Electronic Commerce "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -Arthur C. Clarke

What is Electronic Commerce? “Technology-mediated exchanges between parties (individuals or organizations) as well as the electronically based intra- and inter- organizational activities that facilitate such exchanges” Rayport and Jaworski, 2001

In the beginning... MAINFRAME Dumb Terminals

Then came the PC...

Local Area Networks (LANs)

Why not connect branches around the country? gateway Seattle, WA College Park, MD New Haven, CT Albany, NY

Why not link the world?

And so it came to be... “Internet” The “Internet” a global network of networks connecting millions of users networks connected via gateways standard grammar (or protocol) for communicating with one another (TCP/IP) common addressing system (URL) most commonly used for

URLs Need to keep the computers straight Each assigned a unique IP address Example : Four sets of octets Can take values between 0 and 255 IP addresses stored as domain names for easy recall Domain Name Server maintains the mapping between IP address and domain name

The Internet: What does it look like? 5 supercomputer centers 1985: NSF funded 5 supercomputer centers around the country Cornell Theory Center, Cornell University National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, University of Pittsburgh San Diego Supercomputer Center, University of San Diego Jon von Neumann Center, Princeton University

The Original Internet 56kbps Five centers linked by 56kbps lines Unexpectedly large volumes of traffic and file transfers Not only used for research but also for and file transfers 1987: 1987: NSF awarded Merit Networks Inc. (Ann Arbor, MI) contract to upgrade the NSFnet backbone

The Original Internet (contd.) Merit upgraded the lines to T-1 (1.544 Mbps) 8 more nodes added (making 13) interconnect The purpose of NSFnet now was to interconnect these regional networks

The Original Internet (contd.) 1991: 1991: The lines interconnecting networks was upgraded to T-3 (45 Mbps) 3500 regional networks Over 3500 regional networks were interconnected The original 1983 concept of the Internet was that of interconnecting networks 10 years later, “being on the Internet” meant being connected to the NSFnet backbone

The New Internet Architecture April, 1995 April, 1995: NSF shut down its NSFnet backbone network access points Radical new architecture consisting of four network access points (NAPs) San Francisco (PacBell) Chicago (Ameritech and Bellcore) New York (Sprint) Washington D.C. (Metropolitan Fiber Systems)

Today’s Internet

WWWhat in the WWWorld is the World Wide Web?

The World Wide Web (WWW) multimedia arm The multimedia arm of the Internet WWW is an information system that uses the internet uniform addressing schemes (URL) common grammar (HTTP protocols) hypertext (written in a language called HTML) web servers web browsers

World Wide Web Browser client URL

What is Electronic Commerce? “Technology-mediated exchanges between parties (individuals or organizations) as well as the electronically based intra- and inter- organizational activities that facilitate such exchanges” Rayport and Jaworski, 2001

Ripples Business Originating From…. Selling to…. Business Consumer B2B C2B B2CC2C Consumers buy thousands of Harry Potter books from Amazon Publisher orders paper supplies from paper companies Amazon orders extra copies from publisher Consumers resell Harry Potter books on eBay Potter fans band together for bulk purchase from Amazon