Second, electronic commerce poses a headache for national regulators, especially in service industries such as medicine and financial advice where suppliers are much better informed than their customers.
In some ways electronic commerce has already had a profound impact: just ask the Wall Street brokers who have been watching their private clients flock to online discount brokers.
Eric Hughes, a cryptology expert with Simple Access, an electronic-commerce consulting firm, conducted his own experiment: at a technical conference, he issued a roll of pennies to every participant and explained that there was a one-cent charge, payable into a box beside the door, each time anyone entered the main room.
Hirai Yoshimitsu, deputy secretary-general of the Electronic Commerce Promotion Council of Japan, predicts that within a decade, half of Japan's e-commerce will be conducted over non-PC devices such as phones and public computer kiosks.
Oracle believes that the rigours of doing business on the Internet are creating a demand for ever more sophisticated database technology, and that 8i will be a natural choice for electronic commerce.
First Data, a global leader in electronic commerce and payment processing, is actively recruiting thousands of new merchants in these areas and will soon expand those efforts to deploy more contactless merchant terminals across the country.
ENGADGET: Google Wallet mobile payment service, Google Offers announced
Matas says U.S. Department of Commerce figures for sales of electronic systems, a wider category that includes consumer electronics, computers and other electronic products, is slumping by about 4% for 2002.
Although e-mail may have killed some letters, post offices stand to gain from becoming the delivery boys for electronic commerce, which is expected to rise within a few years to 15% of all retail sales.
Deutsche Telekom's second tactic is to reinvent itself as a Systemhaus, selling multimedia, electronic commerce and anything else floating modishly across the Atlantic.
Add to that the increased demand for IT projects, plus year 2000 and electronic-commerce projects, and you've got a "really stressed-out situation, " Polansky says.
Many consultants look to a new strut to prop up growth: electronic commerce.
During one test, DIS employees from five buildings viewed a live, on-screen presentation of a managers' meeting detailing the department's electronic commerce plans.
These players lack the clout to compete effectively in the portal or electronic commerce arenas but still have to bear the costs of keeping together a national or regional network.
Approval of the measure is being urged by industry groups and some national corporations, which say the lack of a uniform legal standard on electronic signatures is impeding interstate commerce.
The next day, they met for smoothies in Palo Alto and came up with the idea that became PayPal: a system of electronic payment designed to make e-commerce easy, consistent, and secure.
The ad campaign led to a tremendous amount of "heavy volume to the electronic-commerce site, which wasn't configured for that sort of volume, " Doyle said.
"We got a directive from the Department of Commerce, which wants to become more electronic, " Leslie said.
Slowdowns and bottlenecks greeted some visitors to the site, but the site "never went down, " claimed Brian Doyle, a spokesman for IBM Global Services, which provided Web hosting and electronic-commerce software for the site.
Politicians are painting a dire picture of schools being shut down and hospitals closing whilst ways are found to tax electronic commerce.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology, a part of the Commerce Department, is beginning the process of defining accuracy and security requirements for electronic voting equipment.
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