Lesson 1

The primary objective of this module is to explain how Internet technologies evolved to from the e-Businesses we see today.
A key point here is that technology has radically changed business models.
The business model has changed radically, moving from

1. wait for the customer to
2. manage the customer

- reactive to proactive.
Certainly the key to the success of Internet technologies both B2C and B2B has been the ability to compress the time required for an interaction between parties, allowing for richer, more bi-directional exchanges. At some level the purpose is always the same: to make money and please the stock market to increase market cap. In this module, you will learn about Web technologies, their evolution, and their relevance to e-Business today.

Electronic Business focuses on organizational transformations based on information technologies. Research includes the identification of best practices and trends, the comparative analysis of new business models, the evaluation of performance based on the introduction of new technologies, the efficacy of the new services and methods in attracting and satisfying customers, and the simulation of integrated supply chains. Electronic technologies focus on information technologies and system architectures, which are used to create and manage on-line commercial transactions. Research includes work on

1. electronic commerce technologies and protocols (in particular wireless and multi-media),
2. the analysis and development of algorithms and theories (in particular security, data mining, web data warehouses, and distributed applications),
3. the definition of standards,
4. architectures and software engineering methodologies for developing electronic commerce systems,
5. the experimental development of innovative applications (virtual environments, e-learning, electronic negotiations, business reporting).

In the past decade, the boom of Internet technology has encouraged vast ranges of information be created and shared among peoples, organizations, and enterprises. Most of the information has been written in hypertext markup language (HTML), which mainly follows certain format to express the contents. However, this well-formatted information is normally written for human comprehension. When the information volume grows, the time to locate and to digest the information that fits needs of users increases exponentially. There are many possible solutions to the problem and the attentions are drawn to the data and the meaning of data. The XML (extensible markup language) provides the independence between applications and data, allowing the data to be shared among applications. But, what kinds of information can be shared and how to share the information remain as unsolved problems. This brings the attention to the semantic Web. The semantic Web has rules to automatically reason the needs of information and has XML/RDF (resource description framework) to define the meaning and relationship of data. The new phenomenon provides the possibility of having diversified and machine-processable Web services over Internet, intranet, and extranet. The semantic web represents advances in Electronic Business and helps to provide intelligent Web services.
The World Wide Web is an information universe, in which countless nodes of Web content provide links to online and off-line resource. Although this information universe tends to be unbounded, the technology that supports it is simple. The World Wide Web is constructed using just three fundamental standards:

1. the uniform resources identifier (URI),
2. the hyper text transfer protocol (HTTP), and
3. the hyper text markup language (HTML).

These three standards perform different functions individually, but serve collaboratively to enable information consumer to access remote resources by retrieving Web content from remote nodes and presenting them on local machines.