By the 2000s, there were countless societies, taskforces, initiatives, and organizations ostensibly in place to guide or regulate myriad facets of e-commerce and the Internet. One of the most prolific and respected was the Internet Society (ISOC), a nonprofit corporation based in Reston, Virginia, whose broad goal was to facilitate global cooperation and coordination for the Internet by helping to…
The U.S. Congress addressed the controversial issue of taxation and e-commerce with the passage of the Internet Tax Freedom Act (ITFA), which took effect in October 1998. ITFA prohibited the imposition of new e-commerce taxation from October 1, 1998 to October 21, 2001. According to the legislation's sponsors, ITFA was enacted to create a tax-free period that would allow for the unfettered …
As the Internet opened to the mass public in the 1990s, it didn't take long for investors to see the potential for buying and selling securities online. While forms of online investing existed before the Internet became popular, the proliferation of Internet access and the coinciding stock market boom ushered in a vast industry catering to all kinds of investors. The Internet had something …
Island ECN has played a key role in redefining how stocks and other securities are traded. Island is an electronic marketplace that enables market professionals to display limit orders for stocks and other securities, directly matching buyers and sellers, and in doing so eliminating many of the traditional stock market middlemen and their fees. Thousands of market participants enter over 2 billion…
iVillage was the first site on the Web devoted to the concerns and interests of women in the prime of their lives. But during the first six years of its existence, iVillage also came to epitomize the quicksilver nature of the Internet economy. By late 2001, the firm had experienced the entire dot.com boom-and-bust cycle. It launched one of the most wildly successful public stock offering in histor…
Former Microsoft manager Naveen Jain is the founder, CEO, and chairman of InfoSpace, Inc., a provider of Internet services and content—including news, stock quotes, and yellow and white pages—to major World Wide Web portals like America Online, Lycos, Disney's GO Network, and Microsoft's MSN, as well as to various wireless networks. Sales at InfoSpace grew nearly 200 pe…
Java is a programming language that is widely used on the World Wide Web, both in Web pages (client side) and on Web servers (computers used to host or maintain Web sites). Therefore, it is an important technical component of e-commerce. Based on a high-level programming language called C++, the most popular, powerful aspect of Java is that it allows programmers to create programs that can be down…
J.D. Edwards & Company develops, produces, and markets software applications packages for business. It develops applications that can be used in every aspect of business, including supply, finance, human resources, manufacturing, and planning, and by most business sectors, such as chemicals, automobiles, arts and entertainment, and energy. Its flagship products, OneWorld and WorldSoftware, …
As the founder and CEO of Apple Computer Co., the prolific Steve Jobs was at the very heart of the computer revolution. The early Apple computers played an integral part in opening the personal computer market. Through the years, as Jobs shifted his focus to his myriad side projects, Apple's market strength dissipated. By the 2000s, however, Jobs was back in command at Apple, and was busily…
New York-based Juno Online Services, Inc. was the third largest Internet service provider (ISP) in the U.S. prior to its merger with rival NetZero, Inc. In September of 2001, Juno Online Services and NetZero joined forces to become a new company, United Online. With more than 18 million registered accounts and 7 million active subscribers—those who access the Internet at least once a month&…
Jupiter Media Metrix is a leading market research and consulting firm that reports on the impact of the Internet and new technologies on commerce and marketing. Jupiter Media Metrix was formed in September 2000, when Media Metrix acquired Jupiter Communications for about $350 million in stock. The company's five business units were subsequently organized around its core competencies of meas…
Mitchell D. Kapor is the founder of Lotus Development Corp. and co-developer of the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, considered the first "killer" software application. Many analysts credit 1-2-3 for being the catalyst that sparked widespread use of personal computers (PCs). Kapor served as CEO of Lotus until 1986, when he left to pursue other ventures, including the creation of network-util…
Having risen to prominence in the mid-1990s alongside the start of the Internet boom, "killer applications" (or "killer apps") is industry jargon for compelling uses for a technology. Technology developers and industry watchers deem an application "killer" when it drives high sales and wide adoption, possibly even creating whole new markets, paradigms, and…
Web-enabled kiosks made their debut in 1996. One of the first retailers to make extensive use of instore kiosks was outdoor sports retailer REI (Recreation Equipment Inc.), which had kiosks in 58 stores by fall 2000. Its in-store kiosks provided customers with access to 78,000 products available on its Web site. At the end of 2000 kiosks were not widely deployed. Those that were installed seemed t…
Knight-Ridder is the third-largest U.S. newspaper publisher with sales of $3.2 billion, roughly 22,000 employees, daily circulation rates of 9 million, and Sunday circulation rates of 13 million. Behind both Gannett and Tribune Co. in print operations, the firm is considered a leader in online newspaper publishing. However, despite the success of the firm's Internet operations, the North Am…
Although knowledge management assumes a variety of meanings depending on the context, the most basic idea behind knowledge management is the sharing of knowledge and information in an efficient and productive manner. As the Information Age, and particularly the Internet, dramatically expanded the wealth of information available and necessary to companies' operations, the efficiency of infor…
The Industrial Revolution gave birth to a large base of manufacturing jobs. These often required physical labor but little thought on the part of workers: employees repetitively operated machines and performed a limited range of physical tasks. During the latter half of the 20th century, however, information began to play a more central role in the world of work, particularly in advanced industria…
Timothy Koogle is CEO of Yahoo! Inc., the most heavily trafficked Internet portal in the world with roughly 100 million visitors every month. For free, Yahoo! browsers can do everything from sending and receiving email and searching for old classmates to booking airline flights and car rentals and creating online photo albums. Koogle oversaw Yahoo!'s growth from a small upstart Internet sea…
LandsEnd.com was launched in 1995 by catalog apparel firm Lands' End Inc. The site, which started out selling 100 items, grew to include all Lands' End catalog items and was visited by 38 million World Wide Web surfers in 2000. Profitable since its inception, LandsEnd.com was considered the number one online apparel site, having secured $218 million in sales in fiscal 2001. A direct …
The rise of the Internet has impacted virtually every branch of law and is expected to revolutionize the relationship between law, government, and technology. Central questions concerning Internet-related legal issues include: If cyberspace constitutes a separate legal domain, should there be a separate branch of "cyberlaw" to regulate it? Or should existing laws be reinterpreted to …
Levis.com was launched by fashion retailer Levi Strauss & Co. in 1996 as an informative company Web site that included pages on the firm's history and current operations, culture, and fashion. Two years later, the Web site became a sales outlet for more than 120 clothing items in 3,000 different styles. However, in 1999 Levi Strauss pulled the plug on its online sales efforts, using …
A freely distributed operating system that functions on many different platforms, Linux is important to e-commerce because of its increasing use as an operating system for Web servers. The system thrives in multi-user, networked environments and runs on a range of hardware configurations, including PCs, Macintoshes, high-end workstations, and many servers and network devices. Besides its compatibi…
Local area networks, more commonly known as LANs, typically connect a geographically restricted group of clients, such as a group of employees in an office building, to a server. Clients simply are stand-alone personal computers (PCs) or other types of workstations, while servers are faster computers that house the programs and data distributed to the workstations. Servers either can be mainframe …
Over time, companies invest a great deal of effort and money in the computer systems they rely on to manage their many business functions. Not only do the systems themselves cost money (in terms of hardware, software, and other network infrastructure), they also require a substantial investment of human capital. Employees, customers, and business partners spend many hours learning to use such syst…
