Tuesday, June 2, 2015

The Internet and Trade

     With the popularity of the internet and its close to instant speeds online shopping has become especially popular.  E-Commerce is one name for trade that happens over the internet but there are several different kinds.  There are business to business, business to consumer, and consumer to consumer.  Most people will only be very familiar with the second two because unless you do trade for a business you would not be involved in the first of these. Business to consumer is when we, the consumers,  but a product or service over the internet from a business.  There are thousands of different places to do this but probably the most common online business to buy from is Amazon.  The third type of E-Commerce is Consumer to Consumer,  this is another common type that we ssee often, a great example is craigslist.  They key to Consumer to Consumer is that you are buying from another person and not a larger business.
     These three types of E-Commerce are very different but because they are all done over the internet there are certain 'ideas you must consider in order to shop safely.  Always double check the source you are buying from.  This means to check the company or person to make sure they are real, and then check the website to make it is real as well.  Even if a website looks legitimate you need to ensure that it is the correct place.  Like all things the key is to just have common sense.
     M-Commerce is a term used to describe the above mentioned types of E-Commerce that are done on a mobile device.

Reference:
http://www.differencebetween.info/difference-between-e-commerce-and-m-commerce
Picture From:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/78855484@N03/7223384344

How Do We Talk On The Internet?

     Communication nowadays has all but been completely taken over by the internet.  There are many different ways to get a message to someone across the internet but there are ways that are more efficient than others depending on the task.  Social Media is by far one of the most commonly use means of communication on the Internet because it is usually meant for fun.  From Facebook and Twitter to YouTube and Pinterest the common theme is sharing some piece of information with a large number of people, most often then not you will post something for many people to see.
     Email dates back farther than social media but has maintained its position as the primary source of communication on the internet.  Because it is asynchronous, which means that the sender and the receiver do not have to be on at the same time, it is useful for conversations that do not have to be instant, or for subject that may be deemed less critical.
     Other forms of internet communication include VoIP phones, which are phones that go over the internet like data, and Video chatting, like Skype or Google Hangouts.  These are great because they are live and make conversations much faster and direct than Email or Social Media.


Reference:
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=Types+of+communication+on+the+internet

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The Birth of the Internet and the World Wide Web

     The internet began as a connection between two computers, located at UCLA and Stanford.  This first connection did not come about without much work done before its creation.  In 1958 the Advance Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which was an initiative of the U.S. Department of Defense during the Cold War.  The ARPANET was built and after some time it had four computers connected that could send data.  Vincent Cerf and Robert Kahn are credited as the fathers of the internet because of there work on the creation of internet protocols that still are in use to this day.


      The World Wide Web is not the same as the internet despite common belief.  The World Wide Web, or just the Web, was designed by Tim Berners-Lee as a means to share his research documents with other researchers.  With the help of Robert Cailliau, the first web browser was developed in 1991, it was very primitive and could only support text.  Two years after this the Mosaic Browser was released which could support graphics as well as text.  This later evolved into the Netscape Browser which grew in popularity and help to increase the size of the Web.  This remained as the most widely used web browser until 1999 when Windows Internet Explorer took the lead.  Since then  many other web browsers have been released and updated into smoothing running programs but the protocols that run them remain the same.

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