City University of Hong Kong (CityU) hosted a three-day exhibition on "Personalized Service Oriented eBusiness", which showcased application systems and management solutions developed by final-year students of the Department of Information Systems (IS) for the industry and business of Hong Kong.

"The purpose of developing these systems and solutions is to give students an opportunity to integrate technologies with our daily lives in a real business environment. We also want to bring innovative technologies to the industry for business development", said Dr Michael Ho Moon-tong, senior lecturer in IS and the supervisor of the exhibition.

Dr Ho added that through these projects students would learn much from practical experience in creative thinking and application of skills in system analysis to develop solutions for the industry.

Eight student projects will be showcased in the exhibition, including personalized mobile services, next generation Internet-based (IPv6) applications, eBusiness enabled by Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), personalized web services applications, and value-added wireless services. These projects are developed by 23 final-year IS students who have been sponsored by seven corporations and CityU.

One of the projects, "Smart Phone and Customer Relationship Management Solution for Shopping Mall", has been developed by three students, Patrick Cheng Chun-choi, Paul Yip Cheuk-wing, and Lawrence Yip Kai-on. With inspiration from daily living, they come up with this application for customers in shopping malls to shop with mobile phones such as looking for shopping tips, finding the location of stores, booking tickets, and even reserving tables in restaurants. Restaurants in turn would notify customers by mobile phones about their queuing status. This can save customers the trouble of getting queuing tickets in person or queuing up outside restaurants.

Another project, "Personalized IPv6-based Peer-to-Peer Group-Interaction Applications", has been developed by Calvin Chan King-fung, Hydie Chan Wing-yan, and Fenwick Tang Yan-kin. They make use of the latest Internet-based (IPv6) technology to enable groups of individuals at different locations to discuss business via video conferencing without being restricted by time zone or geographic location. The unique feature of this system is that it does not require a computer server and yet it provides a platform for very secure, eavesdrop-free communication.

This annual event has been held for the eighth year and the guests who officiated the opening ceremony on 29 March included the Honourable Mr Sin Chung-kai, Legislative Councillor; Mr Leo Lam, General Manager of ELM Computer Technologies Limited; Mr Michael Yu, Manager of Hewlett-Packard AP (Hong Kong) Limited; and Professor Wei Kwok-kee, Head of IS.

The exhibition was held at the podium on the fourth floor of the Purple Zone of Academic Building at CityU, with the opening hours from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on 29th and 30th March, and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on 31st March. All were welcome.

For details of the student projects, please visit our website: http://www.is.cityu.edu.hk/fyp/project2007/