#1

This week, Group D will respond to the question posed here regarding business intelligence. The members of Groups A, B and C will respond to at least two students' postings with comments, questions and further discussion. Be sure to check back and see if other students or I replied to your posting and posed additional questions or asked for additional information.

Zillow

Zillow.com is an online Web- based real estate site helping homeowners, buyers, sellers, renters, real estate agents, mortgage professionals, property owners, and property managers find and share information about real estate and mortgages. Zillow allows users to access, anonymously and free of charge, the kinds of tools and information previously reserved for real estate professionals. Zillow's databases cover more than 90 million homes, which represents 95 percent of the homes in the United States. Adding to the sheer size of its databases, Zillow recalculates home valuations for each property every day, so they can provide historical graphs on home valuations over time. In some areas, Zillow is able to display 10 years of valuation history, a value- added benefit for many of its customers. This collection of data rep-resents an operational data warehouse for anyone visiting the website.

As soon as Zillow launched its website, it immediately generated a massive amount of traffic. As the company expanded its services, the founders knew the key to its success would be the site's ability to quickly process and manage massive amounts of data, in real time. The company identified a need for accessible, scalable, reliable, secure databases that would enable it to continue to increase the capacity of its infrastructure indefinitely without sacrificing performance. Zillow's traffic continues to grow despite the weakening real estate market; the company is experiencing annual traffic growth of 30 percent and about a third of all U. S. mortgage professionals visit the site in a given month.

Data Mining and Business Intelligence

Zestimate values on Zillow use data- mining features for spotting trends across property valuations. Data mining also allows the company to see how accurate Zestimate values are over time. Zillow has also built the industry's first search by monthly payment, allowing users to find homes that are for sale and rent based on a monthly payment they can afford. Along with the monthly payment search, users can also enter search criteria such as the number of bed-rooms or bathrooms.

Zillow also launched a new service aimed at changing the way Americans shop for mortgages. Borrowers can use Zillow's new Mortgage Marketplace to get custom loan quotes from lenders without having to give their names, addresses, phone numbers, or Social Security numbers, or field unwanted telephone calls from brokers competing for their business. Borrowers reveal their identities only after contacting the lender of their choice. The company is entering a field of established mortgage sites such as LendingTree.com and Experian Group's Lowermybills.com, which charge mortgage companies for borrower information. Zillow, which has an advertising model, says it does not plan to charge for leads.

For mortgage companies, the anonymous leads come free; they can make a bid based on information provided by the borrower, such as salary, assets, credit score, and the type of loan. Lenders can browse borrower requests and see competing quotes from other brokers before making a bid.

References

Baltzan, P. (2014). Business driven information systems (Fourth ed., p. 243). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill/Irwin.

Questions

1. Databases are an integral part of Zillow; now consider and list some reasons that a business might use a database.

2. Zillow uses business intelligence to create a unique product for its customers, how can business intelligence be used in the course case study?

3. In the course case study, how could a data mart be used to help with the release of a new-product launch?

4. Categorize the five common characteristics of high- quality information and rank them in order of importance to the course case study.

5. Zillow uses a data- driven website to run its business, would this be useful to the business in the course case study? Explain why or why not.

#2

• On April 27, 2007, the Estonian government moved a controversial Soviet-era World War II memorial from a square in the capital city of Tallin to a more secluded location. Protests erupted in Estonia and Russia, where Estonia's Moscow embassy was blockaded. The Russian government protested vociferously and issued threats. (Estonia was occupied by the Soviet Union for much of the Cold War, and a large Russian minority lives there.)

Weeks of cyber-attacks followed, targeting government and private Web sites. Some attacks took the form of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Hackers used hundreds or thousands of "zombie" computers and pelted Estonian Web sites with thousands of requests a second, boosting traffic far beyond normal levels.

The "Cyber Attacks on Estonia on April 2007" video discusses the effects of DDOS attack on Estonia. According to Turban, et al (2013), this type of attack occurs when a "web site or network is bombarded with traffic to make them crash" (page 118). And that is exactly what took place when the cyberattack shut down one of the most wired countries in the European Union. Almost everything connected to computers was crippled.

I suggest everyone watch the video as it quite interesting and describes the events leading up to the attack as well as the effect it had on the Estonian economy. Group D has the responsibility to respond to the below questions and the members of Groups A, B and C will respond. Remember, you need to at least two students' postings with comments, questions and further discussion. Be sure to check back and see if other students or I replied to your posting and posed additional questions or asked for additional information.

1. What was your reaction to the video and what hackers could do to an entire country?

2. Using Google determine if there have been any similar DDOS attacks?

3. Were you able to find out how hackers were able to conduct this attack?

4. Have firewalls been improved to help prevent or minimize, these types of DDOS attacks?

References

Turban, E., Volonino, L., Gregory, W., & Janice, S. (2013). Information technology for management advancing sustainable, profitable business growth, 9th edition (9th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.