Doing business online!

Electronic Commerce, or e-commerce, is the digitally enabled commercial transactions, which are transactions mediated by digital technology, between and among organisations and individuals. Commercial transactions involve the exchange of value across organisational or individual boundaries in return for products or services.

E-commerce is getting increasingly popular amongst organisations for many reasons. Why is this so? In order to demostrate my point, I'm going to use Amazon.com as a example of a successful organisation. Amazon.com is an American based, multinational electronic commerce company. It's America's largest online retailer.


1) Firstly, having an online presence helps to expand your market reach. Your website can be accessed globally, across most cultural and national boundaries. For example, Amazon provides its services in more than one country. Having an website helps Amazon to reach out to their market in other countries, such as Singapore, even though it is based in America. However, organisations have to be prepared to localise and adapt your content to different countries if possible, so that the content can be easily understood, and even relatable to the target market.

2) It saves money. Having a physical store, operating costs, and the costs of buying the products all takes up money, and there might not even have enough customers to buy their products in the first place. Having a online store, however, can save the organisation money from having to buy a physical space to store their goods. On top of that, Amazon only needs to bring in the product for their customers only when they placed an order on the goods. Therefore, money is not wasted as no product is unwanted and left behind.

3) E-commerce is ubiquitous - it is available everywhere and all the time. If you feel like shopping for the greatly hyped about (but dubiously useful) new Apple product, the iPad, in the middle of the night, the website will always be there to suit your nocturnal shopping needs. Your market need not wait till the morning, when the stores are open, to buy what they want.

4) With E-commerce, organisations can better enchance their reponsiveness to customers. Amazon can sell their products cheaper to their customers now, due to their lack of middleman. They can also better serve customers, since as mentioned above, e-commerce is ubiquitous, and customers can shop and order anytime they like. However, the ability to act on and fulfill your customer's needs is important, and helps in the success of the organisation. If there is a problem with the product, or your services, it is important to act as promptly as possible.

5) Websites allow organisations to personalise their websites to each individual customers. When a customer has an account on Amazon, Amazon can quickly suggests other similar products to the customers. Organisations can even make some of their products in order to better cater to the needs of their customers.

6) The website allows organisations to better sell their products, due to the power of the Internet. Organisations can provide information richness through pictures and videos of their product, on top of just text that merely describes what the product is about. Amazon even have a review section, so that other users of the website can post their reviews about the product online. This helps the customer in deciding whether to get the product or not, and it can be all the more credible because the reviews are posted by fellow customers, who are not paid to give good reviews. The website can also be interactive. It allows the organisation to stimulate a face-to-face experience to their customers, and even allows that be on a global scale, so that they can reach out to more customers.

Social Media

Communication on the internet has become more interactive ever since the coming of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is commonly associated with web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design and collaboration on the World Wide Web. With Web 2.0, social media has also become more prevalent.

Social media describes the online technologies and practices that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences and perspective with each other. They are participatory online media where news, photos, videos and podcasts are made public via social media websites through submission. They are normally accompanied with a voting process to make media items become "popular". Some examples of social media includes social networking sites like Facebook, Friendster, MySpace, Youtube, and blogs such as blogger, livejournal, and tumblr, and websites such as Wikipedia, in which users upload and share information they have on the internet.

An example of a social media is this website.

(http://borntobeyourtaoeh.blogspot.com)

A blog is a website where entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. For example, this blog is a website set up by a guy who calls himself the "Tao Eh", a guy who blogs about his daily life as a gangster.

His blog has text, links to other blogs, an image of himself, and even a tagboard for passers-by to leave their comments on, just like any other typical blog. The ability for readers to leave comments in such an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Towards the end of the month, this guy decided to shut down his blog, and he asked for his readers to leave comments behind if they wanted to be credited as readers of his blog. His blog attracted 28600 views within a month, and many of them have left comments behind, thanking him for all the laughs he has given to them as a "Tao Eh". Many have even asked him to continue blogging. Whether that will happen or not remains to be seen. Others have flamed him for trying too hard to be a gangster.

Perhaps after Web 2.0, Web 3.0 will soon take over. Many has agreed that Web 3.0 is about the Semantic Web and personalisation of the internet; that is, getting the internet to understand the and satisfy the users' requests for web content. Some websites are already evolving in that direction, such as Yahoo! Music, which allows users to rate the type of music they like to listen to, and recommend music similar to the users' taste in music.

History of the Internet

Hi all, or non-existent readers, this is my first entry about the exciting topic of the Internet! This blog was created as part of an online assignment...assigned by my lecturer, and I am to update it every week with a new! Exciting! Post of the week.

For my first entry, I am going to talk and reflect on the History of the Internet. Please bear with me as I attempt to summarise what I've learnt in class.

In the early 1950s to 1960s, most communication networks were very limited, as they only allowed communication between the stations on the network. When J.C.R. Licklider was appointed head of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in October 1962, he identified a need for inter-networking, as the lack of it is attributing to the loss of many resources and time. Hence, he came up with the idea, which is the ARPANET.

The internet started out as the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, otherwise known as the ARPANET. It's the world's first operational packet-switching network, and the predecessor of the global internet. The first ARPANET link was established on October 29th, 1969.

The Internet Protocol Suite, otherwise known as the TCP/IP, is a set of communication protocols used for the internet and other similar networks. It was invented in mid-late 1978, and was produced to unite the different network methods. It became the only approved protocol on the ARPANET, replacing the earlier NCP protocol, on the 1st January, 1983.

Afterwards, the ARPANET became widely used. While it used to only be restricted to noncommercial use, it expanded to be used by more educational institutions. The Military Network (MILNET), which used to be part of the ARPANET for unclassified United States Department of Defense Traffic. soon separated from ARPANET for security reasons.

In 1992, the Internet Society was founded. A few years later, the Mosaic Web Browser became the preferred interface for accessing the Internet, due to its property as a graphical browser, instead of the primarily text-based Gopher. However, it was later superseded by Netscape Navigator, which is also later superseded by other browsers, such as Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. The World Wide Web, as we know today, was formed.