E-Business Juncture LLC would like to take a moment to kick back and see where e-business is going in the future. So, from time-to-time we will place posts on our blog to provide the entrepreneur with some “food for thought” about the direction of e-business. Today we would like to concentrate on the Internet.
Do not confuse the Internet with the World Wide Web, because they are not the same. The World Wide Web (WWW) is servers containing the information required to point to where resources exist. The Internet is how people and organizations obtain those resources.
A key term that needs to be understood in regard to the Internet is bandwidth. We see bandwidth expressed in terms of megabytes or kilobytes per second. A telephone modem would be expressed as 56 kbps, while DSL and Broadband would be expressed as 1.5 or 2 mbps.
Breaking bandwidth down a little further we have upstream and downstream rates. How fast this page is viewable in your web browser would be downstream, while how fast you can send email would be upstream. Upstream and downstream are vital in regard to e-business and your decision to host your own web site locally or use a hosting provider.
Where are we going? Backwards. Web 2.0 is all about collaboration; however, the Internet service providers are beginning to place quotas on the amounts of downstream data. This means e-business needs to be concerned about the amount of data being downloaded by their viewers. Forcing a viewer to download a video they do not want to watch when they click on your web page is going to become a turnoff.
We actually see web pages, at least the opening pages, becoming lean once more. E-business will still be able to have videos and sound tracks; however, they will only be provided to viewers that request them. Cellular phones with web browsers are a prime example of this theory right now, because the viewer pays per so many megabytes.
E-business will also depend more upon hosting plans rather than hosting their own web sites locally. Web Site Hosting can provide a better break down of associated costs of web site hosting. However, we would like to reiterate that hosting plans generally provide enough bandwidth for your viewers while costing a fraction of what you would pay to obtain the bandwidth yourself.
E-business will also be transformed from design and implementation of web sites to customization and content management of existing software. Why reinvent the wheel? If there is an organization that has the infrastructure to enable you to meet your customer requirements, why not use that infrastructure?
Dynamic web sites. Dynamic web sites are generated according to viewer requests and or requirements. The HTML script is housed in a database, which is queried to render the page. This enables the e-business organization to change web site language and display based upon geographical regions. A prime example would be the holiday in the United States of Mothers Day, which would allow the e-business organization to market Mothers Day gifts in the United States on their web site, while displaying a different page to viewers who do not celebrate Mothers Day.
Our last forecast for now in regard to the Internet is satellite communications. As the technology becomes more affordable we will see organizations start to implement satellitecommunications for Internet access. Many people are using satellite dishes for television at this time, so all that is required is an up-link to make communications bidirectional.
Enjoy and leave a comment on how you feel,
Mikhail Kniaziewicz, MIS