With a workforce of nearly 150,000, holding company FedEx Corp. operates FedEx Express, the largest express shipping company in the world, handling more than 3 million deliveries a day. Three other subsidiaries—FedEx Ground, FedEx Custom Critical, and FedEx Freight—round out the firm's delivery services. While FedEx boasted a 51-percent share of the overnight delivery market, …
Fiber optics is the transmission of data via light waves passed through glass threads. Most major telephone companies have replaced, or are in the process of replacing, traditional copper telephone lines with fiber optic cables. Additionally, local-area networks often use fiber optic technology. Single-mode fiber is used in conjunction with laser light to transfer data more than five miles in dist…
David Filo co-founded Yahoo! Inc. with fellow Stanford University doctoral student Jerry Yang in March of 1995. Initially a search tool for the World Wide Web, Yahoo! grew into the leading Internet portal with more than 100 million surfers using the site every month by the year 2000. Filo continues to oversee the technological development of Yahoo! and owns roughly eight percent of its stock. Filo…
All new companies need financing of some sort to launch operations. In some cases, entrepreneurs are able to simply dip into their existing personal savings accounts. For example, Jerry Greenberg and Stuart Moore, who co-founded Sapient Corp. in 1991, used $40,000 of their own savings and charged nearly $70,000 on their credit cards rather than seek outside funding for their new information techno…
Firstsource Corp. is an e-commerce solutions provider. Its Firstsource Connect unit designs purchasing hubs, connected to various product distributors, for businesses looking to use the World Wide Web to streamline their procurement processes. The firm also licenses access to its FSP platform, which it uses to power Firstsource Connect, to businesses wanting to conduct operations online. En Pointe…
Addison Fischer is considered by many to be a trailblazer in the computer security industry. He has founded and made major investments in several firms that specialize in authentication and encryption software. Up until 1996, Fischer served as a board member for RSA Data Security Inc., maker of the world's leading data encryption software. His current board seats include Surety Technologies…
Founded in 1998, Huntington Beach, California-based Flashcom Inc. was one of the first companies to offer digital subscriber line (DSL) service to small businesses and individuals. DSL technology makes use of the copper telephone lines already running from telephone companies into most homes and businesses, allowing recipients continual Internet access at speeds 50 times faster than traditional di…
For some people, surfing the Web brings on a light, trance-like state of mind that stems from being totally focused on viewing information online. Known as flow, this state of mind can make one oblivious to surroundings, and to the amount of time that passes while they are online. This is similar to what happens when one becomes completely absorbed in a book or article. The concept of flow has bee…
Business forecasting has always been one component of running an enterprise. However, forecasting traditionally was based less on concrete and comprehensive data than on face-to-face meetings and common sense. In recent years, business forecasting has developed into a much more scientific endeavor, with a host of theories, methods, and techniques designed for forecasting certain types of data. The…
In order to effectively prepare business strategies in the technologically fast-paced worlds of e-commerce, information technology, and the global economy, it has become important for companies and policy makers to look into the future with sophisticated models and techniques to determine the course of technological change. The field of technological forecasting, more commonly referred to as fores…
With roughly 2,500 business clients, nearly 745 employees, and sales of $157.1 million in 2000, Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Forrester Research Inc. is one of the leading market research firms covering the Internet and related technology. Its early focus on Internet technology, which began in 1995, helped to bolster the firm's image as an Internet industry expert capable of predicting fut…
FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslating) is a programming language historically used in math, science, and engineering programs. It is recognized as the first high-level programming language. High-level programming languages are much closer to human language than machine language, through which computer hardware accepts commands. High-level languages eventually get translated to a primary, numeric machine la…
According to the U.S. National Consumers League, Internet-related fraud cost individuals and businesses $3.2 billion at the turn of the 21st century. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) identified 18,660 instances of potential Internet fraud in 1999, with fully 25 percent of all consumer fraud complaints concerning the Internet, up from three percent in 1997. The Securities and Exchange Commis…
Ira Fuchs is credited with co-founding Because It's Time Network (BITNET), the world's first computer messaging network for liberal arts professors, in 1981. His work played a crucial role in the early development of the Internet and e-mail technology, and he continues to pioneer information technology projects in the academic world. As an undergraduate student majoring in physics at…
Online fulfillment is a cornerstone of e-commerce, encompassing all of the steps involved in purchasing and receiving a product, from order placement and billing to packaging, shipping, and beyond. Fulfillment problems arise when a breakdown or bottleneck occurs at some point in the process. Before the advent and wide use of the Internet, companies could often hide inefficient fulfillment systems,…
With roughly 800 consultants, Gartner Inc. is one of the largest information technology (IT) consultanting firms in the United States. Its client base includes nearly 10,000 businesses, institutions, and other organizations which prefer to let outside experts advise them on decisions regarding computer hardware and software, communications devices, and other technology-related topics. In 2000, sal…
William H. (Bill) Gates is the founder, chief software architect, and chairman of Microsoft Corp., the world's leading software company. In 2000, revenues at Microsoft reached roughly $23 billion, and employees totaled more than 39,000. Gates's firm is best known for its two landmark products: the Windows operating system, which holds a 92-percent share of the global personal compute…
Gateway, Inc. is a leading personal computer (PC) maker in the U.S. with a 15 percent share of the market as of 2001. The firm sells its machines by phone and via the Internet. Operations include 15 call centers, five manufacturing plants, and 275 Country Store showrooms. Declining prices and market saturation in the PC industry prompted the firm to diversify into Internet access services and othe…
E-commerce is powerful because it enables companies and individuals from across the globe to engage in business transactions. However, this same advantage also can be a roadblock. Business standards that are deemed acceptable in one part of the world may be viewed quite differently in another region. Furthermore, when business transactions occur between parties on opposite sides of the globe, matt…
Once an employee at Microsoft Corp., Robert Glaser is the founder of Seattle-based RealNetworks. He turned himself and his company into a major competitor and bitter rival of Microsoft by the end of the 20th century, while simultaneously pioneering the market for streaming media, the technology that allows Internet surfers to download, listen to, or watch media clips online. Glaser, a Yale graduat…
While businesses coveted the relatively untapped African e-commerce market and saw tremendous opportunity there, Africa faced a number of troubling obstacles to the development of e-commerce at the start of the 21st century. These problems ranged from the technical to the social to the political. For instance, the continent was characterized by inadequate telecommunications and business infrastruc…
With a tremendous population, several highly developed countries, and a rapidly escalating Internet penetration, Asia is among the most promising regions for e-commerce development. In March 2000, about 69 million people had access to the Internet in Asia, compared with 83 million in Europe. Still, internal disparities and a series of logistical difficulties hampered some of the most optimistic ex…
The development of e-commerce throughout the world ranges from the widely adopted use of the Internet as a medium for both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) commerce transactions in North America, to the relatively embryonic stages of basic telecommunications service in many Third World countries. E-commerce development in most other areas, including Australia, tends to fal…
In the early 2000s, the development of e-commerce in Central and South America was several years behind similar development in North America and Europe. However, the region still represented a market with great promise. With a large and increasingly connected population, and markets that were ever more linked to those in the north, particularly those in the United States, business leaders both in …
The development of e-commerce across the globe varies widely depending on factors such as an area's technological infrastructure; the technological expertise of residents, which is related to both the ability of e-commerce companies to find qualified workers and the ability of citizens to engage in Internet-related transactions; funding available for e-commerce ventures; and national, regio…