that we are close to equipment and other resources. See Map to locate Gate Hall.  Since Gio is retired, he mainly comes in most Thursdays and on Fridays. Avron and Shirley keep office hours during the hour before class on Thursday and Friday.

The first session will be Thursday, 5 April 2012 at 3:15pm in Gates room 100. We meet there on Thursdays, 3:15-4:05, and on Fridays, 2:15-4:05.

To schedule a meeting, it is best to send email to Gio or Shirley Tessler or Avron Barr or all of us, and to Marianne Siroker, who keeps track of things. Send any messages to Gio from a Stanford email address, so that his aggressive spam filter won't ignore them. Our offices are on the 4th floor of Gates, 431 for Avron and Shirley, 436 for Gio.

A tentative topic Schedule is available. It has links to weekly Notes, summarizing each meeting. The initial notes, available before the class has met, are copies from prior years.

Course Definition

Information from prior years is available as Spring 2011 Schedule, Spring 2010 Schedule, Spring 2009 Schedule, Spring2008Schedule, CS73N schedule 2007, CS99I 2006 description, 2005 description,  2004 description, 2003 description, 2002 description, 2001 description; 2000 description; 1998 description. (The class was numbered CS99I initially, and CS99 is still the file name Gio uses in Stanford files).

This course now fulfills the second part of the Stanford undergraduate writing requirement (WR 2). During this course we focus on writing as it will be practiced in the future, namely effective communication on the web.  In addition to weekly writing assignments, each student is expected to produce a comprehensive, well written, and well structured website. Students' websites can address an internet business idea, a non-profit organization, or an educational or public service goal. Each project should have a page with an assessment of the project's benefits and costs, into the long term. The work that students produce will be criticized in class and by your classmates. A critique can be based on feasibility, cost, risk, ethics, and originality. From such criticism you should be able to extract constructive guidance to improve your work. 

You can view your colleagues work via the Classlist and Assignments. The website you produce will at least be available to the next class as guidance, and for perusal by the occasional guest. Many projects from prior years are available here.

Objective

Our seminar is intended to help us and others understand what is happening in the world-wide information highways and how to assess their benefits and risks. There is no way that we can predict the future, but we can try to understand the forces and the constraints in several dimensions.

We will focus on the use of the Internet for commercial, educational, and scientific objectives. We will present enough of the technology for students to have a sense of what is possible, what potential pitfalls exist along the way, and where things are likely to go in the future. You will not need to go into technological details to understand the power of the Internet. Some points related to current perceptions are made in the slides on Web Growth.

A still relevant report is

Wiederhold, Gio: Trends for the Information Technology Industry; report prepared for MITI under sponsorship of the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO), San Francisco CA 94104, April 1999.

For communication, send email to: gio@cs.stanford.edu.
Secretary:  Marianne Siroker, Gates 435, 723-0872.

For appointments please email to: siroker@cs.stanford.edu.  Gio Wiederhold's office is in the Computer Science building, Gates, fourth floor, way in the back, room 436.

To contact other students and see what projects are being pursued you can use the classlist when the course is in session. This email reflector will reach all 16 students, and this one will reach instructors and students.

 

Meeting format:

The Thursday hour will be available to answer questions about the assignment and to introduce business aspect of the Internet topic for the week.  During the initial half of each Friday session we will present the topic in more depth.   The remainder of the time is available for discussing its import and potential. Students that have chosen the topic for their project will lead those discussions.  Some days will be fully devoted to student presentations and analysis.  One or two external speakers with specialized experience will be invited.

Following the open tradition of the Internet we publish the results of the course on the World-wide-web, so that the material can be shared beyond the participants of the class. How to Write for the Web will be an important issue.

The major product will a project, available on the web, covering a business or information topic related to the Internet.  Intermediate assignments will contribute to that project and allow us to provide feedback.  Students should decide in a topic well before the midterm period. Assignments are given out on Fridays, as shown in the scheduleand are due, by email, before midnight the next Friday; the email can simply contain a pointer to a webpage. 

If you have a simple question about your project that was not addressed in class, send the instructors an email. Do not delay your work by a week.  If you feel that more time with one of us is needed make an appointment through my secretary, Marianne <Siroker@cs.stanford.edu>. You will typically get a suitable time within a few days. (My work schedule is irregular, so that having office hours does not work well for me). The topic schedule provides notes summarizing past classes, updated soon after each class. For future dates class notes from the prior year are available.

A note about the early history of the class is available on a background page.