الموسوعة العربیة للكمبیوتر/ قسم الدورات التعلیمیة
سلسلة كتب الدورات التعلیمیة الإلكترونیة
C4arab.com
التجارة الإلكترونیة
كیف، متى وأین ؟!!!
تألیف : بسام نور
مشرف القاموس بالموسوعة
إعداد وتجمیع : فريق بیوكوم للتكنولوجیا
BioCom 4 Technology
یسمح بتوزیع الكتاب على صورته الإلكترونیة لكن لا یسمح بطبع الكتاب أو تغییر هیئته
إلا بعد أخذ الإذن من الكاتب
الموسوعة العربیة للكمبیوتر والإنترنت © 2000- جمیع الحقوق محفوظة - 2003
التواصل مع القراء
إلى القارئ العزیز ،،،
حرصت الموسوعة العربیة للكمبیوتر والإنترنت _ ومن منطلق اهتمامها العام بعلوم الحاسب
والتقنیة واهتمامها الخاص بتقدیم هذه العلوم باللغة العربیة _ على تقدیم هذه السلسة من
الكتب الإلكترونیة التى نتمنى أن تحقق طموحات القارئ العربى الذى اعتاد على قراءة أجود
المطبوعات بكافة اللغات العالمیة .
إن الموسوعة العربیة _من خلال هذه السلسلة _ تطمح لتقدیم سلسلة من الكتب بمستوى عالٍ من
الجودة ، الشيء الذى لن یتحقق بدون ملاحظاتكم واقتراحاتكم حول السلسلة _ طریقة الكتابة ،
الأخطاء الإملائیة والنحویة ، التنظیم والترتیب ، طریقة نشر الكتاب وتوزیعه ، الإخراج الفنى
... الخ
ننتظر سماع أراءكم على البرید الإلكتروني المخصص لذلك
ebooks@c4arab.com
نرجو ذكر اسم الكتاب والكاتب والطبعة مع ذكر ملاحظاتكم لنا
تهانى السبیت
والإنترنت یوتر الموسوعة العربیة للكمب مشرفة
.. بسم الله الرحمن الرحیم ..
الدورات التعلیمیة .. ھي مجموعة من الدورات
التي تقدمھا لكم الموسوعة العربیة؛ بدأنا
بتقديمھا في الصیف تحت مسمى " الدورات
الصیفیة " وھا ھي تعود من جديد . حرصنا على
تقديم دورات في مجالات مختلفة لنراعي أغلب
الاھتمامات كما حرصنا على انتقاء الدورات
المفیدة، غیر المتكررة، بطريقة جادة تنقلك إلى
الجو الدراسي في قاعات الجامعة و صفوف
المعاھد و لكن في بیئة إلكترونیة! كل ھذا
مجانا! ...
يوجد كذلك ساحة متخصصة لھا ضمن مجموعة
ساحات الموسوعة العربیة للنقاش والأسئلة،
تجدھا ھنا! ...
استفد واستثمر وقتك معنا! إذا كنت ترغب
في تطوير ذاتك و توسیع نطاق ثقافتك في
الحاسوب فاستغل كل دقیقة واستفد معنا! و لا
تنسى أننا في عصر المعلومات والسرعة.
ابدأ الآن !انتقل لصفحة الدورات و اختر الدورة التي تناسبك، انتقل لصفحة الأساتذة للاطلاع على
قائمة الأساتذة الّذين سیلقون المحاضرات ،انتقل لصفحة التسجیل كي تسجّل نفسك في إحدى
الدورات، لن تستطیع المشاركة في أي دورة قبل أن تسجل. انتقل لصفحة المراجع كي تطلع على
المراجع المقدمة من الأساتذة بخصوص الدورات الحالیة .انتقل لصفحة الملتحقین لتطلع على بعض
المعلومات عن الملتحقین في الدورات. انتقل لصفحة اتصل بنا كي ترسل لنا اقتراحاً أو طلباً. نحن
بانتظارك! لكن الوقت محدود و عدد الملتحقین في كل دورة محدود لذا لا تتأخر في التسجیل من
فضلك.
هذا الكتاب ....
لیس فى الأصل ألا دورة تم تدریسها فى ساحة الدورات التعلیمیة
بالموسوعة العربیة للكمبیوتر والإنترنت ، وتم جمع تلك الدروس وسلسلة
النقاش التى دارت حولها هنا فى هذا الكتاب ، وتم وضع النقاشات على
هیئة أسئلة وأجوبة لكى یستفید الجمیع منها ،،،،،،،،،
لذلك تعتبر سلسلة كتب الدورات التعلیمیة :
أول سلسلة كتاب إلكترونیة عربیة خاصة بالمبتدأین. ·
السلسلة الوحیدة التى تتبع نظام الأسئلة والأجوبة الناتجة فعلاً من مشاكل حقیقة لأشخاص من ·
مختلف الدول، مما یهیئ عندك نوع من استعداد لأى مشكلة وكیفیة التعامل معها.
تعتبر سلسلة الكتاب الوحیدة المدعومة اربع وعشرین ساعة طوال العام، فیمكنك الاستفسار عن أى ·
مشكلة وحلها عن طریق وضعها فى ساحة النقاش والأسئلة بالموسوعة .
إن هذا الكتاب هو من أجل نشر المعرفة وتوسیع التفكیر المنطقى الأساسي ، الاحتراف هو لیس ·
الهدف فى حد ذاته، بل الاستطلاع واكتشاف الذات والإلمام الجید بالأساسیات والمبادئ الأولیة
من أجل شق طریق النجاح بكل سهولة ویسر.
المحتویات :
الیوم الأول - أساسیات التجارة الإلكترونیة .........................................
الیوم الثانى - تصنیف مجال التجارة الإلكترونیة وعلومھا ...........................
الیوم الثالث - فوائد وقیود التجارة الإلكترونیة ...................................
الیوم الرابع - البنیة التحتیة للتجارة الإلكترونیة .....................................
الیوم الخامس - حلول التجارة الإلكترونیة ................................................
الفصل الأول: أساسیات التجارة الالكترونیة
Electronic Commerce: *مفھوم التجارة الالكترونیة
التجارة الالكترونیة ھو مفھوم جديد يشرح عملیة بیع أو شراء أو تبادل المنتجات والخدمات والمعلومات
من خلال شبكات كمبیوترية ومن ضمنھا الانترنت. ھناك عدة وجھات نظر من أجل تعريف ھذه الكلمة:
-فعالم الاتصالات يعرّف التجارة الالكترونیة بأنه وسیلة من أجل ايصال المعلومات أو الخدمات أو
المنتجات عبر خطوط الھاتف أو عبر الشبكات الكمبیوترية أو عبر أي وسیلة تقنیة.
-ومن وجھة نظر الأعمال التجارية فھي عملیة تطبیق التقنیة من أجل جعل المعاملات التجارية تجري
بصورة تلقائیة وسريعة.
-في حین أن الخدمات تعرف التجارة الالكترونیة بأنھا أداة من أجل تلبیة رغبات الشركات والمستھلكین
والمدراء في خفض كلفة الخدمة والرفع من كفاءتھا والعمل على تسريع ايصال الخدمة.
-وأخیرا، فإن عالم الانترنت يعرفھا بالتجارة التي تفتح المجال من أجل بیع وشراء المنتجات والخدمات
والمعلومات عبر الانترنت.
*مجال التجارة الاكترونیة:
ھیكل التجارة الالكترونیة:
الكثیر من الناس تظن بأن التجارة الالكترونیة ھي مجرد الحصول على موقع على الانترنت، ولكنھا أكبر
من ذلك بكثیر. ھناك الكثیر من تطبیقات التجارة الالكترونیة من مثل البنوك الانترنتیة والتسوق في
المجمعات التجارية الموجودة على الانترنت وشراء الأسھم والبحث عن عمل والقیام بمزادات والتعاون مع
بقیة الأفراد في عمل بحث ما. ومن أجل تنفیذ ھذه التطبقیات، يستلزم الحصول على معلومات داعمة
وأنظمة وبنیة تحتیة.
تطبیقات التجارة الالكترونیة مدعومة ببنى تحتیة. وتأدية عمل ھذه التطبیقات يستلزم الاعتماد على
أربعة محاور مھمة:
1)الناس )
2)السیاسة العامة )
3)المعايیر والبروتوكولات التقنیة )
4)شركات أخرى. )
*أقسام تطبیقات التجارة الالكترونیة:
تطبیقات التجارة الالكترونیة تنقسم إلى ثلاثة أجزاء:
1)شراء وبیع المنتجات والخدمات وھو ما يسمى بالسوق الالكتروني. )
2)تسھیل وتسییر تدفق المعلومات والاتصالات والتعاون ما بین الشركات وما بین الأجزاء المختلفة )
لشركة واحدة
3)توفیر خدمة الزبائن )
Electronic Commerce: *الأسواق الالكترونیة
السوق ھو عبارة عن محل من التعاملات والمعاملات والعلاقات من أجل تبادل المنتجات والخدمات
والمعلومات والأموال. وعندما تكون ھیئة السوق الإلكترونیة فإن مركز التجارة لیس بناية أو ما شابه بل
ھو محل شبكي يحوي تعاملات تجارية. فالمشاركین في الأسواق الالكترونیة من باعة ومشترين
وسمسارين لیسوا فقط في أماكن مختلفة بل نادرا ما يعرفون بعضھم البعض. طرق التواصل ما بین
الأفراد في السوق الالكتروني تختلف من فرد لآخر ومن حالة لأخرى.
*أنظمة المعلومات ما بین المؤسسات والأسواق الالكترونیة:
ترتكز على تبادل Interogranization Information Systems أنظمة المعلومات ما بین المؤسسات
وتدفق المعلومات ما بین منظمتین أو أكثر. غرضھا الأساسي ھو تخلیص المعاملات بصورة فعالة كارسال
الحوالات المالیة والفواتیر والكمبیالات عبر الشبكات الخارجیة. وفي ھذه الأنظمة فإن كل العلاقات ما بین
الأطراف المعنیة قد تم الاتفاق علیھا مسبقا، فلا توجد مفاوضات أخرى ولكن مجرد تنفیذ ما تم الاتفاق
علیه مسبقا. في حین أن الباعة والمشترين في الأسواق الالكترونیة يتفاوضون ويزايدون ويناقصون في
السعر ويتفقون على فاتورة معینة وينفذون الاتفاق وھم متصلین بالشبكة أو غیر متصلین. أنظمة ما بین
المؤسسات تُستخدم فقط في تطبیقات الشركات للشركات في حین أن الأسواق الالكترونیة فتستخدم
في تطبیقات الشركات للشركات وفي تطبیقات الشركات للمستھلكین.
*أنظمة المعلومات ما بین المؤسسات:
المجال:
أنظمة المعلومات ما بین المؤسسات ھو نظام يربط ما بین عدة جھات تجارية وغالبا ما تشمل شركة ما
ومزودھا ومستھلكھا. ومن خلال أنظمة المعلومات ما بین المؤسسات يستطیع الباعة والمشترون تنظیم
وترتیب المعاملات التجارية الروتینیة. ويتم تبادل المعلومات من خلال شبكات اتصالات تم تھیئتھا بصورة
مناسبة لكي لا يتم استخدام الھواتف والوثائق الورقیة والاتصالات التجارية. وسابقا فإن أنظمة المعلومات
ما بین المؤسسات كانت تتم من خلال شبكات اتصالات خاصة ولكن الاتجاه الآن ھو استخدام الانترنت
لھذه الغايات.
أنواع أنظمة المعلومات ما بین المؤسسات:
يوفر اتصال الشركات Electronic Data Interchange EDI: -التبادل الالكتروني للبیانات
Value-added Networks. للشركات بصورة آمنة عبر شبكات القیمة المضافة
والتي توفر اتصال الشركات للشركات بصورة آمنة عبر الانترنت Extranet: -الشبكة الاضافیة
Electronic Funds Transfer -التحويل الالكتروني للأموال
-الاستمارات الالكترونیة
-التواصل المتكامل :ھو عملیة ارسال الايمیلات ووثائق الفاكس عبر نظام موحد للارسال الالكتروني.
-قواعد البیانات المتقاسمة :وفیھا أن المعلومات المخزنة في قواعد البیانات تكون قابلة للمعاينة من
قبل جمیع الأطراف المشاركین في التجارة. والغرض من ھذا التقاسم ھو التقلیل من الوقت اللازم
لارسال البیانات واستقبالھا اذا لم تكن البیانات مفتوحة للجمیع. والمقاسمة تجري عبر الشبكات
الاضافیة.
وھو التعاون ما بین الشركات ومزوديھا Supply Chain Management: -ادارة سلسلة التزويد
ومستھلكیھا في مجال التنبأ بالطلب وادارة قائمة الجرد وإنھاء الطلبات التجارية وھو التعاون الذي يؤدي
إلى خفض البضائع المخزونة وإلى تسريع شحن البضائع وإلى السماح بالتصنیع الآني.
*الفرق ما بین التجارة الالكترونیة البحتة والتجارة الالكترونیة الجزئیة:
ھناك عدة أشكال للتجارة الالكترونیة اعتمادا على درجة تقنیة المنتج وعلى تقنیة العملیة وعلى تقنیة
الوسیط أو الوكیل. انظر الصورة التالیة:
فأي سلعة إما أن تكون ملموسة أو رقمیة، وأي وكیل إما أن يكون ملموس أو رقمي وأي عملیة إما تكون
ملموسة أو رقمیة. وبناءا على ذلك، لدينا شكل مكعب يحوي 8 مكعبات مقسمومة ما بین الأجزاء الثلاثة.
فالتجارة تنقسم إلى 3 أقسام:
1)تجارة تقلیدية بحتة )
2)تجارة الكترونیة بحتة )
3)تجارة الكترونیة جزئیة )
وعندما يكون الوكیل ملموس، والسلعة ملموسة والعملیة ملموسة، فإن نوع التجارة سیكون التجارة
التقلیدية البحتة. وعندما يكون الوكیل رقمي والسلعة رقمیة والعملیة رقمیة، فإن نوع التجارة سیكون
التجارة الالكترونیة البحتة.
واذا أحد العوامل الثلاثة أصبحت رقمیة والبقیة ملموسة، فإنه سیكون ھناك مزيج ما بین التجارة التقلیدية
والتجارة الالكترونیة. ونطلق على ھذا المزيج: التجارة الالكترونیة الجزئیة.
مثلا، اذا اشتريت كتابا من موقع أمازون، فإن نوع التجارة ھو التجارة الالكترونیة الجزئیة لأن الشركة
سترسل لك الكتاب على البريد. ولكن اذا اشتريت برمجیات من موقع أمازون، فإن نوع التجارة ھو التجارة
الالكترونیة البحتة لأن الشركة سترسل لك البرمجیات عن طريق الانترنت أو الايمیل. مجال التجارة
الالكترونیة واسع، فحتى عملیة شراء علبة الكولا من جھاز بواسطة البطاقات الذكیة يكون ضمن التجارة
الالكترونیة الجزئیة.
========================================
Happy Puppy ملف ھابي بَبي
من الصعب الحصول على أرباح جیدة من خلال بیع الألعاب الالكترونیة خصوصا للشركات المستقلة. فھذه
الألعاب تمر بقنوات تسويقیة كثیرة، وكل قناة تلتھم جزءا من الأرباح، وفقط القلیل يبقى ويذھب إلى
مؤلف اللعبة ومخترعھا. فمؤسسي شركة ھابي ببي مروا بخلال ھذه التجربة إلى أن قرروا استعمال
الانترنت من أجل بیع الألعاب إلى المستھلكین بصورة مباشرة. وفي خلال أقل من سنة، أصبحت
الشركة قصة نجاح.
موقع الشركة على الانترنت بدأ في عام 1995 . والشركة ھي إحدى أولى الشركات في استخدام
التجارة الالكترونیة. ويتم الاستفادة من الانترنت بالطريقة التالیة: يتم اظھار ووصف بعض برمجیات الألعاب
الالكترونیة على موقع الشركة على الانترنت. ھذه الألعاب من تصمیم الشركة أو شركات أخرى ترغب
demo أو shareware بالاستفادة من موقع الشركة على الانترنت. وھذه الألعاب تكون على ھیئة
فیقوم كل زائر لذلك الموقع بتنزيل بعض الألعاب مجانا على جھازه بواسطة الانترنت وتجربة freeware. أو
اللعبة. فإن أعجب الزائر باللعبة، يقوم بشراءه النسخة الأصلیة والكاملةمن اللعبة.
يتم تنزيل ملايین النسخ من الألعاب شھريا من . Happy Puppy : موقع الشركة على الانترنت معروف جدا
موقع الشركة. ويبحث موظفي الشركة الكثیر من المنتديات المختصة بالالعاب الالكترونیة. واذا رأوا بأن
أحد الافراد يسأل عن لعبة ما، يتم ارسال ايمیل إلى صاحب السؤال ودعوته إلى زيارة موقع الشركة
لاحتواءه على اللعبة أم فقط يقوم الموظف بوضع الوصلة إلى اللعبة في ذلك المنتدى.
ونتیجة لھذه الشھرة، فإن الشركة أصبح لديھا مصدر دخل آخر: الإعلانات التجارية التي يتم وضعھا على
موقع الشركة. وأيضا، فإن الموقع يسمح للزوار بتنزيل الألعاب فقط بعد تعبئة بعض من الاستبانات ومن ثم
تقوم الشركة ببیع نتائج الاستبانات على الشركات المھتمة بالأمر.
======================================
الواجب المنزلي
ادرس تأثیر التجارة الالكترونیة على صناعة الطیران وعلى صناعة الكتب من النواحي التالیة:
-1- المنافسة
-2- أسعار التذاكر والكتب
-3- الوسطاء
أسئلة ونقاش عام على الدرس الأول
كیف نثق بالموقع الذي نشتري منه؟
لا بد من أن يوفر لك الموقع الذي تنوي الشراء منه، شھادة أمان معتمدة تظھر لك في موقعھم حتى
يحمي معلومات البطاقة الائتمانیة التي تتعامل فیھا معھم للشراء من موقعھم. ولا بد أيضا من توفر
السمعة الحسنة للموقع. فلیس من الحكمة شراء شيء من موقع تجھل تاريخه وسمعته.
وكیف الحصول على شھادة الأمن والحماية؟
وھي من متطلبات أي موقع SSL ھذا الموقع يوفر لك شھادة حماية في http://www.Thawte.com
تجاري.
وأيضا مواقع الاستضافة توفر لك تلك الحماية بكل سھول.
ھل ھنالك فرق بكمیة الربح بین التجارة الالكترونیة البحتة والتجارة الالكترونیة التقلیدية؟
الربح والخسارة يعتمدان على عوامل عديدة. فالربح يتكون من عنصرين مھمین: عنصر "حجم المبیعات"
وعنصر "كلفة المبیعات". ففي التجارة الالكترونیة البحتة تكون كلفة المبیعات قلیلة جدا مقارنة بالتجارة
التقلیدية أو الالكترونیة الجزئیة. فھل ستحتاج إلى مبالغ ضخمة من أجل إنشاء مستودعات حقیقیة
لبرمجیاتك؟ أم فقط ستحتاج إلى القلیل من المیغابايت بأسعار رخیصة جدا لحفظ ھذه البرمجیات؟
كما أن كلفة الأيدي العاملة لا تذكر في حالة التجارة الالكترونیة البحتة حیث أن النظام الالكتروني يتكفل
بارسال المبیعات ومعالجتھا بدون أي تدخل بشري (إلا نادرا). وھذا من ناحیة كلفة المبیعات. ولكن
مايزال حجم مبیعات التجارة الالكترونیة صغیر جدا مقارنةبحجم مبیعات التجارة التقلیدية وذلك لأسباب
عديدة سنتناولھا في الدروس القادمة إن شاء الله. فلذلك، إجابة على السؤال نقول بأن كلفة المبیعات
في التجارة الالكترونیة البحتة تكون صغیرة جدا، وفي حالة ارتفاع حجم المبیعات فیھا، فإن الربح النھائي
سیغطي على نشاط التجارة التقلیدية. ولكن ھذا أمر نادر الحدوث حتى الآن.
اخوي بسام ھناك عنصران اعتقد انھم راح يؤثرون على
تقدم التجارة الالكترونیة او بمعنى اصح الاسواق الالكترونیة
الاول الامان والثاني المعاينة مشاھدة السلعة قبل شرائھا
طبعا ذكر المزايا لا يفي بالغرض ھناك اشیاء لا بد ان تشاھدھا
عن قرب ما رايك
موضوع الأمن التقني ناقشناه سابقا فلیرجع له. أما بخصوص المعاينة فذلك يعتمد على السلعة نفسھا.
ففي بعض المواقع التجارية التي تبیع الكتب يُسمح لك بقراءة صفحات عديدة من الكتاب لكي تعاين
الكتاب قبل شراءه. ونفس الأمر ينطبق على البرمجیات حیث يُسمح لك بتنزيل البرنامج واستعماله لفترة
محددة سلفا. فإن أعجبك البرنامج اشتريته وإن لم يعجبك فإن البرنامج سیتوقف عن العمل بعد فترة
وجیزة.
ولكن المعاينة تكون صعبة جدا أو مستحیلة اذا أردت شراء أثاث للمنزل أو شراء أدوات منزلیة. فمن
الصعب جدا معاينة السلعة في ھذه الحالة قبل شرائھا. ولذلك يعمد الباعة على منحك حرية ارجاع
السلعة في حالة عدم رغبتھا بعد فترة معینة من الزمن كأن يشترط البائع بأن البضاعة المباعة قابلة
للاستبدال أو الارجاع بعد شھر من تاريخ البیع. فحینھا تستطیع معاينة السلعة وارجاعھا إن لم تعجبك.
طبعا معاينة السلعة قبل شرائھا ھو الأفضل في كل الأحوال.
ھل يغلب طابع ادارة الآعمال أم العلوم الحاسوبیة على التجارة الالكثرونیة؟
التجارة الاكترونیة تجمع الاثنین وتدرس في الجامعات باسم نظم المعلومات اي قسم يجمع بین ادراة
الاعمال وبعض الشي من البرمجة الحاسوبیة
مالمقصود ب ملموس أورقمي؟
ملموس : يعني شيء تلمسه بیدك مثلا السلعة التي تنوي شرائھا جھاز فیديو إذن سیصلك جھاز فیديو
تستخدمه في منزلك وتستطیع لمسه!
رقمي:مثلا تشتري برنامج عبر الانترنت تستخدمه في جھازك دون أن يصلك السي دي ، أي مجرد
تسجیل للبرنامج تدفع لھم المال ويعطونك الصلاحیة لاستخدام البرنامج، يا ترى ھل لمست البرنامج
بیدك؟ لا !! إنه مجرد برنامج على الجھاز ، إذن ھذا رقمي
رقمي عبر شبكة الانترنت .. برامج العاب .. كتب الكترونیة
ملموس .. شيء يتم لمسه بالید .. مثلا حلويات .. اكسسوارات .. جھاز كمبیوتر
نقاشات الأستاذ بسام مع الطلبة
ھنا سیقوم الاستاذ بسام بوضع الاسئلة للطلبة لیقوموا بالتعلیق علیھا .... ثم يناقشھا فى نھاية الدرس
ستكون اسئلة الاستاذ بسام ممیزة باللون الاحمر ....... وفى النھاية ستجدوا تعلیق الاستاذ .
أعطوني أمثلة على الأسواق الالكترونیة
-1- مكتبة النیل والفرات
-2- مكتبة الامازون
-3- اسواق ياھو في موقعھم الرسمي.
-4- موقع كارلتون
-5- موقع نسیج
-6- اسواق الكويت الالكترونیة
http://www.awalclick.com/terminal.php?gate=27
ھدايا إلى سورية http://gifts.syriagate.com/Arabic/-7-
يتضمن ھذا الموقع الكثیر من السلع مثل : الزھور .. الحلويات .. الادوات الالكترونیة .. ادوات منزلیة ..
كتب ..
حالیا يوفر خصومات على بوكیھات الورود ..
بامكانك طلب اي سلعة غیر متوفرة بالموقع و يتم توفیرھا باسرع وقت
التجارة ھنا تعتبر " الكترونیة جزئیة " ..
Master Card أو visa Card يمكن الدفع بواسطة بطاقات
اشرح في سطر أو سطرين السوق الالكترونیة الجارية في موقع ياھو
http://shopping.yahoo.com/ في البداية لكل من يريد التوجه إلى اسواق ياھو فإن ھذا ھو موقعھا
وھو في وجھة نظري يعتبر مركز تسوق عالمي أستطاع التغطیة على كل الجوانب فھو يحتوي على
منتجات متنوعة ما بین قسم الكمبیوتر بكل تفاصیله سواء البرامج أو قطع العتاد إلى الملابس سواء
كانت للنساء أو الأطفال أو الرجال وأيضا نجد لديھم كل ما يتعلق بالإكسسوارات والماكیاج وأجھزة الفیديو
والألعاب والكتب وكل ما تريده سوف تجده ھنالك
فأسواق ياھو تعتبر مركز تجاري الكتروني كبیر وضخم ، وللعلم فإنھم يقومون بخصومات ممیزة بین فترة
وأخرى.
ونستطیع القول بأن أسواق ياھو تعتبر تجارة الكترونیة جزئیة حیث أن العملیة ملموسة فیھا لھذا يعتبر
جزئي.
فانه يتم خلال ھذا الموقع .. توفیر عدة أسواق الكترونیة عربیة .. و خلیجیة .. باللغة الانجلیزية و العربیة
.. لديھم خدمة التوصیل للمنازل لاي مكان بالعالم " تجارة الكترونیة جزئیة " .. و خدمة التجارة الالكترونیة
البحته .. حیث تتم المعاملة و اختیار السلعة و الحصول علیھا عن طريق النت ..
يتم التسوق عن طريق البطاقة الائتمانیة .. اما السلع فھي منوعة من كتب و ھدايا و برامج.
كیف تتم السوق الالكترونیة في موقع نسیج
تتم عن طريق الوساطة مابین الشركات المنتجة والمشترين
الوسیط ھو موقع نسیج
يوجد على الانترنت 3 محلات:
1)محل لبیع الكتب )
2)محل لبیع الأثاث )
3)محل لبیع الكمبیوتر )
أيھم تتوقع أن ينجح أكثر من البقیة؟ ومع التعلیل والتعلیق على كل محل وسبب توقعك لنجاحه أو
لفشله
إجابات الطلبة:
محلات بیع الكتب سوف تنجح أكثر.. فالكتب ھي الاكثر رواجا على شبكة الانترنت على ما اظن لعدم
توفرھا بكثرة او لسھولة البحث عنھا على الشبكة..
سأرتب المواقع ترتیبا تنازلیا من الاعلى ربحا - الاقل ربحا
1)محل لبیع الكتب )
2)محل لبیع الكمبیوتر )
3)محل لبیع الأثاث )
التعلیل :-
1)الكتب .. إما ستكون الكترونیة فیسھل نقلھا .. بالتالي توفر الشركة وقت و جھد و موظفین و اسعار )
جمارك و نقل ..
و إما ان تكون كتب ملموسة .. بالتالي نقلھا و لانھا لیست بذات الحجم الاكبیر .. سیتطلب مبلغا يسیرا
من المال.
2)الكمبیوتر .. الطلب علیه كبیر .. خاصة إن كانت الشركة عالمیة .. حیث يتم الوثوق بھا كثیرا ..و )
الشخص ھنا لا يطلب الشكل بل المواصفات .. بامكانه اختیار المواصفات المطلوبة و انتقائھا من الموقع
.. دون الحاجة للبحث عنھا باكثر من سوق تقلیدي
3)الاثاث .. الطلب علیه الكترونیا قلیل .. التأخر بالتوصیل يتطلب شحن .. و جمارك و سیارات لنقله .. و )
ايضا مواقع التجارة الالكترونیة للاثاث قلیلة .. كما أن الناس و بالاخص ربات البیوت يفضلن انتقاء الاثاث
وجھا لوجه .. لملامسته و التاكد من صلاحیه و شكله و الوانه
اعتقد ان نجاح المحلات كالتالي:
-1- محل لبیع الكمبیوتر
-2- محل لبیع الكتاب
-3- محل لبیع الاثاث
طبعا محل بیع الكمبیوتر ھو الاول بدون جدال لان الحصول على مواصفات اي جھاز او قطع تابعه للجھاز
تكون الحصول على مواصفاتھا اكبر بالنت
بالنسبة لسوق الكتب ممكن ان كان المقصود بھا كتب الكترونیة طبعا انتشارھا راح يكون اكبر من الكتب
العادية لكن يظل من محاسن محلات الكتب الالكترونیة بالنت الحصول على كتب قد تكون نادرة او غیر
متوفرة بالبلد المقیم الشخص به
الاثاث مدري والله بس اظن اشیاء مثل كذا الاغلبیة يفضل انه يعاينھا بنفسه مو عن طريق النت
أتوقع محل بیع الكتب
فأسعار الكتب أرخص نسبیا
وتتیح أغلب الشركات مجالا لأخذ فكرة عن محتويات الكتاب
عموما حتى عند الشراء من مكتبة ملموسة نحصل على نفس المزايا
مع ملاحظة زيادة الحرية في الموقع من ناحیة الوقت و اتخاذ القرار
بالنسبة للأثاث أعتقد أنه كلما قلت شھرة الشركة ستقل المبیعات
كما للكمبیوتر إلا في حال وجود ضمان موثوق به
فالكمبیوتر يعتمد على مواصفات محددة ومطلوبة
أما الأثاث يعتمد على التصمیم واللون وأحیانا الملمس
بالتالي سیكون الترتیب من حیث أفضلیة المبیعات
الكتب
الكمبیوتر
الأثاث
اعتقد بیع الكتب
الاجھزة لا اعتقد تاخذ ذلك النجاح ربما لوجود وكلاء لكافة
اجھزة الكمبیوتر والقطع بكل دولة ولكن الكتب من الصعوبة الحصول
على بعض الكتب وايضا لا ننسى ان بعض الكتب قد تكون رقمیة
وبذلك توفر علیك قیمة الشحن والمصاريف الاخرى واسعارھا في متناول الجمیع
بالنسبة للمحلات التي ذكرتھا بسام فنجاحھا من الأكثر سوف يكون كالتالي:
(% -1- محل بیع الكتب(ناجح لدرجة كبیرة تصل ربما إلى 99
والسبب ھو أنني حینما أريد شراء كتاب فإنني حینما أبحث عن كتاب فماذا أريد؟
فھرس للكتاب ، واسم الكاتب و عدد صفحات الكتاب ونبذة عن الكتاب وسعره بالطبع!
فقط ھذا ما أريده لذلك كل تلك الأمور متوفرة في الموقع الذي يبیع الكتب ولھذا سوف أشتري منه دون
أي تردد .
ولأنني حینما أبحث عن كتاب فإنني لا أريد أن انتظر كثیرا حتى يتم وصوله إلى المكتبات المحلیة بل
سوف أبحث مباشرة عنه في المواقع العالمیة الالكترونیة المختصة بالكتب وسأجد ما أريد بسھولة فھي
مواقع عالمیة!
إذن سبب شرائي للكتب ھو الثقة بوجود ما أريد في الموقع ومعرفتي مسبقا بعدم وجوده بالمكتبات
المحلیة بسبب حداثة الكتاب.
+
لن يطلب المحل الكثیر من المال كعمولة توصیل للبیت.
(% -2- محل لبیع الكمبیوتر(ناجح بدرجة 50
الآن في كل مكان نجد محلات الكمبیوتر ، لا يخلو أي شارع في شوارع أي مدينة من محلات الكمبیوتر
فھو أصبح بعدد مطاعم كل مدينة(بل أكثر!)
نعم ھذا ھو ما أقصده بأنه أسھل لي أن أتوجه إلى محل الكمبیوتر وأختار منه ما أريد واشتريه مباشرة
وبھذا أضمن بأن عملیة تصلیح الكمبیوتر ستكون في ذلك المحل فھو أدرى بالأجھزة التي تُباع عنده وھذا
يعطیني ثقة أكثر فأنا لا أريد شراء كمبیوتر لا توجد محلات صیانة له في المدينة ، وفي الواقع كل ما
يعرض في سوق الانترنت متوفر في أرقى محلات المدينة فلماذا انتظر كثیرا إلى أن يأتي الجھاز عبر
السوق الالكتروني وربما اتفاجأ بأنه كان عكس ما اريد وبالتالي لا استطیع ارجاعه بعكس لو كان الجھاز
مغشوشا من المحل فإنني أستطیع التفاھم مع صاحب المحل.
+
سوف يأخذ مني المحل عمولة متوسطة لتوصیل الجھاز للبیت.
-3- محل لبیع الأثاث(فاشل )!
نحن كعرب(والتركیز على كلمة عرب) لا نحب شراء أثاثنا إلا بعد أن نتفحصه جیدا وندقق فیه كثیرا ، سواء
على خامة الأثاث ولونه أو حتى حجمه ونجربه أحیانا(اقصد إذا كان كرسي بالطبع نجلس علیه) نحن
العرب أھل ذوق!
نتعب كثیرا في إيجاد ما يزين بیوتنا فكیف نشتري شیئا بمجرد النظر إلیه عبر شاشة الكمبیوتر فربما كان
اللون مختلفا أو حتى كان حجمه أكبر مما تتسع له غرف الصالة لو كان عبارة عن طقم كراسي لھذا لن
نثق بمحلات بیع الأثاث عبر الانترنت.
+
توجد تكلفة كبیرة في عملیة توصیل الأثاث للبیت ربما فاقت سعر الأثاث نفسه ولا تنسوا الضريبة!(بعض
الدول تأخذ ضريبة على مثل تلك الأمور)!(من يريد دفع الكثیر من المال لمجرد توصیله)!!!
-1 مواقع بیع الكتب
اولا بسبب امكانیة بحث افضل
ثانیا رخص الاسعار عن املكتبات
ثالثا توفیرا لووقت
رابعا و الاھم في رأي صعوبة الحصول على بعض الكتب في المكتبات و ايضا الكتاب اينما وجد فھو نفس
الكتاب يعني لا تزوير او تلاعب ھو انضرب الكتاب يحتاج لصیانة
-2 مواقع بیع الكمبیوتر
اولا لأن وكلات الكمبیوتر في بعض الدول غیر موجودة او نادرة مثال ھنا في سورية لحد الان لا يوجد وكالة
لكومباك فالافضل ھو الطلب مباشرة من الشركة
ثانیا في حال وجود وكالة و في اغلب الدول تكون موجودة يتم طلب الكمبیوتر او القطع المطلوبة عن
طريق الشركة الرئیسیة
ثالثا لسرعة انتشار احث المواصفات
-3 مواقع بیع الاثاث
اولا ممكن تنجح لو شركة معروفة جدا بدا توفر على تفسھا فتح فروع في عدة اماكن اي شركة موثوقة
لحد كبیر
ثانیا موضوع الاثاث يمكن التلاعب فیه بشكل كبیر لذلك اي منا ينزل بنفسه لیعاين القطع
اتمنى انو يكون صح
من وجھة نظري ان ترتیب الافضلیة للثلاث محلات يختلف من دوله الي اخري وذلك بالطبع متوقف علي
عدة اشیاء منھا مستوي دخل الافراد و المستوي العلمي والثقافي للمواطنین
فیمكن القول بأن ترتیب المحلات حسب الافضلیة فیما يتعلق بالدول المتقدمه قد يكون كالتالي:
1- محل الكمبیوتر
لانھم بالطبع يھتمون بالحصول علي الافضل دائما والاحدث
2- محل للكتب
نظرا لارتفاع المستوي الثقافي بالاضافة الي سھولة الحصول علیھا
3- محل بیع الاثاث
في حین أن ھذا الترتیب قد يتغیر اذا ما كنا بصدد الحديث عن دول العالم الثالث مثلا:
فقد يصبح الترتیب كالتالي
1- محل الكتب
نظرا لانخفاض السعر اذا ماقورنت بالكمبیوتر والاثاث فضلا عن سھولة الحصول علیھا سواء في صورة
كتب الیكترونیة او كتب ورقیة
2- محل الكمبیوتر
لان الاھتمام بھذا النوع سیكون من قبل شريحة صغیرة من المجتمع وھم القادرين علي تحملكافة
النافقات الازمه للحصول علي الجھاز
3- محل الاثاث
وذلك بالطبع لانه من الاشیاء التي تعتبر عملیة انتقالھا من مكان اللي اخر صعبه ومكلفة
الترتیب أولاً ثم التعلیق :
1محل لبیع الكتب )
2محل لبیع الكمبیوتر )
3محل لبیع الأثاث )
التعلیق ؟
اعتمدت في ترتیبي على شيء واحد فقط ھو "حجم السلعة من الناحیة المادية و المعنوية" ....
الكتاب ھو الأقل حجماً و الأقل سعراً .....
يلیله جھاز الحاسب
و أخیراً الأثاث "على فرض أنني سأطلب أثاث لغرفة كاملة !" ھو الأعلى ثمناً و الأكبر حجماً .
لماذا اعتمدت على ھذا المتغیر بالتحديد ؟
لأن التجارة بشكل عام ، و التجارة الإلكترونیة بشكل خاص ، تعتمد على الزبون !
و من وجھة نظري كزبونة ، فإنني لا أبالي بشراء قطعة صغیرة الحجم و الثمن ، للأسباب التالیة - تمثیلاً
لا حصراً :
*لن أبكي كثیراً إذا ضاعت السلعة في الطريقة ! =="
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
e- commerance 2005
The issue of levying sales taxes on goods purchased online, which had been largely avoided in the United States for fear of stunting e-commerce, was raised again by a California appeals court decision that found an online bookseller liable for taxes for portions of the years 1998 and 1999 because the firm had combined its stores and online subsidiary in the state. In 1992 the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that online retailers did not have to collect taxes unless the customer was in a state where the retailer had physical operations. The bookseller, Borders, insisted that it was protected under the 1992 ruling because its online operations and California bookstores were run by separate corporate entities. The California court disagreed and said that the two business units had worked together and therefore were not protected under the Supreme Court ruling. The California court decision led states once again to press for changes in the tax law, which they claimed unfairly deprived them of an estimated $15 billion a year in tax revenue on Internet sales.
Digital music was flourishing in 2005. Digital music players, which were also referred to as digital audio players, seemed to be everywhere, with about 95 million expected to be sold worldwide during the year. Early in 2005 a study showed that 22 million U.S. adults—about 11% of the population—owned a digital music player.
The iPod digital music player continued to drive Apple Computer's financial performance; the company's profit more than quadrupled, to $430 million, in the fourth quarter of its fiscal year. Analysts were surprised by the continued unit-sales growth for the product. At midyear the iPod accounted for about three-fourths of the digital music players sold in the United States, analysts said. Apple continued to roll out a steady stream of advances, including the iPod Nano players (which were much smaller than previous full-featured iPod models because they used flash memory instead of disk drives), a video iPod that could display music videos or TV shows, and a telephone equipped with Apple's iTunes software, manufactured by Motorola. Apple also settled a class-action suit brought on behalf of an estimated 1.4 million consumers who had battery problems with iPods purchased through May 2004. The settlement gave consumers $50 vouchers for use in purchasing Apple products and extended service warranties.
The war against music piracy continued. File-sharing Web sites that aided the free trading of copyrighted music files lost key court decisions that left them open to further legal action by the music industry. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the creators of the Grokster and Morpheus file-sharing services could be considered liable for contributing to copyright infringement through the trading of copyrighted songs, even if their services had some legal uses. Grokster abruptly shut down in early November as part of a settlement with the recording industry. An Australian court ruled that Kazaa, another free file-sharing network, violated Australian copyright law. The music industry continued its practice of trying to curb online file sharing by suing consumers. By mid-2005 the number of suits filed over several years had reached a cumulative total of nearly 12,000, although many of the lawsuits had not yet been resolved. The research firm Yankee Group estimated that about 5 billion songs were downloaded via free file-sharing services in 2004, whereas authorized online music stores sold about 330 million songs in the same period. Moreover, the music industry's lawsuits were not always successful. Two universities in North Carolina invoked the right to privacy and successfully resisted attempts by the music industry to learn the identities of two students who allegedly shared copyrighted music on the Internet through university networks. North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill said that they did not condone music piracy but that student privacy rights were more important.
Another threat to the music companies was the development of what were termed “darknets,” a type of peer-to-peer file-sharing network that allowed participants to share information with far more anonymity than other file-sharing networks. The networks linked trusted members of a group and protected their communication with encryption techniques.
Other efforts were being made to prevent Internet piracy from carrying over into the world of movies. A new U.S. law sought to discourage the illegal trading of motion pictures over the Internet by providing penalties of up to three years in prison for persons who secretly videotaped films in movie theatres. Copies of movies illegally taped in theatres, together with prerelease copies surreptitiously given out by industry insiders, were said to be the chief sources of new films that were available online via file-sharing services. Meanwhile, Hollywood studios prepared to allow consumers to buy and download a wide selection of movies over the Internet, partly because they feared that the proliferation of high-speed Internet connections would increase piracy if there was not a legal alternative.
An effort by Sony BMG records to protect music CDs from unauthorized copying backfired when the copy-protection software included on the CDs came to be perceived as malicious. When played on the user's PC, the CDs automatically installed software that spied on the user's music-listening habits and opened the PC to computer-virus attacks. Attempts to remove the software left the operating system damaged. Sony offered a software patch, but experts said the patch also created PC security problems. Sony then announced that it would stop using the copy-protection software, remove three million CDs that incorporated the software from store shelves, and recall the two million such CDs that already had been sold.
Governmental Issues.
Cable TV companies that offered high-speed cable modem Internet access gained a big advantage over their telephone industry rivals. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the cable firms did not have to open up their networks to rival ISPs that wanted to reach customers via the cable network. The ruling was based on the idea that cable TV companies provided a high-speed “information service,” which was mostly unregulated by law, whereas telephone companies offered a high-speed “telecommunications service,” which was regulated. The ruling disappointed consumer groups pressing for more commercial competition in high-speed Internet access and further limited the ability of slower dial-up ISPs to reach a wider audience by purchasing broadband access through the high-speed network of another company.
Cable TV's Internet rivals, the big telephone companies, also won a big victory when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruled that they no longer had to provide competing ISPs with access to their lines at discounted rates. The FCC said that it believed the move would speed the growth of DSL (digital subscriber line) broadband service by giving telephone companies more incentives to upgrade their networks. Some consumer groups, however, said that the move would limit competition for broadband service and result in higher prices. The FCC said that the rule change would take effect in one year.
Legal and political action played a large role in determining the direction being taken by computer technology. A preliminary court decision limited the liability of nearly 300 technology companies that went public during the 1990s dot-com boom. The decision had the effect of diverting the wrath of investors who claimed they had been defrauded by the companies toward a group of 55 investment banks that allegedly provided favoured clients with stock from popular initial public stock offerings. Under the arrangement the companies would not have to pay if the investors recovered more than $1 billion from the investment banks. If they recovered less, the companies would have to pay the difference.
Microsoft continued its long-running fight with the European Union over its antitrust suit. Microsoft was ordered in 2004 to change the way it sold software in European countries and to pay a fine of €497 million (about $613 million), but Microsoft appealed. In 2005, as required, Microsoft introduced a version of Windows that did not include Windows Media Player, a move designed to prevent Microsoft from having an unfair advantage over other companies that sold music and video players for PCs, but Microsoft also filed a lawsuit against the European Commission over the antitrust issues. For its part the European Commission said that it had received new complaints about Microsoft that could result in a new anticompetition case against the software industry giant.
The Google Print Library Project—Google's plan to digitize the world's library books and put them online—ran into trouble, first from opposition by France and then from lawsuits by authors and publishers who were concerned about copyright infringement that could result from the unauthorized duplication and distribution of book content. French government officials, fearing that their language and culture might take a backseat under the Google plan, said that France should devise its own plan to put library collections online. The Authors Guild, which represented 8,000 writers, filed a class-action suit that alleged copyright infringement; the suit sought an injunction against the Google project and monetary damages. The Association of American Publishers, which represented five book publishers, sued Google and sought an injunction against the project to halt alleged copyright infringement. Google said that although millions of copyrighted books from five large libraries would be digitized, copyright holders could opt out of having their books scanned and, in any event, only a few sentences at a time from any book still under copyright would be viewable by readers on the Internet. No printing or downloading of the books would be allowed.
The FBI said that it had lost about $104 million on a major computer-system upgrade project that failed and that a replacement computer system would not be ready until the end of 2006. Virtual Case File, an automated case-management system, was to have cost a total of $170 million, but it was abandoned in 2005 after the FBI concluded that it was already outdated and that its performance did not meet expectations. A Department of Justice (DOJ) report said that the computer-technology problems at the FBI could affect national security.
A federal audit of the controversial E-rate program that funded Internet connections for American schools and libraries found that the $2.25-billion-a-year effort was plagued by fraud and abuse. Investigators blamed some of the schools and libraries that were recipients of the money and some of the companies that provided them with Internet connections. Investigators also said that the FCC failed to provide good oversight for the program's operation.
Companies.
Google's strong financial results reflected the rapid growth of Internet advertising in general and Google's popularity in particular. The company's third-quarter profits increased 700%, and analysts attributed part of that success to a shift in advertising spending toward the Internet and away from traditional media, including newspapers, magazines, and television. Google also became the most highly valued media company in the world, with a stock-market capitalization of more than $90 billion. A new Google technology effort captured public attention; the Google Earth service allowed people to call up on their PC screens detailed satellite images of major cities and overlay them with information as diverse as street names, crime statistics, or coffee-shop locations. Microsoft later introduced a similar online service called Virtual Earth. Some users of the online satellite images devised “mashups,” in which they overlaid the images with information of their choosing, such as real-estate prices, movie filming locations, and sites where unidentified flying objects (UFOs) allegedly had been seen. Mashups proved useful to some Hurricane Katrina evacuees, who used their computers to see whether their homes had been damaged by the storm.
Carleton S. Fiorina resigned as CEO of computer manufacturer Hewlett-Packard after the board of directors asked her to do so. The resignation revolved around problems within Hewlett-Packard in the three years since she successfully completed the company's controversial merger with computer manufacturer Compaq. Among the issues facing the company was an internal debate over whether it should be broken into smaller firms—a move she had opposed—and complaints that her strategies for the company were not being executed well. Fiorina, who had been a high-profile CEO since taking the job in 1999, also was one of the best-known women executives in the U.S., where she was the first woman to head one of the 20 largest publicly owned companies. Under successor CEO Mark Hurd, Hewlett-Packard said that it would lay off 14,500 employees, or about 10% of its workforce, in 2005 and 2006. The company also froze its pension plan for employees not yet vested in it. The two-pronged plan was intended to save the company about $1.9 billion annually beginning in 2007. Meanwhile, Dell, the eponymous PC company founded by Michael Dell (see Biographies), showed record earnings in early 2005.
Microsoft settled the last of the big antitrust suits that it faced in the U.S. by agreeing to pay RealNetworks $761 million. Chief among RealNetworks' claims was that Microsoft had used its dominant position in operating systems to promote its free Windows Media Player, which hurt sales of the RealNetworks Real Player software. Earlier in the year, Microsoft had settled claims brought by IBM for $850 million and settled antitrust and other claims brought by Gateway for $150 million over four years. Microsoft had cleared accounts with Sun Microsystems in 2004 and AOL in 2003. Microsoft settled another antitrust suit by agreeing to pay Burst.com $60 million. Burst had sued Microsoft in 2002 over alleged antitrust violations and patent infringement related to Burst's video-playing software; Microsoft had denied the claims. Burst alleged that its technology and trade secrets were improperly used in Microsoft's Windows Media Player.
Computer-chip manufacturer Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) sued microprocessor industry leader Intel for alleged antitrust violations, including claims that Intel threatened to retaliate against companies that purchased from AMD. Intel denied doing anything wrong and claimed that AMD's problems were of its own making. Both companies remained at the forefront of chip technology, introducing new microprocessors using “dual core” technology, which was designed to combat the problem of heat generated by computer chips inside computers. As the speed of traditional chips increased, their heat output had risen to the point that the need to dissipate it had become a serious problem. The dual-core chips used two processors on a chip, each running at a speed slow enough to keep temperatures manageable.
Time Warner was poised to pay $2.4 billion to settle a class-action suit based on allegations of fraudulent business practices at AOL, both before and after it merged with Time Warner in 2001. Time Warner earlier had agreed to pay $300 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission to settle civil fraud charges related to the improper inflation of AOL revenues and to pay $150 million to settle an investigation by the DOJ. AOL laid off hundreds of employees and repositioned itself as a group of free Web sites rather than a proprietary online service. Time Warner reportedly was negotiating to sell an interest in AOL to one of three suitors, Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo! All were interested in the 112 million unique monthly visitors that AOL could bring to their advertising-supported Web sites.
IBM showed improved earnings while it completed the sale of its PC business to Lenovo of China, settled an antitrust case it had filed against Microsoft, and laid off 13,000 employees, most of them in Europe. Analysts believed that the company's stronger financial results showed that corporate spending on information technology, which had been in a lull, was increasing slowly. IBM also bought software company Ascential Software for $1.1 billion; Ascential's software helped organize large quantities of raw data for business customers.
Apple dropped IBM and Freescale Semiconductor as its longtime suppliers of the computer chips used in Macintosh computers in favour of Intel, whose microprocessors were also used in Windows-based computers. Amazon.com, with an eye on the popularity of downloaded music, said that it would download short literary works to online customers for 49 cents each. The book industry was divided over whether the downloads, called Amazon Shorts, posed a threat or boon to traditional publishers.
Howard Stringer (see Biographies), Sony's new CEO and its first top executive from outside Japan, promised to improve the firm's electronics division, which had been badly hurt by competing consumer electronics products, including Apple's iPod music player, and by declining prices for items such as digital cameras. The electronics business contributed about two-thirds of Sony's revenue. When Apple introduced new iPod models late in the year, Sony said that it intended to challenge Apple's dominance in digital music players. Sony also announced it would eliminate 10,000 jobs as part of a reorganization, however, and that it expected to lose about $90 million in the fiscal year ending in March 2006. Sony had earlier predicted a profit of $90 million.
Mergers and Acquisitions.
Oracle bought Siebel Systems, which made software for managing customer relationships, for $5.85 billion. It was part of Oracle's continuing effort to be a consolidator in the business software market; Oracle said that the Siebel acquisition would make it the world's leader in that field. Oracle's biggest rival was the German business software company SAP. The relatively quiet acquisition of Siebel was less than a year after Oracle's year-and-a-half pursuit and hostile takeover of business software firm PeopleSoft for $10.3 billion. Early in 2005 Oracle outbid SAP for Retek, a retail-oriented business software maker, for which Oracle paid $643.3 million.
Sun Microsystems acquired Storage Technology for $4.1 billion in cash. Analysts said that Sun was trying to revitalize its business by strengthening its storage capabilities, which was likely to please corporate customers concerned about the long-term storage and security of data. Sun's revenue had reached a peak in 2001 and had lost money the next three years on diminished revenues.
Adobe Systems, creator of the Acrobat document-and-graphics software, acquired Macromedia, a multimedia firm, for $3.4 billion in stock. The deal promised a combined firm with both document-sharing and Web-design capabilities.
There was a consolidation in the online brokerage business as online trading continued a two-year decline. Ameritrade bought TD Waterhouse for an estimated $3 billion. E*Trade Financial Corp. paid $700 million in cash for competitor Harrisdirect. The deals were made in the belief that size would be a key factor in determining which companies prospered.
In an unusual purchase of a technology firm by private investors, Agilent Technologies sold its semiconductor business for $2.66 billion to two equity companies, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Silver Lake Partners. At the same time, Agilent, itself a spin-off from Hewlett-Packard five years earlier, said that it would spin off its chip-testing operations as two companies in 2006.
EBay bought Internet phone company Skype Technologies of Luxembourg for about $2.6 billion in cash and stock, although that amount could rise based on performance, the companies said. Skype software users could talk over the Internet for free, using their PCs instead of phones. The company also offered a premium service that allowed PC users to make calls to and receive calls from traditional telephones. EBay made the acquisition after Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! began to offer online phone-calling services.
IAC/InterActiveCorp, the owner of travel Web site Expedia as well as television's Home Shopping Network, bought search engine company Ask Jeeves for $1.85 billion. While most search engine Web sites searched for key words or phrases, Ask Jeeves was designed to search for answers to specific questions.
DoubleClick, an Internet marketing firm, was acquired for $1.1 billion by Hellman & Friedman LLC, a firm that specialized in buying out media companies. Despite a sharp increase in spending for online advertising, competition between firms that provided Internet ads to Web sites had driven down prices and left DoubleClick in a commodity market, some analysts said.
The Internet.
In 2005 the United States insisted that it would indefinitely retain control of a group of Internet “root servers,” which acted as traffic directors for PCs navigating the Web. The move was a departure from previous U.S. policy and came at a time when many nations favoured putting an international body in charge of overseeing the root servers. The U.S. government said that its decision was both a response to security threats and a way of ensuring Internet dependability for communications and business, but some countries believed that the United States was improperly tightening its grip on the Internet. In the end an international forum was created to discuss Internet issues, but the U.S. remained in control of the Internet's address system.
A resolution was reached in a long-running dispute between the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), an Internet oversight group, and VeriSign, the company whose computers controlled much of the flow of traffic destined for Internet addresses that ended in “.com” and “.net.” VeriSign in 2003 created a service that provided Web surfers who misspelled an Internet address with suggestions about what they might have intended to type. Because VeriSign sometimes profited from directing traffic to some of the Web sites it suggested, ICANN pressured the company to halt the service. VeriSign then sued ICANN on the grounds of business interference. ICANN and VeriSign reached a settlement that extended VeriSign's control of the “.com” addresses an extra five years beyond the existing 2007 contract expiration date but gave ICANN the right to review new services that might affect the Internet's address system.
Bloggers, persons who published personal opinions at their own Internet addresses, continued to gain more recognition and, in some cases, instant fame. A number of bloggers became self-appointed public watchdogs, and a few were credited with precipitating the resignations of prominent persons in the mainstream news media, such as Dan Rather, who quit the CBS Evening News several months after bloggers exposed flaws in a major news story that he had reported. Some observers, however, feared that blogs (a shortened form of the words Web logs) gave individuals the power of the press without the accompanying accountability for accuracy and fairness. Some blog-oriented businesses that specialized in “social networking” became hugely successful. MySpace.com, begun in 2003 as a social network in which members could share their likes and dislikes about popular music, attracted more than 30 million members, many of them aged 14 to 20. In 2005 the Internet traffic of MySpace rose 840% over the previous year, and News Corp. acquired MySpace's parent company, Intermix Media, for about $580 million.
High-speed Internet access, also called broadband, continued to spread and grow in popularity. The extent to which broadband had become established in a country was viewed by some as a measurement of the country's preparedness for the future. South Korea ranked first in broadband use as a percentage of its population, whereas the United States ranked 12th, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. In terms of the number of broadband users, however, the United States ranked first and South Korea was third. In the U.S., broadband service was not evenly distributed, and because of costs the rollout of broadband service sometimes skipped over areas that were too lightly populated, too distant from network equipment, or—some charged—too poor to afford the service. A few large U.S. cities planned their own broadband networks to make certain their entire population would be served. Philadelphia sought to construct a network using Wi-Fi, or wireless fidelity technology, to cover the entire city (350 sq km [135 sq mi]) with wireless broadband service. In San Francisco the establishment of a city wireless Internet network was opposed by commercial broadband providers—telephone and cable TV companies. Broadband services that transmitted data signals over electrical power lines became available in a small number of U.S. cities, but questions remained whether that form of broadband service would be economically viable.
Wi-Fi hotspots, which functioned as short-range wireless links to a broadband Internet connection, proliferated in coffee shops, bookstores, hotels, and airports. Some hotspots offered free connections; others required a payment. The business of providing Wi-Fi for a fee proved to be less profitable than originally thought, and many commercial providers who sought to charge consumers for Wi-Fi underwent a consolidation. Security software firm McAfee acquired Wireless Security; networking firm Cisco Systems bought Wi-Fi firm Airespace; and electronics giant Siemens AG acquired Chantry Networks.
Computer Games.
The game industry prepared for the next generation of video-game consoles. Microsoft's new Xbox 360 debuted in late 2005, but the competing Sony PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Revolution consoles were not expected to reach consumers until mid-2006. Microsoft hoped to pull ahead of Sony by introducing its game console earlier; in the previous generation of consoles, the Sony PlayStation 2 outsold the Microsoft Xbox nearly four to one, with Nintendo's GameCube coming in third. In the handheld video-game market, the Nintendo DS and various Game Boy models from Nintendo got some competition from Sony's new handheld unit, the PlayStation Portable, which was dubbed the PSP.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the latest in a series of controversial video games known for their casual attitude toward violence, had its rating changed from “mature” to “adults only” after a controversy erupted over sexually oriented material that was found hidden in the game's code. (Games rated “mature” could be purchased by those 17 or older; games rated “adults only” could be purchased only by persons 18 or older.) Hackers discovered they could unlock hidden animated sex scenes that had been part of the game during its development but had been eliminated before the game was introduced by its creator, Rockstar Games. The hackers then used the Internet to distribute the code that unlocked the sex scenes. The code was widely downloaded, which created an outcry in Congress and prompted the Entertainment Software Rating Board to change the rating of the game. As a result, many retailers removed the game from their shelves, which dealt a financial blow to Rockstar, whose Grand Theft Auto series of video games had collectively sold more than 21 million copies over four years. Rockstar later offered a software patch for the game that disabled the code for the sex scenes, and it also released a new mature-rated version of the game.
New Technology.
A battle over standards threatened to disrupt the introduction in 2006 of next-generation DVD players that would be able to play high-definition TV programs and movies. It was feared that consumers might be reluctant to purchase next-generation players for fear that one of the two incompatible standards, Blu-ray from Sony and HD DVD from Toshiba, would lose out to the other and thereby render the purchase worthless. Movie studios faced a potentially expensive situation if they produced movies for the losing format. Computer and software firms such as Intel and Microsoft were concerned because new computers would need to have a DVD disk drive that used one or the other standard, since the technology would be a key to making PCs the centre of home multimedia networks. The first Toshiba HD DVD player was expected to appear in the U.S. in the spring of 2006, whereas the first Blu-ray DVD player to hit the American market would likely be the disk drive in Sony's PlayStation 3 video-game console, which would probably ship in late 2006.
Microsoft rechristened its upcoming version of Windows for consumers. The company changed the development codename, Longhorn, to its product name, Windows Vista. Microsoft promised security enhancements, better graphics, and new ways of searching for data. Vista was to be introduced in 2006, but test versions became available in mid-2005 as part of the company's efforts to refine the product before releasing it.
Disk-drive manufacturers rushed to make smaller drives, which they hoped would be used in consumer devices such as cellular phones. Hitachi and Seagate Technologies developed drives with capacities of several gigabytes that used disks only 2.5 cm (1 in) in diameter. Anticipating that such consumer devices would sometimes accidentally be dropped, drive makers were developing motion-sensing technology for hard drives that would detect when the hard drive was falling. The technology would make it possible to move sensitive components of the drive into a safe position before impact. In another area of disk-drive technology, Toshiba was the first manufacturer to introduce a commercial disk drive that used “perpendicular recording,” a method of orienting the magnetically recorded data on a disk in a way that dramatically increased storage capacity.
Britannica style:
"
Year in Review 2005Computers and Information Systems." Encyclopædia Britannica from Encyclopædia Britannica 2007 Ultimate Reference Suite. (
document.write(new Date().getFullYear());
2008)
Digital music was flourishing in 2005. Digital music players, which were also referred to as digital audio players, seemed to be everywhere, with about 95 million expected to be sold worldwide during the year. Early in 2005 a study showed that 22 million U.S. adults—about 11% of the population—owned a digital music player.
The iPod digital music player continued to drive Apple Computer's financial performance; the company's profit more than quadrupled, to $430 million, in the fourth quarter of its fiscal year. Analysts were surprised by the continued unit-sales growth for the product. At midyear the iPod accounted for about three-fourths of the digital music players sold in the United States, analysts said. Apple continued to roll out a steady stream of advances, including the iPod Nano players (which were much smaller than previous full-featured iPod models because they used flash memory instead of disk drives), a video iPod that could display music videos or TV shows, and a telephone equipped with Apple's iTunes software, manufactured by Motorola. Apple also settled a class-action suit brought on behalf of an estimated 1.4 million consumers who had battery problems with iPods purchased through May 2004. The settlement gave consumers $50 vouchers for use in purchasing Apple products and extended service warranties.
The war against music piracy continued. File-sharing Web sites that aided the free trading of copyrighted music files lost key court decisions that left them open to further legal action by the music industry. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the creators of the Grokster and Morpheus file-sharing services could be considered liable for contributing to copyright infringement through the trading of copyrighted songs, even if their services had some legal uses. Grokster abruptly shut down in early November as part of a settlement with the recording industry. An Australian court ruled that Kazaa, another free file-sharing network, violated Australian copyright law. The music industry continued its practice of trying to curb online file sharing by suing consumers. By mid-2005 the number of suits filed over several years had reached a cumulative total of nearly 12,000, although many of the lawsuits had not yet been resolved. The research firm Yankee Group estimated that about 5 billion songs were downloaded via free file-sharing services in 2004, whereas authorized online music stores sold about 330 million songs in the same period. Moreover, the music industry's lawsuits were not always successful. Two universities in North Carolina invoked the right to privacy and successfully resisted attempts by the music industry to learn the identities of two students who allegedly shared copyrighted music on the Internet through university networks. North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill said that they did not condone music piracy but that student privacy rights were more important.
Another threat to the music companies was the development of what were termed “darknets,” a type of peer-to-peer file-sharing network that allowed participants to share information with far more anonymity than other file-sharing networks. The networks linked trusted members of a group and protected their communication with encryption techniques.
Other efforts were being made to prevent Internet piracy from carrying over into the world of movies. A new U.S. law sought to discourage the illegal trading of motion pictures over the Internet by providing penalties of up to three years in prison for persons who secretly videotaped films in movie theatres. Copies of movies illegally taped in theatres, together with prerelease copies surreptitiously given out by industry insiders, were said to be the chief sources of new films that were available online via file-sharing services. Meanwhile, Hollywood studios prepared to allow consumers to buy and download a wide selection of movies over the Internet, partly because they feared that the proliferation of high-speed Internet connections would increase piracy if there was not a legal alternative.
An effort by Sony BMG records to protect music CDs from unauthorized copying backfired when the copy-protection software included on the CDs came to be perceived as malicious. When played on the user's PC, the CDs automatically installed software that spied on the user's music-listening habits and opened the PC to computer-virus attacks. Attempts to remove the software left the operating system damaged. Sony offered a software patch, but experts said the patch also created PC security problems. Sony then announced that it would stop using the copy-protection software, remove three million CDs that incorporated the software from store shelves, and recall the two million such CDs that already had been sold.
Governmental Issues.
Cable TV companies that offered high-speed cable modem Internet access gained a big advantage over their telephone industry rivals. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the cable firms did not have to open up their networks to rival ISPs that wanted to reach customers via the cable network. The ruling was based on the idea that cable TV companies provided a high-speed “information service,” which was mostly unregulated by law, whereas telephone companies offered a high-speed “telecommunications service,” which was regulated. The ruling disappointed consumer groups pressing for more commercial competition in high-speed Internet access and further limited the ability of slower dial-up ISPs to reach a wider audience by purchasing broadband access through the high-speed network of another company.
Cable TV's Internet rivals, the big telephone companies, also won a big victory when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruled that they no longer had to provide competing ISPs with access to their lines at discounted rates. The FCC said that it believed the move would speed the growth of DSL (digital subscriber line) broadband service by giving telephone companies more incentives to upgrade their networks. Some consumer groups, however, said that the move would limit competition for broadband service and result in higher prices. The FCC said that the rule change would take effect in one year.
Legal and political action played a large role in determining the direction being taken by computer technology. A preliminary court decision limited the liability of nearly 300 technology companies that went public during the 1990s dot-com boom. The decision had the effect of diverting the wrath of investors who claimed they had been defrauded by the companies toward a group of 55 investment banks that allegedly provided favoured clients with stock from popular initial public stock offerings. Under the arrangement the companies would not have to pay if the investors recovered more than $1 billion from the investment banks. If they recovered less, the companies would have to pay the difference.
Microsoft continued its long-running fight with the European Union over its antitrust suit. Microsoft was ordered in 2004 to change the way it sold software in European countries and to pay a fine of €497 million (about $613 million), but Microsoft appealed. In 2005, as required, Microsoft introduced a version of Windows that did not include Windows Media Player, a move designed to prevent Microsoft from having an unfair advantage over other companies that sold music and video players for PCs, but Microsoft also filed a lawsuit against the European Commission over the antitrust issues. For its part the European Commission said that it had received new complaints about Microsoft that could result in a new anticompetition case against the software industry giant.
The Google Print Library Project—Google's plan to digitize the world's library books and put them online—ran into trouble, first from opposition by France and then from lawsuits by authors and publishers who were concerned about copyright infringement that could result from the unauthorized duplication and distribution of book content. French government officials, fearing that their language and culture might take a backseat under the Google plan, said that France should devise its own plan to put library collections online. The Authors Guild, which represented 8,000 writers, filed a class-action suit that alleged copyright infringement; the suit sought an injunction against the Google project and monetary damages. The Association of American Publishers, which represented five book publishers, sued Google and sought an injunction against the project to halt alleged copyright infringement. Google said that although millions of copyrighted books from five large libraries would be digitized, copyright holders could opt out of having their books scanned and, in any event, only a few sentences at a time from any book still under copyright would be viewable by readers on the Internet. No printing or downloading of the books would be allowed.
The FBI said that it had lost about $104 million on a major computer-system upgrade project that failed and that a replacement computer system would not be ready until the end of 2006. Virtual Case File, an automated case-management system, was to have cost a total of $170 million, but it was abandoned in 2005 after the FBI concluded that it was already outdated and that its performance did not meet expectations. A Department of Justice (DOJ) report said that the computer-technology problems at the FBI could affect national security.
A federal audit of the controversial E-rate program that funded Internet connections for American schools and libraries found that the $2.25-billion-a-year effort was plagued by fraud and abuse. Investigators blamed some of the schools and libraries that were recipients of the money and some of the companies that provided them with Internet connections. Investigators also said that the FCC failed to provide good oversight for the program's operation.
Companies.
Google's strong financial results reflected the rapid growth of Internet advertising in general and Google's popularity in particular. The company's third-quarter profits increased 700%, and analysts attributed part of that success to a shift in advertising spending toward the Internet and away from traditional media, including newspapers, magazines, and television. Google also became the most highly valued media company in the world, with a stock-market capitalization of more than $90 billion. A new Google technology effort captured public attention; the Google Earth service allowed people to call up on their PC screens detailed satellite images of major cities and overlay them with information as diverse as street names, crime statistics, or coffee-shop locations. Microsoft later introduced a similar online service called Virtual Earth. Some users of the online satellite images devised “mashups,” in which they overlaid the images with information of their choosing, such as real-estate prices, movie filming locations, and sites where unidentified flying objects (UFOs) allegedly had been seen. Mashups proved useful to some Hurricane Katrina evacuees, who used their computers to see whether their homes had been damaged by the storm.
Carleton S. Fiorina resigned as CEO of computer manufacturer Hewlett-Packard after the board of directors asked her to do so. The resignation revolved around problems within Hewlett-Packard in the three years since she successfully completed the company's controversial merger with computer manufacturer Compaq. Among the issues facing the company was an internal debate over whether it should be broken into smaller firms—a move she had opposed—and complaints that her strategies for the company were not being executed well. Fiorina, who had been a high-profile CEO since taking the job in 1999, also was one of the best-known women executives in the U.S., where she was the first woman to head one of the 20 largest publicly owned companies. Under successor CEO Mark Hurd, Hewlett-Packard said that it would lay off 14,500 employees, or about 10% of its workforce, in 2005 and 2006. The company also froze its pension plan for employees not yet vested in it. The two-pronged plan was intended to save the company about $1.9 billion annually beginning in 2007. Meanwhile, Dell, the eponymous PC company founded by Michael Dell (see Biographies), showed record earnings in early 2005.
Microsoft settled the last of the big antitrust suits that it faced in the U.S. by agreeing to pay RealNetworks $761 million. Chief among RealNetworks' claims was that Microsoft had used its dominant position in operating systems to promote its free Windows Media Player, which hurt sales of the RealNetworks Real Player software. Earlier in the year, Microsoft had settled claims brought by IBM for $850 million and settled antitrust and other claims brought by Gateway for $150 million over four years. Microsoft had cleared accounts with Sun Microsystems in 2004 and AOL in 2003. Microsoft settled another antitrust suit by agreeing to pay Burst.com $60 million. Burst had sued Microsoft in 2002 over alleged antitrust violations and patent infringement related to Burst's video-playing software; Microsoft had denied the claims. Burst alleged that its technology and trade secrets were improperly used in Microsoft's Windows Media Player.
Computer-chip manufacturer Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) sued microprocessor industry leader Intel for alleged antitrust violations, including claims that Intel threatened to retaliate against companies that purchased from AMD. Intel denied doing anything wrong and claimed that AMD's problems were of its own making. Both companies remained at the forefront of chip technology, introducing new microprocessors using “dual core” technology, which was designed to combat the problem of heat generated by computer chips inside computers. As the speed of traditional chips increased, their heat output had risen to the point that the need to dissipate it had become a serious problem. The dual-core chips used two processors on a chip, each running at a speed slow enough to keep temperatures manageable.
Time Warner was poised to pay $2.4 billion to settle a class-action suit based on allegations of fraudulent business practices at AOL, both before and after it merged with Time Warner in 2001. Time Warner earlier had agreed to pay $300 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission to settle civil fraud charges related to the improper inflation of AOL revenues and to pay $150 million to settle an investigation by the DOJ. AOL laid off hundreds of employees and repositioned itself as a group of free Web sites rather than a proprietary online service. Time Warner reportedly was negotiating to sell an interest in AOL to one of three suitors, Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo! All were interested in the 112 million unique monthly visitors that AOL could bring to their advertising-supported Web sites.
IBM showed improved earnings while it completed the sale of its PC business to Lenovo of China, settled an antitrust case it had filed against Microsoft, and laid off 13,000 employees, most of them in Europe. Analysts believed that the company's stronger financial results showed that corporate spending on information technology, which had been in a lull, was increasing slowly. IBM also bought software company Ascential Software for $1.1 billion; Ascential's software helped organize large quantities of raw data for business customers.
Apple dropped IBM and Freescale Semiconductor as its longtime suppliers of the computer chips used in Macintosh computers in favour of Intel, whose microprocessors were also used in Windows-based computers. Amazon.com, with an eye on the popularity of downloaded music, said that it would download short literary works to online customers for 49 cents each. The book industry was divided over whether the downloads, called Amazon Shorts, posed a threat or boon to traditional publishers.
Howard Stringer (see Biographies), Sony's new CEO and its first top executive from outside Japan, promised to improve the firm's electronics division, which had been badly hurt by competing consumer electronics products, including Apple's iPod music player, and by declining prices for items such as digital cameras. The electronics business contributed about two-thirds of Sony's revenue. When Apple introduced new iPod models late in the year, Sony said that it intended to challenge Apple's dominance in digital music players. Sony also announced it would eliminate 10,000 jobs as part of a reorganization, however, and that it expected to lose about $90 million in the fiscal year ending in March 2006. Sony had earlier predicted a profit of $90 million.
Mergers and Acquisitions.
Oracle bought Siebel Systems, which made software for managing customer relationships, for $5.85 billion. It was part of Oracle's continuing effort to be a consolidator in the business software market; Oracle said that the Siebel acquisition would make it the world's leader in that field. Oracle's biggest rival was the German business software company SAP. The relatively quiet acquisition of Siebel was less than a year after Oracle's year-and-a-half pursuit and hostile takeover of business software firm PeopleSoft for $10.3 billion. Early in 2005 Oracle outbid SAP for Retek, a retail-oriented business software maker, for which Oracle paid $643.3 million.
Sun Microsystems acquired Storage Technology for $4.1 billion in cash. Analysts said that Sun was trying to revitalize its business by strengthening its storage capabilities, which was likely to please corporate customers concerned about the long-term storage and security of data. Sun's revenue had reached a peak in 2001 and had lost money the next three years on diminished revenues.
Adobe Systems, creator of the Acrobat document-and-graphics software, acquired Macromedia, a multimedia firm, for $3.4 billion in stock. The deal promised a combined firm with both document-sharing and Web-design capabilities.
There was a consolidation in the online brokerage business as online trading continued a two-year decline. Ameritrade bought TD Waterhouse for an estimated $3 billion. E*Trade Financial Corp. paid $700 million in cash for competitor Harrisdirect. The deals were made in the belief that size would be a key factor in determining which companies prospered.
In an unusual purchase of a technology firm by private investors, Agilent Technologies sold its semiconductor business for $2.66 billion to two equity companies, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Silver Lake Partners. At the same time, Agilent, itself a spin-off from Hewlett-Packard five years earlier, said that it would spin off its chip-testing operations as two companies in 2006.
EBay bought Internet phone company Skype Technologies of Luxembourg for about $2.6 billion in cash and stock, although that amount could rise based on performance, the companies said. Skype software users could talk over the Internet for free, using their PCs instead of phones. The company also offered a premium service that allowed PC users to make calls to and receive calls from traditional telephones. EBay made the acquisition after Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! began to offer online phone-calling services.
IAC/InterActiveCorp, the owner of travel Web site Expedia as well as television's Home Shopping Network, bought search engine company Ask Jeeves for $1.85 billion. While most search engine Web sites searched for key words or phrases, Ask Jeeves was designed to search for answers to specific questions.
DoubleClick, an Internet marketing firm, was acquired for $1.1 billion by Hellman & Friedman LLC, a firm that specialized in buying out media companies. Despite a sharp increase in spending for online advertising, competition between firms that provided Internet ads to Web sites had driven down prices and left DoubleClick in a commodity market, some analysts said.
The Internet.
In 2005 the United States insisted that it would indefinitely retain control of a group of Internet “root servers,” which acted as traffic directors for PCs navigating the Web. The move was a departure from previous U.S. policy and came at a time when many nations favoured putting an international body in charge of overseeing the root servers. The U.S. government said that its decision was both a response to security threats and a way of ensuring Internet dependability for communications and business, but some countries believed that the United States was improperly tightening its grip on the Internet. In the end an international forum was created to discuss Internet issues, but the U.S. remained in control of the Internet's address system.
A resolution was reached in a long-running dispute between the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), an Internet oversight group, and VeriSign, the company whose computers controlled much of the flow of traffic destined for Internet addresses that ended in “.com” and “.net.” VeriSign in 2003 created a service that provided Web surfers who misspelled an Internet address with suggestions about what they might have intended to type. Because VeriSign sometimes profited from directing traffic to some of the Web sites it suggested, ICANN pressured the company to halt the service. VeriSign then sued ICANN on the grounds of business interference. ICANN and VeriSign reached a settlement that extended VeriSign's control of the “.com” addresses an extra five years beyond the existing 2007 contract expiration date but gave ICANN the right to review new services that might affect the Internet's address system.
Bloggers, persons who published personal opinions at their own Internet addresses, continued to gain more recognition and, in some cases, instant fame. A number of bloggers became self-appointed public watchdogs, and a few were credited with precipitating the resignations of prominent persons in the mainstream news media, such as Dan Rather, who quit the CBS Evening News several months after bloggers exposed flaws in a major news story that he had reported. Some observers, however, feared that blogs (a shortened form of the words Web logs) gave individuals the power of the press without the accompanying accountability for accuracy and fairness. Some blog-oriented businesses that specialized in “social networking” became hugely successful. MySpace.com, begun in 2003 as a social network in which members could share their likes and dislikes about popular music, attracted more than 30 million members, many of them aged 14 to 20. In 2005 the Internet traffic of MySpace rose 840% over the previous year, and News Corp. acquired MySpace's parent company, Intermix Media, for about $580 million.
High-speed Internet access, also called broadband, continued to spread and grow in popularity. The extent to which broadband had become established in a country was viewed by some as a measurement of the country's preparedness for the future. South Korea ranked first in broadband use as a percentage of its population, whereas the United States ranked 12th, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. In terms of the number of broadband users, however, the United States ranked first and South Korea was third. In the U.S., broadband service was not evenly distributed, and because of costs the rollout of broadband service sometimes skipped over areas that were too lightly populated, too distant from network equipment, or—some charged—too poor to afford the service. A few large U.S. cities planned their own broadband networks to make certain their entire population would be served. Philadelphia sought to construct a network using Wi-Fi, or wireless fidelity technology, to cover the entire city (350 sq km [135 sq mi]) with wireless broadband service. In San Francisco the establishment of a city wireless Internet network was opposed by commercial broadband providers—telephone and cable TV companies. Broadband services that transmitted data signals over electrical power lines became available in a small number of U.S. cities, but questions remained whether that form of broadband service would be economically viable.
Wi-Fi hotspots, which functioned as short-range wireless links to a broadband Internet connection, proliferated in coffee shops, bookstores, hotels, and airports. Some hotspots offered free connections; others required a payment. The business of providing Wi-Fi for a fee proved to be less profitable than originally thought, and many commercial providers who sought to charge consumers for Wi-Fi underwent a consolidation. Security software firm McAfee acquired Wireless Security; networking firm Cisco Systems bought Wi-Fi firm Airespace; and electronics giant Siemens AG acquired Chantry Networks.
Computer Games.
The game industry prepared for the next generation of video-game consoles. Microsoft's new Xbox 360 debuted in late 2005, but the competing Sony PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Revolution consoles were not expected to reach consumers until mid-2006. Microsoft hoped to pull ahead of Sony by introducing its game console earlier; in the previous generation of consoles, the Sony PlayStation 2 outsold the Microsoft Xbox nearly four to one, with Nintendo's GameCube coming in third. In the handheld video-game market, the Nintendo DS and various Game Boy models from Nintendo got some competition from Sony's new handheld unit, the PlayStation Portable, which was dubbed the PSP.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the latest in a series of controversial video games known for their casual attitude toward violence, had its rating changed from “mature” to “adults only” after a controversy erupted over sexually oriented material that was found hidden in the game's code. (Games rated “mature” could be purchased by those 17 or older; games rated “adults only” could be purchased only by persons 18 or older.) Hackers discovered they could unlock hidden animated sex scenes that had been part of the game during its development but had been eliminated before the game was introduced by its creator, Rockstar Games. The hackers then used the Internet to distribute the code that unlocked the sex scenes. The code was widely downloaded, which created an outcry in Congress and prompted the Entertainment Software Rating Board to change the rating of the game. As a result, many retailers removed the game from their shelves, which dealt a financial blow to Rockstar, whose Grand Theft Auto series of video games had collectively sold more than 21 million copies over four years. Rockstar later offered a software patch for the game that disabled the code for the sex scenes, and it also released a new mature-rated version of the game.
New Technology.
A battle over standards threatened to disrupt the introduction in 2006 of next-generation DVD players that would be able to play high-definition TV programs and movies. It was feared that consumers might be reluctant to purchase next-generation players for fear that one of the two incompatible standards, Blu-ray from Sony and HD DVD from Toshiba, would lose out to the other and thereby render the purchase worthless. Movie studios faced a potentially expensive situation if they produced movies for the losing format. Computer and software firms such as Intel and Microsoft were concerned because new computers would need to have a DVD disk drive that used one or the other standard, since the technology would be a key to making PCs the centre of home multimedia networks. The first Toshiba HD DVD player was expected to appear in the U.S. in the spring of 2006, whereas the first Blu-ray DVD player to hit the American market would likely be the disk drive in Sony's PlayStation 3 video-game console, which would probably ship in late 2006.
Microsoft rechristened its upcoming version of Windows for consumers. The company changed the development codename, Longhorn, to its product name, Windows Vista. Microsoft promised security enhancements, better graphics, and new ways of searching for data. Vista was to be introduced in 2006, but test versions became available in mid-2005 as part of the company's efforts to refine the product before releasing it.
Disk-drive manufacturers rushed to make smaller drives, which they hoped would be used in consumer devices such as cellular phones. Hitachi and Seagate Technologies developed drives with capacities of several gigabytes that used disks only 2.5 cm (1 in) in diameter. Anticipating that such consumer devices would sometimes accidentally be dropped, drive makers were developing motion-sensing technology for hard drives that would detect when the hard drive was falling. The technology would make it possible to move sensitive components of the drive into a safe position before impact. In another area of disk-drive technology, Toshiba was the first manufacturer to introduce a commercial disk drive that used “perpendicular recording,” a method of orienting the magnetically recorded data on a disk in a way that dramatically increased storage capacity.
Britannica style:
"
Year in Review 2005Computers and Information Systems." Encyclopædia Britannica from Encyclopædia Britannica 2007 Ultimate Reference Suite. (
document.write(new Date().getFullYear());
2008)
الفـوركـــسذلك المصطلح الغريب الذي قد تمر به أحيانا فتتساءل ما هو ؟؟ربما تجيب هذه المقالة على تساؤلاتك !!
ببساطة يمكنني أن أقول لك أن كلمة فوركس هي التعبير المختصر للمصطلح الأجنبي Foreign Exchange والتي تعني باختصار المضاربة في سوق العملات الأجنبية أو في البورصة العالمية للعملات !!بداية دعني أوضح لك ما هي البورصة ؟ نحن نقوم يوميا ببيع وشراء العديد من السلع المختلفة التي يتم عرضها في المحلات والأسواق وأماكن العرض مثل الأطعمة, الملابس, السيارات, والأجهزة المنزلية ... وغيرها. ونجد عادة أن لكل سلعة سوق خاص يميزها, حيث يجتمع المهتمين بتلك السلعة لتتم بينهم عمليات البيع والشراء على أساس سعر تحدده قوى العرض والطلب. إن الأسهم والسندات والعملات تعتبر احد تلك السلع ويتم تبادلها بين الأفراد والمؤسسات والدول بشكل يومي وبكميات هائلة. تسمى الأسواق التي يتم فيها تداول (بيع وشراء) هذا النوع من السلع بالبورصات. والبورصات موجودة بكل دول العالم ولكل بورصة تخصصها ومجالها, وتقوم الدول بإدارة تلك البورصات وتنظيم العمل بها.بورصة العملات !! كغيرها من البورصات حيث يتم فيها بيع وشراء عملة دولة مقابل دفع عملة دولة أخرى .. فمثلاً يتم فيها شراء الدولار الأمريكي بدفع العملة الأوروبية الموحدة ( اليورو), أو العكس أي شراء اليورو بدفع الدولار الأمريكي مقابلة. أو شراء الدولار الأمريكي بدفع الين الياباني, أو العكس. أو شراء الدولار الأمريكي بدفع الجنية الإسترليني, أو العكس. أو شراء الدولار الأمريكي بدفع الفرنك السويسري مقابله, أو العكس. أو شراء أي عملة ودفع مقابلها عملة أخرى كثمن لها. وهكذا فانه يتم عرض العملات على شكل أزواج بحيث يتم بيع احد تلك الأزواج مقابل شراء الزوج الآخر أو العكس إن الفروقات البسيطة التي تنشأ بين أسعار العملات نتيجة لتغير قوى العرض والطلب خلال الوقت يمكن استغلالها لتحقيق الربح من هذا السوق. تخيل معي انك قمت بشراء يورو واحد الآن ودفعت مقابله (1.2700) دولار وبعد فترة قصيرة تغير سعر اليورو ليصبح (1.2800) فقمت ببيعه مرة أخرى بهذا المبلغ. تستطيع الآن حساب أرباحك ( 1.2800 - 1.2700 = 0.0010 ) من الواضح انك ربحت سنتا واحدا من تلك العملية البسيطة. ولكن ماذا لو انك قمت بشراء (10000) يورو, تستطيع أن تربح في تلك الصفقة (100) دولار دفعة واحده.يلزمني إذاً مبالغ مالية كبيرة للاستفادة من هذه السوق ؟ لا .. لن تحتاج إلى مبالغ كبيرة لتحقيق أرباح ضخمة في هذا السوق. ففي الواقع أنت لن تعتمد على أموالك التي خصصتها للاستثمار فقط !!إذ يتيح هذا السوق نظاما فريدا يمكنك من المتاجرة بكميات كبيرة من النقود مقابل دفع مبالغ بسيطة فقط .يسمى هذا النظام النظام الهامشي ! يمكنك هذا النظام من المتاجرة بمبالغ تصل إلى 200 ضعف المبلغ الذي تقوم باستثماره وأكثر من ذلك. وتحتفظ بالأرباح كاملة لنفسك. وكذلك الخسائر !! إلا أن خسائرك في جميع الأحوال لن تتعدى المبلغ الصغير الذي قمت باستثماره بداية. بمعنى انك لن تستطيع الاستمرار في الخسارة إذا تعدت الخسائر رأس مالك المبدئي, ولن تصبح مطالبا بدفع أية مبالغ إضافية فوق المبلغ الذي قمت باستثماره بادئ الأمر. إن حجم العمليات في سوق الفوركس في نمو مطرد. يرتبط هذا بالتطور الكبير في التجارة العالمية ورفع الحظر علي العملات في كثير من البلدان. إن (80 %) من كل المعاملات هو عبارة عن مضاربات في سوق العملة الهدف منها الحصول علي أرباح من فروقات الأسعار. وتجتذب هذه المضاربات العديد من المشاركين سواء من المنظمات المالية أو المستثمرين الأفراد.ولكن كيف تتم عمليات البيع والشراء هذه ؟ إن سوق الفوركس ليس سوقاُ بالمعني الحرفي للكلمة، إذ أنه ليس لديه مركزاُ و ليس لديه مكانا معينا تمارس فيه المتاجرة. إن المتاجرة تمارس عن طريق الاتصال التلفوني و الإنترنت بالحاسوب في وقت واحد بين مئات البنوك حول العالم. مئات الملايين من العملات تباع وتشتري كل بضع ثوان. تقوم شركات متخصصة ومرخصة باستلام أوامر البيع والشراء من المستثمرين لتقوم بتنفيذها لهم.
تسمى تلك الشركات بشركات الوساطة (Brokerage firms ) وبأي حال فانه لا يمكنك أن تقوم بتنفيذ أوامرك بشكل مباشر دون التعامل مع احد تلك الشركات. يتم الأمر بشكل عام بالتسلسل التالي
· تقوم باختيار شركة وساطة تناسب أهدافك وإمكاناتك لتتعاقد معها
· تقوم بفتح حساب لدى تلك الشركة وتسجل به معلوماتك الشخصية, وتودع المبلغ الذي تود استثماره بحسابك.
· تقوم بمتابعة حركة الأسعار عن طريق احد البرامج المتخصصة على حاسوبك وتقوم بإعطاء أوامر البيع والشراء لشركة الوساطة عن طريق برنامج المتاجرة.
· ستقوم الشركة بتنفيذ أوامرك وأي أرباح أو خسائر سيتم إضافتها أو سحبها من حسابك.
· يمكنك بطبيعة الحال سحب أموالك من الشركة أو الإضافة عليها في أي وقت تشاء.
الاتصال بينك وبين شركة الوساطة يتم عن طريق برنامج خاص يسمى محطة عمل ( Platform ), ويتم الدخول على هذا البرنامج عن طريق اسم مستخدم وكلمة مرور خاصة يتم تزويدك بها عند فتح الحساب بالشركة. يمكنك هذا البرنامج من متابعة الأسعار وإعطاء أوامر البيع والشراء والتحكم الكامل بحسابك. وبالطبع فان كل تلك العمليات ستتم أثناء اتصال حاسوبك بالانترنت. ستجد أن عملية الاتصال والتفاعل بينك وبين شركة تقع في النصف الآخر من الكرة الأرضية أمرا يسيرا جدا وستجد أن معظم الشركات تقدم دعما قويا لمساعدة المستثمرين وتقريب المسافات بينهم لأقرب حد وكأن الشركة تقع في الغرفة المجاورة لك. هكذا تتم الأمور بوجه عام ولكن ينبغي عليك أن تعلم انه قبل القيام بالمتاجرة بأموال حقيقية يجب أن تكون لديك الخبرات الكافية لإدارة حسابك بشكل سليم لأنه وببساطه يمكنك أن تخسر كل استثماراتك بسهولة إذا لم تكن لديك الخبرة الكافية.كيف أزيد من خبراتي ومعلوماتي بهذا السوق ؟ انه سؤالا واحدا ... إلى أي اتجاه سيتجه السعر ؟؟ لقد بذل الكثير من العلماء والأساتذة والمطورين مجهودا ضخما وأمضوا وقتا طويلا في الدراسة ليقدموا لنا أبحاثا ودراسات عديدة تعنى بأسواق المال. من اجل الإجابة على هذا السؤال. إن التنبؤ الصحيح باتجاه الأسعار يعتمد على الدراسة العميقة للسوق. عادة نجد ثلاثة أشكال تحليلية للسوق: تحليل أخباري, وتحليل فني, وتحليل نفسي. ويكون الجمع المدروس والصحيح لهذه التحليلات الثلاثة هو الضمان للتنبؤ الصحيح في سوق الفوركس. التحليل الإخباري يتضمن دراسة العوامل الاقتصادية والسياسية التي قد تؤثر علي سوق العملات. مثال لذلك تقارير سياسات بنك الاحتياطي المركزي الأمريكي، ومعاملات الاقتصاد الأساسية، وتصريحات رجال الدولة المهمين والأحداث المهمة الأخرى. والهدف الرئيس للتحليل الأساسي هو تحليل العوامل الرئيسة وتأثيرها علي ديناميكية الأسعار في سوق الفوركس. أن المتاجر في سوق الفوركس يكون دائما علي إلمام بالوضع الراهن عالمياًٌ. التحليل الفني وهو تحليل لحالة السوق ترتكز علي التغيرات السابقة للأسعار. وتستخدم في هذا التحليل الرسومات البيانية التي تعكس تغيرات الأسعار لفترة زمنية معينة. ويمكننا التحليل الفني كذلك من فهم حالة السوق العامة في الوقت الحالي، وبمؤشرات عدة يمكن التنبؤ بتغيرات الأسعار في المستقبل القريب. إن التحليل الفني يرتكز علي حقيقة أن حركة الأسعار تأخذ في الاعتبار كل العوامل التي يمكن أن تؤثر علي السوق - اقتصادية وسياسية ونفسية والعوامل الأخرى - أخذت كلها مسبقاً في الاعتبار عند تحديد الأسعار. و إذا كان السوق حقا سوقا فستتكون حركته نتيجة لقرارات عدد هائل من المشاركين اتخذوها بعد تحليلاتهم لقدر هائل من المعلومات عند قيامهم بعقد الصفقات. إن سلوك الأسعار هو نتيجة هذه القرارات، وبمراقبته يكون لديك مدخلاًً لكل المعلومات في هذا السوق. إن ما يلزم المتاجر حقيقة هو أن يعرف اتجاه حركة الأسعار. والتحليل الفني يعطي كماً هائلاً من الأدوات تمكننا من استخلاص تنبؤات مفيدة من الرسومات البيانية للأسعار. التحليل النفسي هو تحليل سلوكيات المتاجرين في السوق وحالتهم النفسية وتوقعاتهم وآمالهم وتخوفاتهم. وهذا النوع من التحليل مهم جدا لان نسبة صحته عالية جداً. ويجب أن لا ننسي أن خلف محطات الحاسوب التي تعطي توقعات الأسعار بشر وعلي تصرفاتهم تعتمد في نهاية المطاف أسعار العملات. ربما تجد أن الأمر في البداية مشوقا ورائعا وربما تجده شاقا ومتعبا وفي الحقيقة فان الأمر مشوقا ورائعا, وشاقا ومتعبا معا. فتحقيق أرباح ضخمة ليس أمرا سهلا ويسيرا ولكنه على أي حال ليس صعبا أو معقدا. يمكنك البدء من الآن في التعلم واكتساب الخبرات وتذكر بأنك إن لم تبدأ فلن تنتهي .... ننصح بشدة بقراءة الكتاب التالي : الفوركس للمبتدئين هذا الكتاب يعتبر مدخلا جيدا للتعرف على بورصة العملات وكيف يمكن العمل بها بالتفصيل وشرحا سريعا لأساسيات التحليل. في حال وجود أي تساؤلات أو استفسارات لا تتردد أبدا في مراسلتنا ________________________________________ المراجع المستخدمة في كتابة هذا المقال: - كتاب الفوركس للمبتدئين. - شركة فوركس أرابيا.
http://www.fx4beginners.com/ar/home/forex.htm
ببساطة يمكنني أن أقول لك أن كلمة فوركس هي التعبير المختصر للمصطلح الأجنبي Foreign Exchange والتي تعني باختصار المضاربة في سوق العملات الأجنبية أو في البورصة العالمية للعملات !!بداية دعني أوضح لك ما هي البورصة ؟ نحن نقوم يوميا ببيع وشراء العديد من السلع المختلفة التي يتم عرضها في المحلات والأسواق وأماكن العرض مثل الأطعمة, الملابس, السيارات, والأجهزة المنزلية ... وغيرها. ونجد عادة أن لكل سلعة سوق خاص يميزها, حيث يجتمع المهتمين بتلك السلعة لتتم بينهم عمليات البيع والشراء على أساس سعر تحدده قوى العرض والطلب. إن الأسهم والسندات والعملات تعتبر احد تلك السلع ويتم تبادلها بين الأفراد والمؤسسات والدول بشكل يومي وبكميات هائلة. تسمى الأسواق التي يتم فيها تداول (بيع وشراء) هذا النوع من السلع بالبورصات. والبورصات موجودة بكل دول العالم ولكل بورصة تخصصها ومجالها, وتقوم الدول بإدارة تلك البورصات وتنظيم العمل بها.بورصة العملات !! كغيرها من البورصات حيث يتم فيها بيع وشراء عملة دولة مقابل دفع عملة دولة أخرى .. فمثلاً يتم فيها شراء الدولار الأمريكي بدفع العملة الأوروبية الموحدة ( اليورو), أو العكس أي شراء اليورو بدفع الدولار الأمريكي مقابلة. أو شراء الدولار الأمريكي بدفع الين الياباني, أو العكس. أو شراء الدولار الأمريكي بدفع الجنية الإسترليني, أو العكس. أو شراء الدولار الأمريكي بدفع الفرنك السويسري مقابله, أو العكس. أو شراء أي عملة ودفع مقابلها عملة أخرى كثمن لها. وهكذا فانه يتم عرض العملات على شكل أزواج بحيث يتم بيع احد تلك الأزواج مقابل شراء الزوج الآخر أو العكس إن الفروقات البسيطة التي تنشأ بين أسعار العملات نتيجة لتغير قوى العرض والطلب خلال الوقت يمكن استغلالها لتحقيق الربح من هذا السوق. تخيل معي انك قمت بشراء يورو واحد الآن ودفعت مقابله (1.2700) دولار وبعد فترة قصيرة تغير سعر اليورو ليصبح (1.2800) فقمت ببيعه مرة أخرى بهذا المبلغ. تستطيع الآن حساب أرباحك ( 1.2800 - 1.2700 = 0.0010 ) من الواضح انك ربحت سنتا واحدا من تلك العملية البسيطة. ولكن ماذا لو انك قمت بشراء (10000) يورو, تستطيع أن تربح في تلك الصفقة (100) دولار دفعة واحده.يلزمني إذاً مبالغ مالية كبيرة للاستفادة من هذه السوق ؟ لا .. لن تحتاج إلى مبالغ كبيرة لتحقيق أرباح ضخمة في هذا السوق. ففي الواقع أنت لن تعتمد على أموالك التي خصصتها للاستثمار فقط !!إذ يتيح هذا السوق نظاما فريدا يمكنك من المتاجرة بكميات كبيرة من النقود مقابل دفع مبالغ بسيطة فقط .يسمى هذا النظام النظام الهامشي ! يمكنك هذا النظام من المتاجرة بمبالغ تصل إلى 200 ضعف المبلغ الذي تقوم باستثماره وأكثر من ذلك. وتحتفظ بالأرباح كاملة لنفسك. وكذلك الخسائر !! إلا أن خسائرك في جميع الأحوال لن تتعدى المبلغ الصغير الذي قمت باستثماره بداية. بمعنى انك لن تستطيع الاستمرار في الخسارة إذا تعدت الخسائر رأس مالك المبدئي, ولن تصبح مطالبا بدفع أية مبالغ إضافية فوق المبلغ الذي قمت باستثماره بادئ الأمر. إن حجم العمليات في سوق الفوركس في نمو مطرد. يرتبط هذا بالتطور الكبير في التجارة العالمية ورفع الحظر علي العملات في كثير من البلدان. إن (80 %) من كل المعاملات هو عبارة عن مضاربات في سوق العملة الهدف منها الحصول علي أرباح من فروقات الأسعار. وتجتذب هذه المضاربات العديد من المشاركين سواء من المنظمات المالية أو المستثمرين الأفراد.ولكن كيف تتم عمليات البيع والشراء هذه ؟ إن سوق الفوركس ليس سوقاُ بالمعني الحرفي للكلمة، إذ أنه ليس لديه مركزاُ و ليس لديه مكانا معينا تمارس فيه المتاجرة. إن المتاجرة تمارس عن طريق الاتصال التلفوني و الإنترنت بالحاسوب في وقت واحد بين مئات البنوك حول العالم. مئات الملايين من العملات تباع وتشتري كل بضع ثوان. تقوم شركات متخصصة ومرخصة باستلام أوامر البيع والشراء من المستثمرين لتقوم بتنفيذها لهم.
تسمى تلك الشركات بشركات الوساطة (Brokerage firms ) وبأي حال فانه لا يمكنك أن تقوم بتنفيذ أوامرك بشكل مباشر دون التعامل مع احد تلك الشركات. يتم الأمر بشكل عام بالتسلسل التالي
· تقوم باختيار شركة وساطة تناسب أهدافك وإمكاناتك لتتعاقد معها
· تقوم بفتح حساب لدى تلك الشركة وتسجل به معلوماتك الشخصية, وتودع المبلغ الذي تود استثماره بحسابك.
· تقوم بمتابعة حركة الأسعار عن طريق احد البرامج المتخصصة على حاسوبك وتقوم بإعطاء أوامر البيع والشراء لشركة الوساطة عن طريق برنامج المتاجرة.
· ستقوم الشركة بتنفيذ أوامرك وأي أرباح أو خسائر سيتم إضافتها أو سحبها من حسابك.
· يمكنك بطبيعة الحال سحب أموالك من الشركة أو الإضافة عليها في أي وقت تشاء.
الاتصال بينك وبين شركة الوساطة يتم عن طريق برنامج خاص يسمى محطة عمل ( Platform ), ويتم الدخول على هذا البرنامج عن طريق اسم مستخدم وكلمة مرور خاصة يتم تزويدك بها عند فتح الحساب بالشركة. يمكنك هذا البرنامج من متابعة الأسعار وإعطاء أوامر البيع والشراء والتحكم الكامل بحسابك. وبالطبع فان كل تلك العمليات ستتم أثناء اتصال حاسوبك بالانترنت. ستجد أن عملية الاتصال والتفاعل بينك وبين شركة تقع في النصف الآخر من الكرة الأرضية أمرا يسيرا جدا وستجد أن معظم الشركات تقدم دعما قويا لمساعدة المستثمرين وتقريب المسافات بينهم لأقرب حد وكأن الشركة تقع في الغرفة المجاورة لك. هكذا تتم الأمور بوجه عام ولكن ينبغي عليك أن تعلم انه قبل القيام بالمتاجرة بأموال حقيقية يجب أن تكون لديك الخبرات الكافية لإدارة حسابك بشكل سليم لأنه وببساطه يمكنك أن تخسر كل استثماراتك بسهولة إذا لم تكن لديك الخبرة الكافية.كيف أزيد من خبراتي ومعلوماتي بهذا السوق ؟ انه سؤالا واحدا ... إلى أي اتجاه سيتجه السعر ؟؟ لقد بذل الكثير من العلماء والأساتذة والمطورين مجهودا ضخما وأمضوا وقتا طويلا في الدراسة ليقدموا لنا أبحاثا ودراسات عديدة تعنى بأسواق المال. من اجل الإجابة على هذا السؤال. إن التنبؤ الصحيح باتجاه الأسعار يعتمد على الدراسة العميقة للسوق. عادة نجد ثلاثة أشكال تحليلية للسوق: تحليل أخباري, وتحليل فني, وتحليل نفسي. ويكون الجمع المدروس والصحيح لهذه التحليلات الثلاثة هو الضمان للتنبؤ الصحيح في سوق الفوركس. التحليل الإخباري يتضمن دراسة العوامل الاقتصادية والسياسية التي قد تؤثر علي سوق العملات. مثال لذلك تقارير سياسات بنك الاحتياطي المركزي الأمريكي، ومعاملات الاقتصاد الأساسية، وتصريحات رجال الدولة المهمين والأحداث المهمة الأخرى. والهدف الرئيس للتحليل الأساسي هو تحليل العوامل الرئيسة وتأثيرها علي ديناميكية الأسعار في سوق الفوركس. أن المتاجر في سوق الفوركس يكون دائما علي إلمام بالوضع الراهن عالمياًٌ. التحليل الفني وهو تحليل لحالة السوق ترتكز علي التغيرات السابقة للأسعار. وتستخدم في هذا التحليل الرسومات البيانية التي تعكس تغيرات الأسعار لفترة زمنية معينة. ويمكننا التحليل الفني كذلك من فهم حالة السوق العامة في الوقت الحالي، وبمؤشرات عدة يمكن التنبؤ بتغيرات الأسعار في المستقبل القريب. إن التحليل الفني يرتكز علي حقيقة أن حركة الأسعار تأخذ في الاعتبار كل العوامل التي يمكن أن تؤثر علي السوق - اقتصادية وسياسية ونفسية والعوامل الأخرى - أخذت كلها مسبقاً في الاعتبار عند تحديد الأسعار. و إذا كان السوق حقا سوقا فستتكون حركته نتيجة لقرارات عدد هائل من المشاركين اتخذوها بعد تحليلاتهم لقدر هائل من المعلومات عند قيامهم بعقد الصفقات. إن سلوك الأسعار هو نتيجة هذه القرارات، وبمراقبته يكون لديك مدخلاًً لكل المعلومات في هذا السوق. إن ما يلزم المتاجر حقيقة هو أن يعرف اتجاه حركة الأسعار. والتحليل الفني يعطي كماً هائلاً من الأدوات تمكننا من استخلاص تنبؤات مفيدة من الرسومات البيانية للأسعار. التحليل النفسي هو تحليل سلوكيات المتاجرين في السوق وحالتهم النفسية وتوقعاتهم وآمالهم وتخوفاتهم. وهذا النوع من التحليل مهم جدا لان نسبة صحته عالية جداً. ويجب أن لا ننسي أن خلف محطات الحاسوب التي تعطي توقعات الأسعار بشر وعلي تصرفاتهم تعتمد في نهاية المطاف أسعار العملات. ربما تجد أن الأمر في البداية مشوقا ورائعا وربما تجده شاقا ومتعبا وفي الحقيقة فان الأمر مشوقا ورائعا, وشاقا ومتعبا معا. فتحقيق أرباح ضخمة ليس أمرا سهلا ويسيرا ولكنه على أي حال ليس صعبا أو معقدا. يمكنك البدء من الآن في التعلم واكتساب الخبرات وتذكر بأنك إن لم تبدأ فلن تنتهي .... ننصح بشدة بقراءة الكتاب التالي : الفوركس للمبتدئين هذا الكتاب يعتبر مدخلا جيدا للتعرف على بورصة العملات وكيف يمكن العمل بها بالتفصيل وشرحا سريعا لأساسيات التحليل. في حال وجود أي تساؤلات أو استفسارات لا تتردد أبدا في مراسلتنا ________________________________________ المراجع المستخدمة في كتابة هذا المقال: - كتاب الفوركس للمبتدئين. - شركة فوركس أرابيا.
http://www.fx4beginners.com/ar/home/forex.htm
Electronic Commerce
Electronic Commerce
I
INTRODUCTION
Electronic Commerce or e-commerce, the exchange of goods and services by means of the Internet or other computer networks. E-commerce follows the same basic principles as traditional commerce—that is, buyers and sellers come together to exchange goods for money. But rather than conducting business in the traditional way—in stores and other “brick and mortar” buildings or through mail order catalogs and telephone operators—in e-commerce buyers and sellers transact business over networked computers.
E-commerce offers buyers convenience. They can visit the World Wide Web sites of multiple vendors 24 hours a day and seven days a week to compare prices and make purchases, without having to leave their homes or offices. In some cases, consumers can immediately obtain a product or service, such as an electronic book, a music file, or computer software, by downloading it over the Internet.
For sellers, e-commerce offers a way to cut costs and expand their markets. They do not need to build, staff, or maintain a store or print and distribute mail order catalogs. Automated order tracking and billing systems cut additional labor costs, and if the product or service can be downloaded, e-commerce firms have no distribution costs. Because they sell over the global Internet, sellers have the potential to market their products or services globally and are not limited by the physical location of a store. Internet technologies also permit sellers to track the interests and preferences of their customers with the customer’s permission and then use this information to build an ongoing relationship with the customer by customizing products and services to meet the customer’s needs.
E-commerce also has some disadvantages, however. Consumers are reluctant to buy some products online. Online furniture businesses, for example, have failed for the most part because customers want to test the comfort of an expensive item such as a sofa before they purchase it. Many people also consider shopping a social experience. For instance, they may enjoy going to a store or a shopping mall with friends or family, an experience that they cannot duplicate online. Consumers also need to be reassured that credit card transactions are secure and that their privacy is respected.
II
TYPES OF E-COMMERCE
A variety of businesses are conducted online, including retail businesses that sell products to consumers, service providers that sell services to consumers, auctioneers that create a marketplace for products and services, and business-to-business commerce. Retail transactions make up the largest part of e-commerce. Consumers can find computers, automobiles, clothing, books, music, airline and event tickets, food, and just about anything else for sale on the Internet.
A
Product Transactions
E-Commerce Web Site
A page from the Amazon.com Web site illustrates the ease and immediacy of electronic commerce. Shoppers are able to search a wide variety of products, make their selection, order online, and receive updates about the status of their shipment. After years of operating losses, Amazon.com was among the first e-businesses to report a profit.
Amazon.com
Retail Web sites typically include electronic catalogs that describe and display products for sale. Consumers can search for individual items or randomly browse electronic catalogs, some much larger than their mail order print counterparts. An Internet book retailer, for example, can offer millions of different book titles for sale on its Web site, far more titles than could fit into a store or that could be included cost-effectively in a print catalog.
Many online retailers allow customers to order products and then track the shipment of their order. Some computer manufacturers also allow consumers to choose different combinations of computer components, selecting the combination that best suits their budget and needs. Customers can then visit the company’s Web site to track the progress of their computer purchase as it is being built and shipped. Many online retailers also automatically notify their customers by e-mail when the product has been shipped.
B
Service Transactions
Other e-commerce businesses offer services. Financial services represent a large segment of e-commerce. For a small fee, online investment brokerages trade stocks on behalf of their clients. Online stock brokerages typically charge customers lower fees than traditional stock brokerages. Other sites provide consumers with a way to research and obtain mortgages and other loans online.
Travel sites offer a method of scheduling airline flights, renting cars, and booking hotel rooms. Travelers can plan all the details of their vacation or business trip, make reservations, and purchase tickets at the same site. Such sites also offer maps, travel literature, and booking information for travelers.
C
Auctions
Some e-commerce sites specialize in bringing buyers and sellers together, rather than selling products from their own inventories. Online auctioneers provide sellers a way to list and display items for sale and take bids from interested buyers. An online auctioneer may bring together millions of users and feature more than 700,000 items at any given time. In exchange for the auctioneer’s services, sellers pay the auctioneer a small fixed fee and a portion of the proceeds from the sale. Other sites invert this model. These sites enable bidders to name the price they are willing to pay for a particular product or service and then try to find a seller who is willing to meet that price.
D
Business-to-Business Transactions
Business-to-business commerce represents one of the fastest growing segments of e-commerce. Businesses order supplies and coordinate complicated projects electronically. For example, construction companies use e-commerce to order construction materials and coordinate the work of subcontractors. Before e-commerce, this work was conducted via telephone, facsimile, and regular mail. Subcontractors often lost time waiting for necessary parts to arrive or for another part of the project to be completed. With e-commerce, however, software can automatically track the inventories of manufacturers and suppliers so that both have adequate supplies on hand and no longer need to have excess inventories. Reducing inventories enables both manufacturers and suppliers to lower costs. The labor-intensive method of printing and then faxing or mailing purchase orders can also be avoided because software can create purchase orders and send them electronically.
E-commerce helps trucking and shipping companies match shipments with shippers. Before e-commerce, it was not uncommon for trucks or ships to drop off a shipment and then return to their base of operations empty. This practice was inefficient and cost the trucking or shipping company money. Specialized e-commerce software, along with the Global Positioning System (GPS), enables trucking firms to track the whereabouts of their trucks at all times and make better decisions as to how their trucks are routed so they can respond efficiently and cost-effectively to companies that need their services, dramatically reducing the number of trucks returning empty.
III
ISSUES AFFECTING THE DEVELOPMENT OF E-COMMERCE
Internet sales and transactions in the retail and services sectors increased significantly from 1999 to 2002. According to the United States Bureau of the Census, retail e-commerce sales increased from $15 billion in 1999 to $44 billion in 2002. The Census Bureau noted that in 2002 retail e-commerce sales represented only 1.5 percent of total retail sales. However, studies have shown that e-commerce has become very significant in certain product categories. For example, in 2002, 32 percent of computer hardware and software sales were transacted online, 17 percent of ticket sales were done over the Internet, and 12 percent of book sales were completed electronically, according to a study by the National Retail Federation and Forrester Research.
A number of unresolved issues have unfolded as e-commerce transactions have grown in number and value. Among these issues are taxation, security, privacy, and profitability.
A
Taxation
Because the Internet transcends national boundaries and also state or provincial boundaries within a nation, the issue of sales taxes on goods or services purchased over the Internet poses a problem for many governments that rely on sales tax revenue to fund government programs and services. The Internet is a largely tax-free zone. One study reported in 2001 found that state and local governments in the United States lost an estimated $13.3 billion in uncollected sales taxes on Internet purchases made that year. State and local governments have been lobbying the U.S. Congress to impose some kind of uniform sales tax that all e-commerce businesses would be required to pay. E-commerce businesses, however, have lobbied against such measures, arguing that it would impose a heavy burden on them. The European Union (EU) is also considering a proposal to impose sales taxes on Internet purchases by consumers. The EU already has a method for taxing business-to-business transactions over the Internet.
B
Security
Established encryption methods such as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), a protocol developed by Netscape Communications Corporation, encode credit card numbers and other information to foil would-be thieves. Shoppers can determine if the site they are using is secure by noting the “secure” icon at the bottom of their browser window. Also, the address bar of Internet browsers will carry the “https” prefix instead of the standard “http” prefix when the site is secured. Nevertheless, some consumers are reluctant to divulge credit card information over the Internet, and this reluctance has hindered the growth of e-commerce.
An alternative to credit card information is digital cash, or e-cash. In this arrangement, shoppers pay for a number of virtual credits through a single source, then use those credits as dollars when shopping. After checkout, the online retailer ships the goods to the buyer and adds shipping costs to the purchase price. Few e-commerce sites, however, offer e-cash.
C
Privacy
In addition to credit card security, many shoppers worry about privacy. To put them at ease, many Internet stores post “privacy statements” that explain their policy of sharing or not sharing customer information with other businesses. This privacy policy may include refusing to give the customer’s name and e-mail address to companies that send unsolicited and unwanted commercial e-mail messages, often known as junk mail or spam.
In 2003 the U.S. Congress passed legislation designed to curb spam. The new law made it illegal for senders of unsolicited commercial e-mail to disguise their identity by using false return addresses or misleading subject lines. Violators were subject to steep fines and possible prison terms. The law also prohibited the gathering of e-mail addresses from Web sites. Sponsors of the legislation estimated that the incredible growth in spam, representing about half of all e-mails, cost Internet access providers $9 billion annually in technology-related expenses necessary to handle the increased volume of mail. Clogged in-boxes also annoyed consumers and made it difficult to distinguish between solicited and unsolicited commercial e-mail messages.
D
Profitability
A large percentage of e-commerce businesses went bankrupt in 2000 and 2001, mostly due to inadequate business plans and excessive spending on advertising and marketing to attract customers to their Web sites. The dot-com boom of the late 1990s had largely turned into a dot-com bust as the 21st century began. An estimated 520 e-commerce businesses either ceased operation or declared bankruptcy from 1999 to 2001, resulting in the layoffs of nearly 100,000 employees, according to Fortune Magazine. However, a number of e-commerce sites began to report profits in 2001 and 2002. Notable among them were Amazon.com, Inc., based in Seattle, Washington, which pioneered many of the tools and procedures now commonplace in online retailing, Expedia, an online travel site, and eBay, a popular auction site.
Contributed By:Peter Scisco
Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
I
INTRODUCTION
Electronic Commerce or e-commerce, the exchange of goods and services by means of the Internet or other computer networks. E-commerce follows the same basic principles as traditional commerce—that is, buyers and sellers come together to exchange goods for money. But rather than conducting business in the traditional way—in stores and other “brick and mortar” buildings or through mail order catalogs and telephone operators—in e-commerce buyers and sellers transact business over networked computers.
E-commerce offers buyers convenience. They can visit the World Wide Web sites of multiple vendors 24 hours a day and seven days a week to compare prices and make purchases, without having to leave their homes or offices. In some cases, consumers can immediately obtain a product or service, such as an electronic book, a music file, or computer software, by downloading it over the Internet.
For sellers, e-commerce offers a way to cut costs and expand their markets. They do not need to build, staff, or maintain a store or print and distribute mail order catalogs. Automated order tracking and billing systems cut additional labor costs, and if the product or service can be downloaded, e-commerce firms have no distribution costs. Because they sell over the global Internet, sellers have the potential to market their products or services globally and are not limited by the physical location of a store. Internet technologies also permit sellers to track the interests and preferences of their customers with the customer’s permission and then use this information to build an ongoing relationship with the customer by customizing products and services to meet the customer’s needs.
E-commerce also has some disadvantages, however. Consumers are reluctant to buy some products online. Online furniture businesses, for example, have failed for the most part because customers want to test the comfort of an expensive item such as a sofa before they purchase it. Many people also consider shopping a social experience. For instance, they may enjoy going to a store or a shopping mall with friends or family, an experience that they cannot duplicate online. Consumers also need to be reassured that credit card transactions are secure and that their privacy is respected.
II
TYPES OF E-COMMERCE
A variety of businesses are conducted online, including retail businesses that sell products to consumers, service providers that sell services to consumers, auctioneers that create a marketplace for products and services, and business-to-business commerce. Retail transactions make up the largest part of e-commerce. Consumers can find computers, automobiles, clothing, books, music, airline and event tickets, food, and just about anything else for sale on the Internet.
A
Product Transactions
E-Commerce Web Site
A page from the Amazon.com Web site illustrates the ease and immediacy of electronic commerce. Shoppers are able to search a wide variety of products, make their selection, order online, and receive updates about the status of their shipment. After years of operating losses, Amazon.com was among the first e-businesses to report a profit.
Amazon.com
Retail Web sites typically include electronic catalogs that describe and display products for sale. Consumers can search for individual items or randomly browse electronic catalogs, some much larger than their mail order print counterparts. An Internet book retailer, for example, can offer millions of different book titles for sale on its Web site, far more titles than could fit into a store or that could be included cost-effectively in a print catalog.
Many online retailers allow customers to order products and then track the shipment of their order. Some computer manufacturers also allow consumers to choose different combinations of computer components, selecting the combination that best suits their budget and needs. Customers can then visit the company’s Web site to track the progress of their computer purchase as it is being built and shipped. Many online retailers also automatically notify their customers by e-mail when the product has been shipped.
B
Service Transactions
Other e-commerce businesses offer services. Financial services represent a large segment of e-commerce. For a small fee, online investment brokerages trade stocks on behalf of their clients. Online stock brokerages typically charge customers lower fees than traditional stock brokerages. Other sites provide consumers with a way to research and obtain mortgages and other loans online.
Travel sites offer a method of scheduling airline flights, renting cars, and booking hotel rooms. Travelers can plan all the details of their vacation or business trip, make reservations, and purchase tickets at the same site. Such sites also offer maps, travel literature, and booking information for travelers.
C
Auctions
Some e-commerce sites specialize in bringing buyers and sellers together, rather than selling products from their own inventories. Online auctioneers provide sellers a way to list and display items for sale and take bids from interested buyers. An online auctioneer may bring together millions of users and feature more than 700,000 items at any given time. In exchange for the auctioneer’s services, sellers pay the auctioneer a small fixed fee and a portion of the proceeds from the sale. Other sites invert this model. These sites enable bidders to name the price they are willing to pay for a particular product or service and then try to find a seller who is willing to meet that price.
D
Business-to-Business Transactions
Business-to-business commerce represents one of the fastest growing segments of e-commerce. Businesses order supplies and coordinate complicated projects electronically. For example, construction companies use e-commerce to order construction materials and coordinate the work of subcontractors. Before e-commerce, this work was conducted via telephone, facsimile, and regular mail. Subcontractors often lost time waiting for necessary parts to arrive or for another part of the project to be completed. With e-commerce, however, software can automatically track the inventories of manufacturers and suppliers so that both have adequate supplies on hand and no longer need to have excess inventories. Reducing inventories enables both manufacturers and suppliers to lower costs. The labor-intensive method of printing and then faxing or mailing purchase orders can also be avoided because software can create purchase orders and send them electronically.
E-commerce helps trucking and shipping companies match shipments with shippers. Before e-commerce, it was not uncommon for trucks or ships to drop off a shipment and then return to their base of operations empty. This practice was inefficient and cost the trucking or shipping company money. Specialized e-commerce software, along with the Global Positioning System (GPS), enables trucking firms to track the whereabouts of their trucks at all times and make better decisions as to how their trucks are routed so they can respond efficiently and cost-effectively to companies that need their services, dramatically reducing the number of trucks returning empty.
III
ISSUES AFFECTING THE DEVELOPMENT OF E-COMMERCE
Internet sales and transactions in the retail and services sectors increased significantly from 1999 to 2002. According to the United States Bureau of the Census, retail e-commerce sales increased from $15 billion in 1999 to $44 billion in 2002. The Census Bureau noted that in 2002 retail e-commerce sales represented only 1.5 percent of total retail sales. However, studies have shown that e-commerce has become very significant in certain product categories. For example, in 2002, 32 percent of computer hardware and software sales were transacted online, 17 percent of ticket sales were done over the Internet, and 12 percent of book sales were completed electronically, according to a study by the National Retail Federation and Forrester Research.
A number of unresolved issues have unfolded as e-commerce transactions have grown in number and value. Among these issues are taxation, security, privacy, and profitability.
A
Taxation
Because the Internet transcends national boundaries and also state or provincial boundaries within a nation, the issue of sales taxes on goods or services purchased over the Internet poses a problem for many governments that rely on sales tax revenue to fund government programs and services. The Internet is a largely tax-free zone. One study reported in 2001 found that state and local governments in the United States lost an estimated $13.3 billion in uncollected sales taxes on Internet purchases made that year. State and local governments have been lobbying the U.S. Congress to impose some kind of uniform sales tax that all e-commerce businesses would be required to pay. E-commerce businesses, however, have lobbied against such measures, arguing that it would impose a heavy burden on them. The European Union (EU) is also considering a proposal to impose sales taxes on Internet purchases by consumers. The EU already has a method for taxing business-to-business transactions over the Internet.
B
Security
Established encryption methods such as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), a protocol developed by Netscape Communications Corporation, encode credit card numbers and other information to foil would-be thieves. Shoppers can determine if the site they are using is secure by noting the “secure” icon at the bottom of their browser window. Also, the address bar of Internet browsers will carry the “https” prefix instead of the standard “http” prefix when the site is secured. Nevertheless, some consumers are reluctant to divulge credit card information over the Internet, and this reluctance has hindered the growth of e-commerce.
An alternative to credit card information is digital cash, or e-cash. In this arrangement, shoppers pay for a number of virtual credits through a single source, then use those credits as dollars when shopping. After checkout, the online retailer ships the goods to the buyer and adds shipping costs to the purchase price. Few e-commerce sites, however, offer e-cash.
C
Privacy
In addition to credit card security, many shoppers worry about privacy. To put them at ease, many Internet stores post “privacy statements” that explain their policy of sharing or not sharing customer information with other businesses. This privacy policy may include refusing to give the customer’s name and e-mail address to companies that send unsolicited and unwanted commercial e-mail messages, often known as junk mail or spam.
In 2003 the U.S. Congress passed legislation designed to curb spam. The new law made it illegal for senders of unsolicited commercial e-mail to disguise their identity by using false return addresses or misleading subject lines. Violators were subject to steep fines and possible prison terms. The law also prohibited the gathering of e-mail addresses from Web sites. Sponsors of the legislation estimated that the incredible growth in spam, representing about half of all e-mails, cost Internet access providers $9 billion annually in technology-related expenses necessary to handle the increased volume of mail. Clogged in-boxes also annoyed consumers and made it difficult to distinguish between solicited and unsolicited commercial e-mail messages.
D
Profitability
A large percentage of e-commerce businesses went bankrupt in 2000 and 2001, mostly due to inadequate business plans and excessive spending on advertising and marketing to attract customers to their Web sites. The dot-com boom of the late 1990s had largely turned into a dot-com bust as the 21st century began. An estimated 520 e-commerce businesses either ceased operation or declared bankruptcy from 1999 to 2001, resulting in the layoffs of nearly 100,000 employees, according to Fortune Magazine. However, a number of e-commerce sites began to report profits in 2001 and 2002. Notable among them were Amazon.com, Inc., based in Seattle, Washington, which pioneered many of the tools and procedures now commonplace in online retailing, Expedia, an online travel site, and eBay, a popular auction site.
Contributed By:Peter Scisco
Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
