Acquiring banks, also known as merchant banks, act as middlemen in the online transaction route. They are the link between online merchants and credit-card-issuing banks, and play a vital role in coordinating the relationship and data flow between them. When a customer agrees to an online purchase and enters his or her credit card information, it travels first to the merchant, who sends it along t…
Richard L. Adams, Jr. is the founder of UUnet Technologies, the first commercial Internet Service Provider (ISP) and one of the largest Internet traffic carriers in the world. Among other things, Adams's accomplishments at the helm of UUnet include the invention of Serial Line Internet Protocol (SLIP), technology that allows personal computers to connect to the Internet via modems. With a m…
An adhocracy is an organization that lacks structure—the complete opposite of a bureaucracy. This form of organization is common among advertising agencies and other creativity-based companies. Startups often opt for such a structure as well because of its tendency to foster a team atmosphere. Characteristics of an adhocracy-type firm include taking risks and being flexible as new projects …
The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is the U.S. government-sponsored, data-coding, algorithmic system designed to protect electronic information on hardware and software from security breaches. By providing a basic framework for coding and scrambling sensitive information, AES facilitates easy electronic data sharing and protection across a wide variety of platforms as well as across borders. T…
Although the Internet economy experienced a general slowdown in 2000, there was a record number of online ad impressions—more than 172 billion—in the fourth quarter of that year, according to a report by AdRelevance, a subsidiary of Jupiter Media Metrix. Online ad impressions in December 2000 rose 21 percent over November to reach more than 65 billion ads viewed. The report predicte…
The affiliate (or click-through) model is a popular e-commerce relationship in which an online merchant agrees to pay an affiliate in exchange for providing an advertisement and link to the merchant's site. Each sale generated as a result of a customer "clicking through" from an affiliate to the merchant results in a small commission for the affiliate. The deal provides a stre…
The Internet is a vast sea of electronic information. However, to be of any value that information must be combined in ways that end-users find meaningful and useful, or in ways that bring buyers and sellers together in new ways. Aggregators, of which there are several kinds, play an important role in making this happen. Web aggregators combine information—including sports scores; weather f…
In 2000, Forbes ranked Paul Allen as the third-wealthiest person in the United States, with an estimated net worth of $36 billion. Allen was born in Seattle, Washington, on January 21, 1953, and attended Lakeside High School there, where he was friends with Bill Gates. Gates and Allen co-founded Microsoft in 1975, after Allen left his job as a programmer at Boston-based Honeywell. Allen served as …
AltaVista—the name means "the view from above"—is a Web portal that offers Web pages, shopping, news, live audio and video, and community resources including e-mail. The site is run by Alta-Vista Co., a majority-owned operating company of Palo Alto, California-based CMGI Inc. AltaVista is perhaps best known for its search technology. It provided the first full-text sear…
Although Amazon.com built its reputation as an online bookstore, the Seattle-based company has pursued a strategy of offering a wide assortment of products, which it promotes as "Earth's Biggest Selection." An early 2001 version of the company's home page offered links to several categories, among them books, electronics, toys, video, music, health and beauty, wireless …
A private, non-profit organization that works to coordinate voluntary standards, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) is the hub of all standards-related policy decisions in the United States. It is the primary U.S. body that coordinates the efforts of industry, consumer, and governmental standards developers, and is the sole organization that accredits other U.S. standards organizatio…
Ameritrade Holding Corp. offers online discount brokerage services through five subsidiaries, each of which has its own strategy and target market. Ameritrade Inc. (www.ameritrade.com) is the company's principal retail broker-dealer. It combines discount brokerage fees with trading over the Internet and only charges an $8 brokerage fee for each Internet equity market order. Ameritrade also …
Information can be presented in one of two formats, analog or digital. The main difference between the two involves continuity. Analog information is representative of the way events or phenomena unfold in the real world. Mechanical wristwatches are an excellent example because the hands of a watch display every possible point in time as they unfold, including the very smallest fractional units, i…
Marc Andreessen is a well-known and influential figure in the world of electronic business. In E-Commerce Times, Mitchell Levy, chair of ECM-sym.com, described Andreessen as "Probably the most significant person I can think of" in terms of e-commerce. Andreessen made his mark by developing breakthrough Internet browser software, first with Mosaic and then with Netscape Navigator, and…
Angel investors are a vital component of the venture capital industry. Known for making a splash in the e-commerce world of the late 1990s and early 2000s, they have emerged as a hugely successful economic force, attracting droves of well-leveraged individuals and groups looking for the early investment that can spawn an industry powerhouse. The decade-long U.S. economic expansion produced ever mo…
AOL Time Warner Inc., formed by the merger of America Online, Inc. and Time Warner Inc., is a major media conglomerate that combines the power of the Internet with highly recognized information and entertainment brands. According to the combined companies' first annual report, released in early 2001, AOL Time Warner reached more than 130 million subscribers, 266 million Web users, 268 milli…
Apple Computer is best known for its Macintosh personal computers (PCs), including the colorful iMac desktop and iBook laptop, which are designed to facilitate easy access to the Internet. Although the firm's new product releases in the late 1990s garnered media attention and boosted sales, Apple's share of the worldwide PC market had dwindled to less than three percent by 2001. …
An application service provider (ASP) is a company that delivers and manages software applications and computer services from a remote data center to multiple users. Companies typically access these applications and services over the Internet, through a virtual private network (VPN), or through dedicated lease lines. A wide range of both applications and communications and infrastructure capabilit…
Archipelago Holdings operates Archipelago LLC, one of the four original electronic communications networks (ECNs) approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to serve as a new breed of institutional stock broker—one that matches stock buyers and sellers more quickly than traditional brokers by using an Internet-based electronic platform. Rather than attempting to secure profits…
Considered the predecessor of the Internet, ARPAnet was established by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in 1969 for two main reasons: to allow for the transfer of data between various institutes of research, and to answer the call of the U.S. Department of Defense for a technology that would provide messaging capabilities to the government in the event of nuclear war. Seven years earli…
AT&T Corp. is the world's leading long-distance telephone service provider and also one of the top telecommunications services providers. As competition among long-distance firms intensified throughout the 1980s and 1990s, AT&T struggled to find new markets in which it could succeed. Efforts to convert cable television lines into integrated Internet, local phone, and entertain…
The attention economy is a buzz term that was used in the late 1990s and early 2000s to describe the economic period that followed, in succession, the agricultural economy, the industrial economy, and the information economy. On the heels of the information economy, according to proponents of the attention-economy concept, human attention has become the scarcest resource amidst the swirl of inform…
Online auctions have proven very popular with consumers and businesses alike. They offer many benefits to both buyers and sellers. Online auctions offer buyers the promise of lower prices for merchandise and collectibles. Yet, spirited bidding for desirable items may drive up prices beyond what they would have been in a fixed price environment. Online auctions have virtually unlimited geographic r…
When consumers attempt to withdraw money from a bank, rent movies from a video store, write checks, or obtain passports for international travel, they are required to provide one or more forms of identification that authenticate who they are or prove their identity. These situations usually involve face-to-face encounters with other people in the physical world. E-commerce occurs on the Internet, …
