Regulations governing consumer privacy on the Internet have been much stronger in the European Union (EU) than in the United States. On October 28, 1998, the EU adopted the European Community Directive on Data Protection 95/46/EC, which established minimum standards for the protection of users' personal data and privacy on the Internet. The Directive requires all EU members to generate and …
Internet services consultancy Sapient Corp. operates offices throughout the U.S., as well as in Canada, England, Germany, Italy, India, and Japan. Sales in 2000 exceeded the $500 million mark, and employees totaled roughly 2,300, as Sapient became the first Internet services firm to make the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index. That year, a survey conducted by Forrester Research Inc. r…
Most average computer users have worked with word processing software applications that allowed them to select lines or blocks of text and increase or decrease the text's type size. This action is a very basic example of scalability, whereby the size of something can be changed (increased or decreased) according to need. In the case of e-commerce, the term scalability usually corresponds to…
Throughout most of the 20th century, business moved at a relatively slow pace. By the early 2000s, however, the business climate had changed significantly. The widespread adoption of the Internet and other communication devices allowed information to travel more quickly, and enabled consumers and companies to do business with one another across the globe. Along with the brisker pace came greater c…
Scient Corp. is an Internet services consultant with offices in North America, Europe, and Asia. Like other upstart competitors who survived the dot.com fallout of 2000, it continues to reduce its reliance on newer dot.com s in favor of pursuing accounts with larger, better established clients looking to use e-business tools to improve operations. The firm is also working to change its reputation …
Most people find what they're looking for on the World Wide Web by using search engines like Yahoo!, Alta Vista, or Google. According to InformationWeek, aside from checking e-mail, searching for information with search engines was the second most popular Internet activity in the early 2000s. Because of this, companies develop and implement strategies to make sure people are able to consist…
A protocol designed to ensure the security and integrity of online communications and purchases, Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) uses digital certificates, issued to merchants and other businesses and customers, to perform a series of security checks verifying that the identity of a customer or sender of information is valid. SET provides the basic framework within which many of the various co…
In the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., it was common for social and political commentators to proclaim that "everything has changed." While the geopolitical and domestic landscape transformed in accordance with this pronouncement, the business world weighed up the implications of this changed…
Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are written contracts between a service provider and its client guaranteeing a certain minimal level of service. For instance, Internet service providers (ISPs) may devise SLAs guaranteeing continuous, high-quality Internet access to their subscribers, while applications service providers (ASPs) may offer SLAs to secure the efficient operation of high-tech business …
For several years in the late 1990s, e-commerce companies, which quickly came to be known as "dotcoms," could hardly avoid having money thrown at them by investors looking to cash in on what was widely touted as the financial windfall of the New Economy. Vigorous investment sent the stock valuations of dot-coms sky high, far outpacing what would be expected of firms based on their fu…
Since the earliest days of commerce, manufacturers and retailers have relied on shipping companies—including parcel/express shippers like FedEx and United Parcel Service;less-than-truckload shippers (LTLs); and railway shippers—to move goods throughout the nation. Traditionally, the process of shipping goods was relatively straightforward. Wholesale and retail orders were taken manua…
Shopping bots are price comparison sites on the World Wide Web that automatically search the inventory of several different online merchants to find the lowest prices for consumers. Typically, these sites rank products by price and allow shoppers to link directly to an online merchant's site to actually make a purchase. Many shopping bots also include links to product reviews from evaluatio…
An electronic shopping cart serves the same purpose as a traditional metal shopping cart in a grocery or department store. It allows shoppers to select potential purchases and set them aside until they are ready to pay for their merchandise. While checkout procedures take place at a cash register in a bricks-and-mortar establishment, at an online store payment is most typically made via a real-tim…
Companies that engage in e-commerce rely on software for a variety of things, from ensuring security, operating servers, and managing customer relationships to providing visitors with online shopping carts and payment systems. By definition, software consists of instructions that tell computers what to do. Although it's customary to view hardware and software as separate and distinct elemen…
The rise of e-commerce in the late 1990s brought with it many issues related to the security of online transactions, the accountability of online merchants, and the reliability of Internet sites. As a result, many organizations began offering site evaluation services. In some cases, site assessment is conducted for the benefit of customers considering purchasing goods or services from an e-merchan…
The speed at which individuals connect to the Internet has increased significantly since the World Wide Web became popular in public circles. Early on, when the processing and dial-up modem speeds of computers were relatively slow, it was accepted that most tasks—including the time required to access a Web site—would take a certain amount of time, especially if the site included a la…
SmartMoney.com, the online incarnation of SmartMoney magazine, is a comprehensive set of resources for individual private investors. It includes tools to aid in making investment decisions and tracking investments, as well as regularly updated information from the financial markets and daily news, analysis, and feature articles. SmartMoney.com gives intensive coverage to the most popular investmen…
Years ago, computers were huge expensive machines used mainly by large companies and universities. Since then, they have become useful everyday tools people use to share, store, and analyze information. While computers have affected the world in a very broad way, their impact in the business sector has been especially significant. Desktop computers, large mainframes, and the servers used to host W…
The pace of technological evolution is particularly quick in the Information Age. After purchasing new computer systems, consumers soon find them outdated. The same is true for corporate enterprises that invest large sums to purchase and implement new hardware and software solutions, only to find that continual upgrades and modifications are necessary. For reasons like these, in the early 2000s ma…
Spam, the electronic version of junk mail, stirred enormous controversy and heated opinions as the Internet economy developed in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Following a visit or a transaction on a given Internet site, a user may find his or her mailbox filled with electronic announcements offering everything from cheap airline tickets to limited-offer retail sales, from faster Internet access …
The hallmark characteristic of the Internet since its expansion into the personal and commercial realms is speed: instantaneous communication via e-mail, chat rooms, and instant messaging. In business those who were among the first to establish a quality presence on the Web were usually the ones who won and kept customers. As the Internet has grown, new Web-based collaborative applications have be…
When search engines (like Yahoo or Alta Vista, for example) are used to find information on the Internet, the results one receives normally come from giant indexes or databases, instead of from the actual Internet in real time. Because the Internet changes constantly, a search engine's index must be continually updated. Spiders are the tools used for accomplishing this critical task. They w…
"Startups," in popular parlance, are generally understood to be companies conceived and developed as Internet-based enterprises, and they were all the rage in the economic world as well as in the popular imagination of the late 1990s. Startups were characterized by novel business models and a heavy reliance on venture capital, although that picture was changing in the early 2000s. Th…
In the English language, the root or underlying form of a word is called a stem. Stems serve as the basis for different variations of a word. For example, the word sell has the variants seller, selling, and sellable. The term stemming refers to the ability of Internet search engines to search for all of a word's possible variants to return more comprehensive search results. Therefore, someo…
There are many different elements that e-commerce companies must have in place before they can conduct business successfully. First and foremost, they need to determine exactly how they will profit in the marketplace. This requires a solid business model. Additionally, successful e-tailers must map out strategic plans with goals, objectives, and tactics related to their specific business ideas. W…