Launched in November of 2000, Covisint is an online marketplace for the worldwide automotive industry. Originally conceptualized in late 1999 by industry leaders Ford Motor Co., General Motors, and DaimlerChrysler, the business-to-business (B2B) site has yet to live up to expectations that it will achieve significant savings by streamlining the purchasing and production processes of automobile ma…
Cryptography—called "crypto" by its practitioners—is the study of codes and ciphers and their use to protect information. Cryptography has existed, in one form or another, since the ancient Greeks began toying with methods for encoding with mathematics. In the modern period, cryptography was utilized mainly in wartime to protect sensitive military information, and in th…
Mark Cuban, the co-founder of Dallas-based firm broadcast.com and owner of the National Basketball Association's Dallas Mavericks, was among the most high-profile, outspoken, and wealthiest dot.com moguls of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Broadcast.com built its fortune by taking established media outlets online and streaming their signals over the Internet on the broadcast.com Web site i…
Customer relationship management (CRM) refers to the type of enterprise software that is designed to improve a company's interaction with its customers and thereby increase revenue from sales. In addition to offering the potential to increase revenue, CRM can also reduce the cost of supporting customers. CRM has the ability to move any transaction to the lowest cost channel possible and sti…
Few technologies in human history rival the Internet in its speed of adoption and range of impact. The Internet's spread has been compared to the advent of the printing press, which, like the Internet, greatly enhanced the availability of information and the rate of its reproduction. Many have commented on the Internet's ability to transform business and the broader economy, but perh…
Cyberspace refers to the online world that is formed by computer systems and networks. The word was coined by author William Gibson in his science fiction novel Neuromancer. It originated in the mid-1980s to define the virtual world that exists due to the advent of the Internet, which in its earliest form was a community that shared ideas and information. Increasing interest in cyberspace has give…
The bane of companies, organizations, brand names, and celebrities, cybersquatting is the practice of registering the name of a company, trademark, brand, or person as a domain name for a Web site in hopes of misleading users to one's own site by using a well-known name. The top-level domain (TLD), the highest level of the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) such as sitename.com or sitename.org…
Highly sensitive digital information is often the target of computer hackers, international spies, and criminals. In order to protect such information, in 1977 the National Security Agency (NSA) and the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) adopted the Data Encryption Standard (DES) to protect sensitive, unclassified, non-military digital information from unauthorized access. Encryption is the intent…
Information is what gives power to the Web and e-commerce. In a matter of minutes, consumers are able to research, compare, and purchase products and services online. This availability of information has created more discriminating consumers and has put increased pressure on retailers to offer competitive prices. Understandably, the accuracy or integrity of data is very important during e-commerce…
In the Information Age, it's not how much information is maintained but how it is managed, manipulated, and exploited that can make or break a firm. Data mining is the practice of ferreting out useful knowledge from the wealth of information stored in computer systems, databases, communications records, financial and sales data, and other sources. A staple in the so-called Information Econo…
Data warehousing refers to the organization and assembly of data created from day-to-day business operations. Data warehousing enables a user to retrieve data from online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP), and allows for the storage of that data in a format that can be read and analyzed. The integrated information, which is stored in a data warehouse, can be ana…
Database management refers to the process of storing and manipulating the information housed in a database. Databases can be as simple as the electronic address books used by individuals to keep track of e-mail recipients or as complex as electronic library systems or online flight reservation systems. Typically, some sort of query system allows users to gain access to specific information in a da…
Datek Online was launched in June 1996 as an online trading firm. Founded by Jeffrey Citron and Peter Stern, the firm quickly grew to become one of the online trading industry's largest, with more than 640,000 customer accounts and nearly 100,000 trades per day. Among its products and services are online equity trading, option trading, mutual funds, IRAs, real-time quotes, level II quotes, …
As one of the new economy's most popular pastimes, day trading generated intense emotions from supporters and detractors alike, and the practice was the source of much controversy. Sometimes referred to with derision as "recreational trading," day trading is a form of stock market activity in which investors, known as day traders, make blitzkrieg runs on several stocks for the…
Michael S. Dell is the founder, CEO, and chairman of Dell Computer Corp., the largest personal computer (PC) vendor in the world and also the leading commercial seller of PCs via the Internet. Dell has served his firm—which boasted sales in excess of $32 billion and employed more than 38,000 individuals in early 2001—as CEO since its inception in 1984. His stint is the lengthiest of …
Dell Computer Corp. is the largest personal computer (PC) vendor in the world, a position it has held since April 2001 when it usurped Compaq Computer Corp. The firm also is the leading seller of PCs via the Internet, a medium that accounts for more than half of Dell's PC sales. In 2000, total revenues reached roughly $32 billion, and employees exceeded 38,000. Although PCs account for roug…
Hackers have been known to place programs onto networked computers that create high volumes of dubious requests or messages, resulting in an interruption of network service. This practice is called a denial-of-service (DOS) attack. When more than one networked computer is used to flood a network with phony traffic, the practice is called a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDOS). There are dif…
In terms of e-commerce, differentiation is, simply, how one company sets its e-commerce products and services apart from those offered by competitors. In some cases, the differentiation might be in name recognition. In a world filled with Internet startups, the familiarity of a name like Hewlett-Packard or Microsoft could be an important distinction to some customers looking to purchase e-commerce…
In the field of computing, information can be conveyed in digital or analog formats. Continuity is the differentiating factor between the two. For example, digital devices are only able to display information in finite units (10 degrees versus 10.0625 degrees), while analog devices display information that corresponds more precisely to real world phenomena. Digital watches display time in measured…
Digital cash, or electronic money, consists of encrypted data that serves as an electronic substitute for regular hard currency. It can exist in the form of a cash Internet transaction or as monetary value stored on a smart card. Descended from the electronic money used in bank transactions, currency exchanges, credit cards, and automatic tellers, by the 21st century digital currency was evolving …
Digital certificates are digitally encrypted storage vehicles for transporting personal information, especially digital signatures, over the Internet. They are appended as attachments to electronic communications in order to verify the identity of the sender and provide the tools necessary for the recipient to encode a response. The thrust of the technology is to provide individuals engaging in o…
Certificate authorities were at the hub of many e-commerce developments in the early 2000s. One of the greatest impediments to the widespread adoption of online commerce was the fear among many consumers and businesses of the security risks involved in sending financial or other information over the Internet. Certificate authorities hoped to alleviate such fears by acting as guarantors of the auth…
In the beginning, the Internet, and particularly the World Wide Web, was extolled as a powerful force toward the democratization of information and, ultimately, of politics and economics. This was the idealistic vision of the Web's founder, Tim Berners-Lee. By placing such a wealth of information and opportunity at individuals' fingertips, the Web, according to its most ardent suppor…
In June 2000, the U.S. government issued the Digital Economy 2000 report, a follow-up to its previous Emerging Digital Economy reports published in 1998 and 1999. The report was based on research conducted by the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA), the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the Federal Reserve, and outside economists. It announced that information technology (IT) industries were resp…
Digital Equipment Corp. was a leading developer of microprocessors, semiconductors, and other high-tech equipment in the 1970s and 1980s. Its breakthrough Alpha microprocessor, introduced in 1992, went on to power such well-known World Wide Web portals as Alta Vista and Lycos, although Lycos eventually switched to Microsoft's Wintel platform. Despite its technological breakthroughs, Digital…
