Abstract
E-business has grown dramatically in the last ten years. Its only constant is change. Awareness of these changes can help both business and customers better utilize and take advantage of e-business. This chapter presents the emerging trends of e-business in various areas, including Web services, Web 2.0, Mobile Commerce (M-Commerce), and corresponding ethical and social issues.
TopIntroduction
E-business has grown dramatically during the last ten years. The Internet has provided companies with access to new markets and customers. And customers have found e-business an effective way of researching and purchasing products/services. Things have constantly changed since e-business emerged and will keep changing in the future. The benefit of e-business cannot be gained if companies do not understand or adapt properly to these changes. In this chapter, we will not focus on those full-fledged e-business technologies or applications, but on emerging trends of e-business in recent years. These could be the super stars in the near future, or, if not properly handled, the fatal disasters for some companies. Topics include: Web services, Web 2.0, Mobile Commerce, and emerging ethical and social issues.
Key Terms in this Chapter
WSDL: Web Services Description Language, a common framework for describing the tasks performed by a Web service and the commands and data it will accept so that it can be used by other applications.
UDDI: Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration. It enables a Web service to be listed in a directory so that it can be easily located, just as you can locate services in a yellow page book.
Web 2.0: A perceived second generation of web development and design, that aims to facilitate communication, secure information sharing, interoperability, and collaboration on the World Wide Web.
Web Services: A set of loosely coupled software components that exchange information with each other using standard Web communication protocols and languages, a technology that allows applications to communicate with each other in a platform- and programming language-independent manner.
SOAP: Simple Object Access Protocol, a set of rules for structuring messages that enable applications to pass data and instructions to one another.
Social media: Information content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies that facilitate communications, influence and interaction with peers and public audiences. It is sometime called user generated content.
M-commerce: Mobile Commerce, the use of handheld wireless devices for purchasing goods and services from any location.
SOA: Service-Oriented Architecture, a set of self-contained services that communicate with each other to generate a software application. Software vendor can reuse these services in other combinations to build a different application. It is a completely new way of developing software.