E-Business has become a fact for almost all companies. But what are the key technologies for economically successful e-commerce? In this book readers will find all concepts that will coin tomorrow's e-business: virtual sales assistants (shopbots), personalized web pages, electronic market places, vendor managed inventory, virtual organizations, supply chain management. Both technical and economic issues of these concepts are discussed in detail. Leading-edge real world applications are presented that will shape e-business mid-term.

This book is a must-read for managers or technical consultants as well as researchers needing in-depth information for strategic business decisions.

When we work or play through digital technologies - we also live in them. Communities form, conversations and social movements emerge spontaneously and through careful offline planning. While we have used disembodied communication and transportation technologies in the past - and still do - we have never before actually synchronously inhabited these communicative spaces, routes and networks in quite the way we do now. Digital Diasporas engages conversations across a selection of contemporary (gendered) Indian identified networks online: "Desis" creating place through labour and affective network formation in secondlife, Indian (diasporic) women engaged in digital domesticity, to Indian digital feminists engaged in debate and dialogue through Twitter. Through particular conversations and ethnographic journeys and linking back to personal and South Asian histories of Internet mediation, Gajjala and her co-authors reveal how affect and gendered digital labour combine in the formation of global socio-economic environment.

2.1 E-Government: e-Governance and e-Democracy The term Electronic Government (e-Government), as an expression, was coined after the example of Electronic Commerce. In spite of being a relatively recent expression, e-Government designates a field of activity that has been with us for several decades and which has attained a high level of penetration in many countries2. What has been observed over the recent years is a shift on the broadness of the e-Government concept. The ideas inside e-Governance and e- Democracy are to some extent promising big changes in public administration. The demand now is not only simply delivering a service - line. It is to deliver complex and new services, which are all citizen-centric. Another important demand is related to the improvement of citizen's participation in governmental processes and decisions so that the governments' transparency and legitimacy are enforced. In order to fulfill these new demands, a lot of research has been done over the recent years (see Section 3) but many challenges are still to be faced, not only in the technological field, but also in the political and social aspects.

As the various types of global e-business grow rapidly, the need to establish adequate cyberlaws is increased. Reformation of domestic and global laws has been underway; however, the nature of e-business is one of constant technological developments, consistently outdating existing laws. Cyberlaw for Global E-Business: Finance, Payment & Dispute Resolution examines cyberlaw discussions worldwide on topics such as cybercrime and risk management, comparative electronic trading systems of securities, digital currency regulation, jurisdiction and consumer protection in cross-border markets, and case law on international bank transfers. An invaluable resource for policy-makers, business experts, lawyers, scholars, and researchers, this book provides comprehensive research from a global perspective on the legal, technical, and financial implications of e-business.

This book focuses on cultural tourism as it develops into the second decade of the new millennium. It presents recent hospitality and tourism research findings from various sources, including academic researchers and scholars, industry professionals, government and quasi-government officials, and other key industry practitioners. It discusses the latest tourism industry trends and identifies gaps in the research from a pragmatic and applied perspective. It includes specific chapters on innovation in tourism, the virtual visitor, cross-cultural visions of digital collections, heritage and museum management in the digital era, cultural and digital tourism policy, marketing and governance, social media, emerging technologies and e-tourism and many other topics of contemporary significance in global hospitality and tourism. The book is edited in collaboration with the International Association of Cultural and Digital Tourism (IACuDiT) and includes the proceedings of the Second International Conference on Cultural and Digital Tourism.

Building the E-Service Society is a state-of-the-art book which deals with innovative trends in communication systems, information processing, and security and trust in electronic commerce, electronic business, and electronic government. It comprises the proceedings of I3E2004, the Fourth International Conference on E-Commerce, E-Business, and E-Government, which was held in August 2004 as a co-located conference of the 18th IFIP World Computer Congress in Toulouse, France, and sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP).

The book contains recent results and developments in the following areas:

E-Government:
E-Government Models and Processes,
E-Governance,
Service Provisioning.

E-Business:
Infrastructures and Marketplaces,
M-Commerce,
Purchase and Payment.

E-Commerce:
Value Chain Management,
E-Business Architectures and Processes,
E-Business Models.

Considering the global spread of e-commerce technologies and the rapid pace of organizational adoption of these technological advancements, there is a need for reliable research results on e-services, outsourcing applications, and consumer resources management. Consumer Behavior, Organizational Development, and Electronic Commerce: Emerging Issues for Advancing Modern Socioeconomies offers readers a one-stop resource for contemporary issues, developments, and influences in e-commerce. Through in-depth literature reviews and inventive methodologies, academics, students, and practitioners will find this publication to be a ready reference -- suitable for university or corporate library collections and advanced coursework -- for a complete depiction of technologies and their impact on modern global socioeconomics.

The use of the internet for commerce has spawned a variety of auctions, marketplaces, and exchanges for trading everything from bandwidth to books. Mechanisms for bidding agents, dynamic pricing, and combinatorial bids are being implemented in support of internet-based auctions, giving rise to new versions of optimization and resource allocation models. This volume, a collection of papers from an IMA "Hot Topics" workshop in internet auctions, includes descriptions of real and proposed auctions, complete with mathematical model formulations, theoretical results, solution approaches, and computational studies. This volume also provides a mathematical programming perspective on open questions in auction theory, and provides a glimpse of the growing area of dynamic pricing.

Advances in wireless technologies promise to reshape the way we conduct business. Yet to make wireless e-business work effectively, a variety of enabling technologies are needed.

Kou and Yesha and their contributors provide comprehensive information on these technologies, including, for example, wireless security, mobile payment, location-based services, mobile data management, and RFID technologies. The presentation is targeted at students, lecturers, e-business developers, consultants, and business managers, and this book is an ideal introduction for both self-study and taught e-business classes or commercial training courses.

"I believe this is an excellent book to acquire comprehensive knowledge on enabling technologies for the blooming wireless e-business. I highly recommend this book!" Robert Mayberry, Vice President, Sensors and Actuators, IBM Software Group

As e-commerce continues to develop, organisations have adopted its technological advancements in order to keep a strategic advantage in the business environment. E-Commerce for Organizational Development and Competitive Advantage provides insight on the challenges related to the management aspects of e-commerce and its influence over organisational development. With the growing applications of electronic commerce technologies, this reference source is vital for educators, researchers, and managers interested in the advantages of this field.

Managing Business in a Multi-Channel World: Success Factors for E-Business addresses the concerns of existing companies who wish to succeed in the new multi-channel environment as it develops and becomes commonplace. Readers will obtain academically rigorous yet manager-accessible insight into recent studies on multi-channel e-business in three focus areas: consumers, markets and strategy of e-business and the impending future of the multi-channel environment. While many e-business books provide anecdotal descriptions of what went wrong, few provide structure or insights into how best to utilize the internet as a business channel. Forward-thinking organizations can use this book to build considerable competitive advantage from the examples of first-movers and new business models.

The availability of effective global communication facilities in the last decade has changed the business goals of many manufacturing enterprises. They need to remain competitive by developing products and processes which are specific to individual requirements, completely packaged and manufactured globally. Networks of enterprises are formed to operate across time and space with world-wide distributed functions such as manufacturing, sales, customer support, engineering, quality assurance, supply chain management and so on. Research and technology development need to address architectures, methodologies, models and tools supporting intra- and inter-enterprise operation and management. Throughout the life cycle of products and enterprises there is the requirement to transform information sourced from globally distributed offices and partners into knowledge for decision and action. Building on the success of previous DrrSM conferences (Tokyo 1993, Eindhoven 1996, Fort Worth 1998), the fourth International Conference on Design of Information Infrastructure Systems for Manufacturing (DrrSM 2000) aims to: * Establish and manage the dynamics of virtual enterprises, define the information system requirements and develop solutions; * Develop and deploy information management in multi-cultural systems with universal applicability of the proposed architecture and solutions; * Develop enterprise integration architectures, methodologies and information infrastructure support for reconfigurable enterprises; * Explore information transformation into knowledge for decision and action by machine and skilful people; These objectives reflect changes of the business processes due to advancements of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the last couple of years.

This book presents a blueprint for corporate growth in the challenging environment of the first decade of the 21st century. It shows that Streamlining is an approach that leads companies to enable, automate and innovate, to control costs and improve performance in these new conditions. Pioneers like Cisco, Dell, GE, BP and Siemens have shown that it can deliver. This book will show all companies how to achieve results in the next part of their new techology/e-business journey and will be essential for managers.

This book brings together three great motifs of the network society: the seeking and using of information by individuals and groups; the creation and application of knowledge in organizations; and the fundamental transformation of these activities as they are enacted on the Internet and the World Wide Web. Of the three, the study of how individuals and groups seek information probably has the longest history, beginning with the early "information needs and uses" studies soon after the Second World War. The study of organizations as knowledge-based social systems is much more recent, and really gained momentum only within the last decade or so. The study of the World Wide Web as information and communication media is younger still, but has generated tremendous excitement, partly because it has the potential to reconfigure the ways in which people seek information and use knowledge, and partly because it offers new methods of analyzing and measuring how in fact such information and knowledge work gets done. As research endeavors, these streams overlap and share conceptual constructs, perspectives, and methods of analysis. Although these overlaps and shared concerns are sometimes apparent in the published research, there have been few attempts to connect these ideas explicitly and identify cross-disciplinary themes. This book is an attempt to fill this void. The three authors of this book possess contrasting backgrounds and thus adopt complementary vantage points to observe information seeking and knowledge work.

Very practical - the 'success templates', or blueprint, is a collection of processes to follow and templates to use to design and build an agile alliance. Written by leading professionals in the field of strategic alliances. Mike Nevin is the Founder of The Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals, and Gavin Booth is the Director of Strategic Alliances at KPMG. The book has a clear focus on professional services and technology firms, and the benefits of alliances between the two.

This book explores the ways in which the adoption of new paradigms, processes, and technologies can lead to greater revenue, cost efficiency and control, as well as improved business agility in the insurance industry.

E-commerce systems involve a complex interaction between Web Based Internet related software, application software and databases. It is clear that the success of e-commerce systems is going to be dependent not only on the technology of these systems but also on the quality of the underlying databases and supporting processes. Whilst databases have achieved considerable success in the wider marketplace, the main research effort has been on tools and techniques for high volume but based on relatively simplistic record management. The modern advanced e-commerce systems require a paradigm shift to allow the meaningful representation and manipulation of complex business information on the Web and Internet. This requires the development of new methodologies, environments and tools to allow one to easily understand the underlying structure to facilitate access, manipulation and modification of such information. An essential characteristic to gain understanding and interoperability is a clearly defined semantics for e-commerce systems and databases.
The focus of this volume is therefore on those issues of e-commerce systems that involve the semantics of the information represented, stored and manipulated by these systems. This not only includes methodologies for application domain modeling, formal representations of e-commerce aspects of knowledge, the role of semantics, Internet based transmission and display of data, etc. but also issues in user interfacing and process modeling, architectures that better enable integrity, consistency, interoperation reuse of components, or reports on prototypes illustrating new aspects of such systems from a semantically relevant viewpoint.
Semantic Issues in e-Commerce Systems comprises the proceedings of the Ninth Working Conference on Database Semantics, which was sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and held in Hong Kong in April 2001.
This volume will be essential for researchers and practitioners working in the areas of database management, information retrieval and data mining, and user interfaces, as applied to e-commerce.

In the foreword to this volume of conference proceedings for IFIP Working Group 8.4, it is appropriate to review the wider organization to which the Working Group belongs. The International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP) is a non-governmental, non-profit umbrella organization for national societies working in the field of information processing that was established in 1960 under the auspices of UNESCO. IFIP's mission is to be the leading, truly international, apolitical organization which encourages and assists in the development, exploitation and application of Information Technology for the benefit of all people. At the heart of IFIP lie its Technical Committees that, between them, count on the active participation of some two thousand people world-wide. These Groups work in a variety of ways to share experience and to develop their specialised knowledge. Technical Committees include: TC 1. Foundations of Computer Science; TC 2: Software: Theory and Practice; TC 3: Education; TC 6: Communication Systems; TC 7: System Modelling and Optimization; TC 9: Relationship between Computers and Society; TC 11: Security and Protection in Information Processing Systems; TC 12: Artificial Intelligence and TC 13: Human-Computer Interaction. The IFIP website www.ifip.org) has further details. Technical Committee 8 (TC8) is concerned with Information Systems in organisations. Within TC8 there are different Working Groups focusing on particular aspects of Information Systems.