Example #3: supplting commercial photos.

Thousands of companies around the globe provide photos of their products to retailers who advertise product s in newspapers, in paper catalogs, or online. The new economy has changed the process by which these photos are supplied.

Old Economy. In the old economy, the retailer sends the manufacturer a request for a picture of the item to be advertised, say a Sony TV set. Sony then sends to a designed ad agency, by a courier, alternative pictures that the agency can use.The agency selects a picture by a courier, designs the ad, gets an approval from the retailer, and sends the picture by a courier to the printer. There it is rephotographed and entered into production for the catalog.(An improvement introduced several years ago allows the ad agency to send the picture to a scanning house. There, a digital image is made, and that image is moved to the printer.) Both the retailer and the ad agency may be involved in a quality check at various times. Slowing the process. The cycle time per picture can be four to six weeks. The total processing cost per picture is about $ 80.

New economy. Orbis Inc., a very small Australian company, changed the above old-economy linear supply chain to a hub-like supply chain, as shown in Figure 1.1. In the new process, the manufacturer (e.g., Sony) sends many.

digitized pictures to orbis (at productbank.com.au), and Orbis organizes the pictures in database. When a retailer needs a picture, it enters the database and selects a picture, or several alternatives. The ID number of the chosen picture is e-mailed to the ad agency. The agency enters the database, views the digitized pictures, and works on them. Then, after the client’s approval, either the final digitized pictures are e-mailed to the printer, or the printer is told to pick them up from the database. The entire process takes less than a week at a cost of about $50 per picture.

EXAMPLE#4: PAYING FOR TRANSPORTATION IN NEW YORK CITY.

Millions of people all over the world take public transportation. Metal tokens were the preferred solution in some major cities for generations.

Old Economy. For over 50 years, New Yorkers have used tokens to pay for transportation on buses and subways. The tokens save time and are liked by travelers. However, it costs $6 million a year to manufacture replacement tokens and to collect the tokens out of turnstiles and fare boxes (“NYC Transit Tokens…,” 2003). New York City needs this money badly for other services.

New Economy. The new-economy solution has been to switch to Metro-Cards. By 2002, only 9 percent of all commuters were still using tokens. Despite the fact that they have to occasionally swipe the Metro Cards through the card reader several times, travelers generally like the new cards. (A new generation of contactless cards does not have this problem.) Metro Cards are offered at discounts, which riders like.

Other cities have made the transition to electronic cards as well. Chicago’s transit moved to cards in 1999, replacing the century-old tokens. Washington, D.C., Paris, and London also use transit cards. In Hong-Kong, millions use a contactless card not only for transportation but also to pay for telephone, Internet access food in vending machines, and much more.

EXAMPLE #5: IMPROVING THE LAUNDRY EXPERIENCE FOR COLLEGE STUDENTS.

Millions of college students use dorm laundry facilities worldwide. What is their experience?

Old Economy. You run to the laundry room only to find out that all machines are taken. You run to the laundry room only to find out that all machines are taken. You wait for a machine, and when you finally get one, you realize that you are short on coins. You manage to find someone who will make change for you, and now you are set to start. But you do not remember how your mother instructed you to wash the dirty shirts, and now there is no one around to ask. You put everything into the washer, start it, and hope for the best. Rather than hang around the laundry room, you go away to study, and when you come back you find that someone took out your clean stuff and placed it on the dirty counter. You transfer the laundry to the dryer, and go back to study some more. This time you come back before the dryer is finished, so you must wait, wasting more time.

New Economy. Dryers and washers in your college are hooked to the Web. You punch a code into your cell phone or sign in at esuds.net, and you can check for availability of laundry machines. Furthermore, you can pay with your student ID or with a credit card, and you will receive e-mail alerts when your wash and dry cycles are complete. Once in the laundry room, you activate this system by swiping your student ID card (or key in PIN number). The system automatically injects premeasured amounts of detergent and fabric softener, at the right cycle time.

Introduction

By definition the Internet is a worldwide, publicly accessible series of interconnected compute networks that transmit data by packet switching using the standard Internet Protocol. But, how did it come to be this technology that is so popular and so widely used around the world? Was it always so large and extensive, filled with information about just about anything you could possibly think of accessible from almost anywhere, anytime? The answer is no and its important to understand where it all came from to understand how to utilize it to its fullest potential now.

Creation

The Internet origin comes from a military project. The Semi Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) program consisted of networked country- wide radar systems together for the first time. This was created around 1958 as part of an attempt to regain the lead in technology from the Soviet Union who had recently launched Sputnik. J. C. R. Licklider was selected to head the committee which controlled the SAGE project. He envisioned universal networking as a unifying human revolution.

SAGE Computer Room

Licklider recruited Lawrence Roberts to head a project which implemented a network. Roberts had worked with the U.S. Air Force on a packet switching system as opposed to a circuit switching system. On October 29, 1969, Licklider and Roberts interconnected the first two nodes between UCLA and SPI International at Menlo Park, California. This was the beginning of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) which was one of the key networks which our Internet today was based off of. Soon after the first international packet- switched network service was created between U. S. and U. K.

Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn developed the first description of the TCP protocols (covered more deeply in the introduction to Networking lesson) in 1973. The term “Internet” was first used in 1974 to describe a single global TCP/IP network detailed in the first full specification of TCP written by Cerf and his colleagues. The first TCP/IP- wide area network was created on January 1, 1983 when hosts on the ARPANET were switched over from the older protocols to TCP/IP.

In 1984, the United States National Science Foundation (NSP) commissioned the construction of a 1.5 megabit/ second network which became known as NSFNET. In 1989 the US Federal Networking Council approved the interconnection of the NSFNET to the commercial MCI Mail System. Soon after, other commercial e-mail services were soon connected such as OmTyme, Telemail, and Compuserve. Three Internet Service Providers (ISPs) were also created: UUNET, PSINET, and CERFNET. More and more separate networks were created that eventually interconnected with this large, growing network. The ability of TCP/IP to work over virtually any pre-existing communication networks allowed for a great ease of growth, although the rapid growth of the Internet was due to primarily to the availability of commercial routers from companies such as Cisco Systems, proteon and Juniper, the availability of commercial Ethernet equipment for local-area networking and the widespread implementation of TCP/IP on the UNIX operating system.

Growth

Although the basic applications and guidelines that make the Internet possible had existed for almost a decade, the network did not gain public face until the 1990s. On August 6, 1991, CERN, which straddles the border between France and Switzerland, publicized the new World Wide Web project. The web was invented by English scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989.

Internet logo

An early popular web browser was ViolaWWW. It was eventually replaced in popularity by the Mosaic web browser. By 1996 usage of the word “Internet” had become commonplace, and consequently, so had its use as a reference to the World Wide Web. Over the course of the decade, the Internet successfully accommodated the majority of previously existing public networks (although some networks have remained separate).

Today`s Internet

Aside from the complex physical connections that make up its infrastructure, the Internet is facilitated by bi- or multi –lateral commercial contracts and technical specifications or protocols that describe how to exchange data over the network. Indeed, the Internet has severely matured since its birth many years ago. Today almost 1.5 billion people use the Internet. That`s almost a quarter of the entire world (a lot of people).

ICANN Headquarters

 

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the authority that coordinates the assignment of unique identifiers on the Internet, including domain names, Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, and protocol port and parameter numbers. A globally unified namespace is essential for the Internet to function. Because the Internet is a distributed network comprising many voluntarily interconnected networks, the Internet, as such, has no governing body.

One of the most common uses people have for the Internet is the World Wide Web. Whenever you say you are “on the Internet” you are using the World Wide Web. When you are suffering the Internet through different pages you are moving through the World Wide Web. However, that is not only use for the Internet. E-mail is another very popular use for the Internet. Internet e-mail may travel and be stored unencrypted on many other networks and machines out of both the sender`s and the recipient`s control. Remote access is another very common use for the Internet. The Internet allows computer users to connect to other computers and information stores easily, wherever they may be across the world. File sharing is also popular. It allows people to send files through e-mail, FTP, peer-to-peer networks, etc.

 

[1] Various icons are used throughout the book to identify a particular perspective or functional area related to the nearby example. This icon, for example, indicates an international perspective. Refer to the preface for a listing of all of the icons.

 

[2] Each chapter opens with an example that illustrates the applications of IT in real–world organization and the relevance of the chapter topics. The format—problem, solution, results—helps model a way to think about business problems.