Electronic and Mobile Commerce

Week 1 - Introduction

In the first week, the job scoop for the course is given. The title of the text book is also given: E-Commerce: The second wave. As i look through the title, i began to wonder.. if this is the second wave, what is the first wave, and how was it eventually lead to the second wave?

So, the first wave is defined with the characteristic of:
- Dominated by U.S business
- Extensive use of the english language
- Low bandwidth data transmission techologies
- Unstructured use of e-mail
- Overreliance on advertising as a revenue source

And later, it's find out that:
- Others country is also a potential market for e-commerce business
- People feel more comfortable to buy something electronically by using the language they are comfortable with
- Increased in the technology, which result out in the increased of the bandwidth provided
- As the internet growth, each email providers try to be the best among them, which eventually bring to the structured use of email (in order to compete) and advertising.

Thus, in the second wave:
- Future of electronic commerce will be international in scope
- Language translation and handling currency conversion problem will need to be solved
- E-mail will be used as an integral part of marketing and customer contact strategies.

Apart from the second wave, we also learnt several kinds of distruptive technologies, and how they affect the electronice Commerce. The distruptive technology consists of digitalisation, globalisation, personalitation, mobility, and convergence. We learnt and tried to understand why, now human is so dependent with the technology, when they still could live without them before.

Needless to say, we're surrounded by the technology in everywhere. My activity in typing blog is also one of usage of technology.. Why should i use blogger to do my assignment? What is the purpose behind? hem.. yes, to make it easier for other student to access and review them. but.. dont we have any other way to do that? think for a while, yes. I can do this in a piece of paper, typing using the typewriter, and to be review by other student, i can copy it out (Again, this is the use of technology) and let it to be viewed in class. Without (or lack) use of technology, now we feel that everything is too time consuming to achive the same thing without technology.

Thus, in this highly competitive world, time constraint is one of the factor make us dependent with the technology. The second factor is that, as the technology become common, the place of technology as substitute(eg: computer as the subsitute of typewriter) eventually become the primary good itself, demolished the use of typewriter, and eventually stop the production of it. How many of use still use typewriter nowadays? Thus, eventually, it's become a neccessary for us to use computer, since the old way of doing it - by using typewriter - is no longer available.

The above example can be generalized to reflect our technology life. As the technology changed, the specification changed, and eventually open up alot of potential market for us to grab. And thus, through this couse, we're going to study more about the technology, and how it brings the big effect to the business :)

posted by Unknown @ 9:11 PM