Internet - The World Wide Web
What Next For Technology

What Next For Technology

Wireless handheld browsing and wireless e-mail
People will be able to access your Web site information from more places. At the same time, you will be able to contact them when they are nearby, perhaps sending them an e-mail containing a special offer when they happen to be within a few miles of your business location. Perhaps you’ll offer them the ability to click a button asking you to contact their nearby friends for an impromptu get together at your café. Handheld devices with wireless access are making this possible.

Cellular telephones and handheld personal information managers are becoming indistinguishable and can connect to the Internet through wireless connections. Many new models feature micro Web browsers that allow limited Web browsing. They rely on unique pages that are formatted differently than your regular Web pages. A protocol called WAP, or Wireless Application Protocol, is broadly accepted as the platform for this. Wireless e-mail is another related technology that is becoming increasingly commonplace. Most current cellular PCS networks let you send short e-mail messages to cellular telephones. It is the ability of cellular networks to identify the location of the handset that opens the door to the fascinating relationship marketing ideas listed above.

Currently, the speed of wireless data connections to handheld devices is slow and the screens are small. New developments will certainly change this over the next few years. At the same time, these technologies rely on sophisticated technologies within the network of the carriers. These technologies are currently only available in limited areas, but the carriers are expanding their wireless networks as quickly as they can and adding data and Internet capabilities.

Advanced media becoming practical
A picture is worth a thousand words. This is not only true in the richness of what it can communicate, but in the case of moving pictures—streaming video—it is true regarding the size of the data and the speed of access and downloading.

Advanced media consisting of live or prerecorded audio and video, animation using technologies like Macromedia Flash and Apple QuickTime 3D, and VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) is becoming increasingly practical. While impossibly

slow using dial-up modem connections, the fact that high-speed Internet connections are becoming more common make it a reality for more people.

This makes it possible to communicate information in new ways and to personalize your visitor’s experience. Your voice can communicate nuances through expression and tone that help visitors get to know you better before they even met you.

More important, if you have complicated information to communicate, the Web permits you to show procedures or the process of creating as effectively as the best PBS television program. Animation permits you to “assemble” a whole out of a group of individual parts and, unlike television, if the message isn’t perfectly understood the first time, the segment can be immediately replayed.

Sound, movement, and video must be used with restraint. Like any technological breakthrough, they can easily be overused, obscuring your message rather than enhancing it. Blinking messages and moving text often attract attention to one part of your Web site at the expense of other parts.

E-commerce becomes commonplace
Most Web users shop online. While they may ultimately make their purchase in your store, more and more are actually carrying out the final transaction using credit cards on Web sites. The majority of users, in fact, have already made purchases online. More users are realizing that their credit card number is perhaps more likely to be stolen from a receipt in the dumpster behind the restaurant than off of the Web. All of these things have contributed to the explosion of e-commerce. Whether you sell small products or expensive services, you should be familiar with e-commerce.

Adding e-commerce capabilities can be as simple as using one of the free services from companies like Yahoo.com or as complicated as buying, programming, and installing an e-commerce application suite on your own servers that is integrated with your own warehouse and shipping operations. In any case, the basic components are the same:

A way to present products, hopefully selected from a database and presented based on the interests of the visitor

A way for visitors to select and order the product (usually called a shopping cart application)

A way to accept credit card payments and calculate tax and shipping charges

A way to send that order to the people who will put the gadget in the box and apply a shipping label to it.

And of course, a way to notify the customer that it was shipped, provide the shipper’s tracking number (with a link to the shipper’s tracking Web site), and offer a 30-day discount coupon for accessories, which you present on a personalized Web page with their name at the top.