Ch. 8 - Electronic Commerce Fundamentals

On Tuesday, we learned about e-commerce, internet addressing and IP addresses. E-commerce includes the online processes of developing, marketing, selling, accepting payments, delivering and servicing. The heart of e-commerce is B2B (business to business) e-commerce. The nine process categories of e-commerce are:

• Access control and security
• Profiling and personalizing
• Search management
• Content
• Catalog management
• Workflow management
• Event notification
• Collaboration and trading
• Electronic payment process

We also learned about IPv4 versus IPv6. Currently, we are using IPv4, but it was kind of scary to learn that the number of available IP addresses using this system is expected to run out by the end of 2010 or beginning of 2011. IPv4 is limited to 4.3 billion different addresses. It's so hard to believe that we have almost reached this limit. It really makes you think about how far technology has come and how widespread the Internet is. IPv6 will have better security and will be able to host about 1 billion different IP addresses PER PERSON on Earth! I wonder how long it will take tor us to outgrow this system, hopefully not for awhile.