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3GIO
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3rd Generation Input Output technolgoy. Developed by Intel it is believed to be the eventual successor to PCI . Unlike PCI which sends synchronous messages down numerous parallel wires, 3GIO sends unsychronised messages at much faster speeds down fewer wires. It offers speeds up to six times faster than PCI but will not be available until the second half of 2003 or later |
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Asymmetric Digital Subscriber line: Always on connection between the telephone exchange and your phone/PC. A high frequency carrier wave transports digital data at high speed (up to 2Mb per second download). Upload speeds are slower (about 25%). Many times faster than a modem or ISDN. Existing copper wires are used. Many exchanges are not yet ADSL enabled. You must also be within a certain distance of the exchange (max of 3.8Km) |
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Active Server Pages: Server generated pages which can call other programs to do things like access databases, serve different pages to different browsers. ASP is an open, compile-free application environment in which you can combine HTML, scripts, and reusable ActiveX server components to create dynamic and powerful Web-based business solutions. |
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Application Service Providers. Companies, often partners with major software vendors, providing added value applications and services. Increasingly these may be Web delivered |
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The use of a human characteristic such as a fingerprint, voiceprint, signature or retinal scan as a means of identification. Biometrics could in due course replace passwords as a primary control procedure. |
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Software application to display Web pages on a PC (or other computer). A browser interprets HTML code to render a screen image i.e. what the user sees. There are many different types of browser however the two most commonly used are versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape's Navigator. Older versions may not be compliant with the latest versions of HTML and therefore may not render Web pages correctly. |
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Business to Business: Short hand for the application of Web based technology to transactions between businesses. An example is the automotive exchange "Covisint" developed by a number of large manufacturers including General Motors and Ford. B2B has seen the development of new business models and has the potential to significantly reduce transaction costs. The concepts are driving a powerful technical revolution that has the capacity to transform many aspects of business. |
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Business to Consumer: The application of Web related technology to consumer sales. The power of the Web as a sales tool was quickly realised and led to the development of virtual (on-line) shops where goods could be ordered and purchased. This gave rise to the birth of the "dot.coms" e.g. Amazon.com |
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A small piece of code which some servers download to your PC. When you revisit a site the server can search for cookies and recognise you on your return. Cookies are used for many legitimate purposes and some not so legitimate. Some software that you install may gather information and place it in cookies for later retrieval, e.g. the Registration Wizard for Windows 98. It does this without your knowledge or approaval. See also Web bugs below. |
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Customer Relatinship Management is defined as the alignment of business strategy and the corporate business model with customer information to achieve the widespread implementation of superior customer service. New database management platforms enable access to customer information and allow new insights into customer behavior through a variety of analysis methods. (See also P-CRM) |
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Dynamic Hyper Text Mark-up Language: A development of HTML supported by version 4+ browsers which supports dynamic content in a web page. DHTML offers the web developer much greater control e.g. through the use of layers (or floating boxes) and can be used to create richer web sites. |
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The elimination of middlemen from the supply chain. Disintermediation is a feature of B2B where for example the role of the middleman is usurped by the functionality of an online market or exchange. |
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Digital Subscriber Line: The generic term for the technology used to transfer digital data through the telecommunications network from the exchange to the point of use. |
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Electronic Bill Presentment & Payment refers to the emerging methods of allowing customers to pay bills online. |
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Essentially an extended intranet. Whereas an intranet is typically an organisations private internet used for internal communications, an extranet has extended reach to embrace other approved organisations and members e.g. throughout the supply chain. Access is generally permitted to approved users with appropriate passwords. Sometimes secure connections may be required. |
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Security software and hardware installed on your network to prevent unauthorised external access to your data. Firewalls are a necessity if your network is connected to the Internet. There are however firewalls and firewalls! (See article) |
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General Packet Radio Switching: A way of transferring data over the mobile phone networks at higher speed. GPRS is expected to be available in 2001 and will offer speeds of up to 56K and possibly higher. GPRS will be superseded by UMTS in due course. |
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Hyper Text Mark-up Language: The language in which web pages are written (but see also Java & XML). HTML describes to a browser how text and images are displayed. Hyper text refers to the ability to link text or an image in one document to another document (or different place in the same document) even on a remote computer. |
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Hyper Text Transfer Protocol: The key to the World Wide Web (WWW). Allows documents, images etc. to be remotely linked, creating a virtual knowledge space. See WWW |
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Developed in the 1960's primarily by the US military the Internet connects computers over telecommunication networks. The Internet arose following the development of TCP/IP a key element is "packet switching" was developed by UK telecom engineers. |
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The application of Internet and Web based technology within an organisation to create an internal Internet. Intranets are used by many companies as a way of improving communication and to provide users access to powerful data bases. |
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Integrated Service & Data Network: A 20 year old technology providing a way of transferring data at speeds somewhat faster than a modem, over existing telephone lines. Data transfer speeds are typically 64K per second however two lines can be combined to provide 128K (at double the cost!). ISDN in the UK continues to be relatively expensive and does not provide the bandwidth needed by the Web of tomorrow. It compares very unfavourably with ADSL. |
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Powerful cross platform (hardware independent) language developed by Sun Microsystems. Applets can be downloaded from a server to run in a virtual Java machine running on your PC. Java can be used for anything from animation's to complex interactive web sites. |
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Separate from but often confused with Java. The Java scripting language was developed by Netscape. Scripts contained within the HTML code of a Web page can perform a range of powerful actions to control the appearance and functionality of a web site. |
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Modulator Demodulator: Device for converting the digital information understood by a computer to analogue signals used by the telecommunication network (voice is carried by analogue). Modem speeds have improved significantly in recent years, a V90 modem can receive data at 56K bits per second and transmit at about 36K. You may however be luck to connect at these speeds. Ultimately not fast enough for future requirements. |
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Peer to Peer computing allows internet users to directly access one another's files. Typical examples are Napster and Gnutella. Advocates believe P2P tools are well suited to accessing private and corporate databases. Critics however insist that security levels are too low for such purposes and that many PCs would be overwhelmed by the amount of data. |
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Platform for Privacy Preferences is a technology developed by privacy advocates and a number of companies in conjunction with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The idea is that Web sites would contain in XML (therefore computer readable format) their privacy policy. A browser equipped with the technology would read the policy and alert the user if the Web site does anything outside the declared policy. It may be deployed at the end of 2000. (See article) |
| Peripheral Component Interconnect: The dominant technology for plugging additional devices such as sound and video cards into a PC. | |
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Predictive Customer Relationship Management (see also CRM). P-CRM uses the tools inherent in CRM to predict certain aspects of customer behaviour e.g. churn and bad debt risk. "Wherever there is customer data, it is possible to model, predict and therefore influence customer behavior" (See article) |
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Public Key Infrastructure is Emerging as the Standard for user authentication & data security. Initially developed by the US Miliary its purposes are to authenticate communications (i.e. certainty as to the sender), ensure data integrity (i.e. that the message has not been altered) and provide encryption. PKI as the name suggests incorporates the use of Public Key encryption (see below) |
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Public Key encryption provides a method of exchanging confidential information between two computers linked over the Internet. Actually two types of key are involved, public and private. Used together they ensure that information has come from a known source and that it was transferred with a high degree of security. (Access further articles from the Search Engine). (See Article) |
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Secure Electronic Transactions: A way of encrypting transactions in order to improve security. SET works well and has been heavily promoted by Mastercard. It relies upon an approved digital certificate being issued by a certified authority. A problem is that a certificate is unique to a particular PC which is not therefore convenient for mobile users. SEL is not yet used as widely as SSL |
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Standardised General purpose Mark-up Language: The parent of HTML and XML, SGML is a complex language best suited for technical content requiring specific display and handling attributes. |
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Secure Socket Layer: A method of providing a secure link between two (Internet) connected computers. SSL operates with your browser and uses Public Key Encryption to provide data security. SSL is in common use and will typically be encountered on Web sites accepting credit card details. One potential problem is that the link is not automatically secure in both directions. Information you send (e.g. credit card details) are encrypted but information you receive may not be. |
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Transfer Control Protocol & Internet Protocol: The software behind the Internet that allows computers to be connected over telecommunication networks. |
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The Universal Description, Discovery and Integration Project is a cross-industry initiative designed to accelerate and broaden business-to-business integration and commerce on the Internet. UDDI facilitates sharing business information, making it easier to publish preferred means of doing business, find trading partners and have them find you, and interoperate with these trading partners over the Web. It is supported by a many leading companies including Ariba, CommerceOne, IBM, Microsoft and Sun. UDDI specifications take advantage of emerging standards such as XML. |
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Universal Mobile Technology Standard: Third generation mobile phone technology expected in 2003. UMTS will permit data transfer speeds of up to 2Mb per second, video quality.
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Uniform Resource Locator: To the WWW an URL is basically an address either of a particular computer (connected to the Internet) or of a Web page, document or other data. IP addresses are of the form |
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Wireless Application Protocol: A way of delivering Web based information to portable devices such as mobile phones or PDAs. WAP is an important new technology but is presently limited by the ludicrously slow speed of data transfer, 9.6K. Emerging technologies such as GPRS and UMTS offer faster speeds. |
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An invisible pixle or transparent gif (image) on a web page. It may come from the native server (hosting the site) or be called from another server. When a PC retrieves one of these elements (by viewing the Web page) the server supplying it may log your IP address, deposit and retrieve cookies and depending on your software retrieve your user ID, your PC's domain name and assigned local area network name (used for the purpose of file and printer sharing). It cannot do any more than a visible image the point however is that you may not be aware that it is there! |
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World Wide Web: The creation in 1990/91 of Tim Berners Lee a UK physicist whilst working at CERN. The WWW was conceived as a "virtual knowledge space". TBL 's ideas was (for computers connected to the Internet) to provide each document or piece of information with a unique address. Using HTTP a document would be immediately available in the knowledge space and could be viewed from a browser running on any PC. This tremendously powerful concept has transformed the use of the Internet and given rise to e-business. |
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Extensible Mark-up Language: Technically a derivative of SGML, XML is set to become the new "lingua franca" of the Web. Whereas HTML controls how text, images, etc. are displayed on a Web page, XML copes with structured data. It is difficult to overemphasise the importance of XML, to HTML a number (e.g. 12345) is a text character(s) whereas to XML it is recognised as a number. That number can be manipulated if required and passed on to another computer. XML is a way of providing EDI (electronic data interchange) for the masses. |
