Micropayment System

Other electronic payments systems include micropayment systems like Cybergold and Qpass.

Some of these technologies create electronic scrip or digital cash, sometimes called e-cash, for making payments that are too small for credit card transactions.

Encryption and authentication techniques are used to generate strings of data that can handled like currency for making cash payments.

For example, websites like ESPNET SportZone, Discovery Online and The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition let you chat with superstars, download video segments or pay for business reports by using digital cash micropayment systems.
Micropayment System

History of Business Intelligence

In the 1970s and 1980s analytical software packages started showing up in the market place. However, lack of computing power, poor user friendliness and cumbersome and manual integration with the transaction system providing the data kept business intelligence tools from widespread usage.

The release of spreadsheet software like Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel in the 1980s opened up for end users creating their own data models for business analysis. Spreadsheets are still widely used in this area today, and probably will be for many years to come.

For a period in the 1980s and early 1990s so called executive information systems (EIS) grew in popularity with the promise that they would put key information on the desktops of executive. The idea was that colorful software screens with big buttons and sometimes touch screen, so that the user did not ever have to use a mouse. Should put data directly in the hands of top management to reduce the need for secretaries and assistants to write and print reports for them.

However, one of the biggest problems with executive information system (EIS) systems was that it took a lot of manual work to convert and lead data from the data sources, as well as to maintain customized versions of the user screens.

Major effect in maintaining the EIS made implementations short-lived. In the 1990s and the new millennium, with the widespread usage of SQL (standard query language) databases; datawarehouse technologies; extraction, transformation, and loading tools; as well as new and powerful end-user analytical software, the stage is set for fast growth in usage of business intelligence tools in the next decade.

Furthermore, most of the business intelligence software vendors have released web-based versions of their solutions. Companies can easily and at a low cost give users access to large amount of corporate data and sophisticated analytical tools.

By providing access to the internet or an intranet connection, a person can investigate and analyze data from home, when traveling, or from any other location at which they may happen to be.
History of Business Intelligence

Business to Business Model

75% of future Net revenue is in business to business channels, then herein lies the greatest opportunity for e-commerce hopefuls. The B2Bs now publicly traded swim daily amid accusations of inflated value and short revenue. Investors jump onboard and offboard faster than passengers on tour cruise ship.

Regardless B2B e-commerce ventures will form the backbone of the new economy, which, like the industrial revolution, isn’t going away. If the publicly traded B2Bs are failing now, it’s only because the real gems have yet to be mined and brought to their initial public offering, the biggest opportunities are still in the napkin stages.

Because it offers such tremendous opportunity for specialization and capitalization, business- to-business models can be broken into several distinct forms. First, B2Bs often called “market makers” by investors – serve either vertical or horizontal markets.

Vertical markets 

Vertical markets are industry specific. E-commerce solutions in this category most frequently address the inefficiencies within a given industry, and hundreds of vertical market makers have already emerged in highly scattered, highly populated industries such as steel, chemicals, and paper.

Horizontal markets
Horizontal markets span across multiple industries by offering common information, goods and services. They provided a venue for the transfer of goods, and services, including the outsourcing of basic services; data collection and analysis, human resources and general office operating supplies, to name a few.

Each of four additional types of B2Bs –
Online catalogs
Auctions
Community markets
Exchanges
-can fall within either the vertical or horizontal marketplaces.
Business to Business Model