Although it wasn't the first company to offer securities trading over the Internet, Charles Schwab & Co. Inc.—the principal operating subsidiary of the Charles Schwab Corp.—was the leading online brokerage firm at the end of the 20th century. More than 3.3 million of the company's 6.6 million active accounts were online accounts, representing nearly half of the c…
More than any other group, children have been a center of controversy on the Internet. American youth access the Internet for school, communication, shopping, and recreation. Children's relationship with the Internet has attracted the attention of Internet providers, marketers, advertisers, teachers, lawmakers, and public interest groups. The Internet's role in education, the online …
An increasingly pressing concern among e-commerce businesses of all types, churn refers to the inability of firms to maintain a consistent, longtime, loyal relationship with their customers. More specifically, churn is the turnover of a customer base as customers allow their accounts to lapse or switch to competitors' online products and services. Churn is usually quantified as the percenta…
With 34,000 employees, Cisco Systems was the world's largest manufacturer of routers and switches in the early 2000s. Both form an integral part of the networking technology used to connect users to the Internet. Roughly 80 percent of the firm's revenues stem from transactions completed on Cisco's Web site, which is considered to be one of the most successful business-to-busin…
James H. (Jim) Clark is best known as the co-founder of Netscape Communications Corp., the up-start World Wide Web browser firm that battled Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer and eventually merged with America Online (AOL). Clark also founded two other billion-dollar ventures. Long before his days at Netscape, Clark created Silicon Graphics, the pioneer of three-dimensional computer graph…
CMGI Inc., with origins dating back to 1968, rose to be a leader among Internet holding firms under the direction of David Wetherell. With the 1995 creation of @Ventures, one of the first Internet-only venture capital firms, CMGI operated as an incubator—a firm that invests in business start-ups with the intent of spinning them off or operating the start-ups themselves. By 2001, the company…
CNET Networks Inc. is a leading provider of technology and e-commerce news and information across several media, including the Internet, television, radio, and print. Its target audiences include both consumers and businesses, and the company has created online marketplaces for technology and consumer products. Its subsidiary, CNET Data Services (CDS), plays a central role in providing information…
COBOL (COmputer Business Oriented Language), is a programming language used in many different business applications, both on mainframe computers and desktop systems. It is one of the first high-level computer languages, meaning that it is much closer to human language than the machine language through which computer hardware accepts commands. High-level languages eventually get translated to a pri…
Commerce One builds business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce exchanges that allow companies to do business via the World Wide Web or other electronic platforms. The idea behind these exchanges, or marketplaces, is to cut costs for all parties involved by creating a single place where buyers, sellers, distributors, and suppliers can complete commerce transactions. Commerce One exchanges, based on the …
Commoditization is the dilution of a market sector's internal differentiation and competitive nuances in favor of a mass market where price alone determines consumer behavior. The industry's mode of competition thus moves away from innovation of the underlying, commoditized product and toward alternative methods of building value. As industries mature, barriers to market entry gradua…
In order for e-commerce to take place, computers must be able to communicate with one another. To do so, they must use a language format and rules that each understands. Protocols, which can reside either in software or hardware, are the means by which this occurs. Protocols ensure that each device understands exactly how information will be sent and received. They define the format in which data …
The community model is a method of developing an online presence in which several individuals or groups are encouraged to join and participate in ongoing interaction designed around a common purpose. Web communities, or virtual communities, were not only a way for like-minded people to come together online, they also were an increasingly important element of business plans. The late 1990s and ear…
Compaq Computer Corp. is one of the largest personal computer (PC) manufacturers in the world. Among diversified computer companies like IBM and Hewlett-Packard, Compaq ranks third. Its products include desktop PCs, notebook computers, the Alpha operating system and Alpha chips, handheld computers, monitors, networking and communications equipment, parallel-processing computers, printers, servers …
The concept of competition is well known in the fields of economics. In everyday usage, it also connotes a kind of positive, creative energy that fuels our markets. As mainstream use of the Internet grew exponentially through the 1990s, so did competition among the industry's many players. Hordes of upstart companies that became known as dot-coms emerged. They competed aggressively with one…
Competitive advantage has to do with a company's ability to outdo competitors, either by improving upon what competitors are currently doing or by doing something completely different in a way that proves successful. Being able to implement an e-commerce plan that improves sales or cuts costs might give one retailer a competitive advantage over another. At the same time, being the first to …
According to the U.S. Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics, by 2000 more than 300 million users around the globe accessed the World Wide Web. Of those, at least 1 million were engaged in illegal Internet activities (computer crime or "cyber-crime"). Cyber-crimes include Internet-related forgery, embezzlement, fraud, vandalism, and the disposal of stolen goods. The potential threat to t…
Computer ethics refers to the ways in which ethical traditions and norms are tested, applied, stretched, negotiated, and broken in the realm of computer technology. As computers brought about dramatically enhanced power of communication and data manipulation, new ethical questions and controversies were forced to the forefront of contemporary ethics debates. While ethics is concerned with codes of…
The Computer Ethics Institute (CEI) is the most prominent organization dedicated toward the promotion of ethical computer use in the United States. Its primary function is to study, publicize, and coordinate the intersection of information technology innovations, business interests, regulations and other public policies, and ethics. The organization was founded in 1985 by the Brookings Institution…
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 is the primary federal legislation aimed at curtailing computer crime. It especially applies to interstate crimes that fall under federal jurisdiction. The act was designed to strengthen, expand, and clarify the intentionally narrow Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1984. It safeguards sensitive data harbored by government agencies and related organizations, …
Computer security encompasses a wide range of technological issues. Computer security professionals work to combat hacking, which includes illegally accessing, manipulating, or destroying private information contained in computer networks. Computer security efforts typically involve the use of a combination of passwords, data encryption applications, virus detectors, and firewalls (hardware or so…
Compuware Corp. makes and sells software that allows clients to test and debug corporate mainframe systems. It also offers a suite of system management tools, which have become increasingly important to companies conducting business electronically. Compuware's services, which bring in nearly half the firm's revenues, include systems integration and capacity testing. Compuware also op…
The term "Internet connectivity" refers to the way people are hooked up to the Internet, and may include dial-up telephone lines, always-on broadband connections, and wireless devices. Among these, wireless access to the Internet is the newest and, as of the early 2000s, had only reached a small group of users. Broadband connections, including DSL (digital subscriber line), ADSL (asy…
Content providers are generally perceived to be Web sites that supply different types of online information—including news, entertainment, traffic reports, and job listings—that is regularly updated. The first content providers were entities such as America Online (AOL), which provided content to users for a subscription fee. More recently, however, many providers offer some or all o…
In the field of e-commerce and information technology, convergence typically refers to media convergence, and especially to the combination of television, telecommunications, and the personal computer into a single box that would deliver high-speed Internet access, traditional television programming, and interactive services. However, as of mid-2001, interactive television (iTV) was more vision th…
Co-opetition, a term combining the words "co-operation" and "competition," refers to the arrangement between competing firms to cooperate on specific projects or in certain areas of business for mutual benefit, even while remaining competitors in general. The players enter into the agreement with the expectation that the isolated cooperation will lead to greater overall…
