"A lot of people think that e-commerce and 
e-business is something new,
some are even standing and looking up to the sky and are wondering, when it will come or where it will land"

You may find some grammatical errors in this text, I'm dyslectic, but still try to do my best, any comments are most welcome.

This document will initially address e-business, B2B and e-commerce in general ,as well as describe a conceptual innovation, I my self came up with in early 1999, based on the transaction system innovation made by E-lysium  in Miami, USA. It will also discuss pre-paid transactions and it will describe the concept of creating 
a d-dollar currency.

Written in May 2000.

For us who is involved in McGordons, and with our long experience from building up business and administration functions, based on electronic solutions, e-commerce is just a name on how to conduct business in the future. It is not a "thing", or a box, its more a general expression, for how we can conduct business, with the help of computer based functions.

Up to just recently years, most segments or sectors within the different industries have lived their own life without being mixed together or having a chance to exchange documents or files. Each industry seams keen to innovate there own standard.

This also was related to each segments or level within each industrial segment. You could also see the same related to equipment such as a PABX (Telephone switch) and a computer system.

Today we finally have a global agreed way of doing business and communicate with each other, everyone has agreed and adopted one standard - INTERNET. 

But Internet is not so old as the term e-commerce. If I don't remember wrong Electronic Data Interchange - EDI - was the first attempt to unify and make document inter-exchange easier in-between different companies, governmental offices etc, which I and we came across in early 80th.

EDI serves as a unified faster and substantially more efficient way to communicate and process business data a cross the globe, simplified, where documents and forms can be exchanged - and still be the same..

n. Acronym for e lectronic d ata i nterchange. A set of standards for controlling the transfer of business documents, such as purchase orders and invoices, between computers. The goal of EDI is the elimination of paperwork and increased response time. For EDI to be effective, users must agree on certain standards for formatting and exchanging information, such as the X.400 protocol.

This might sound as we are negative to e-commerce, not at all, it's just important to bring down the level of "hype" and realize that we don’t need any longer to travel to find our customers, they are there in a global unified highway - Internet. What many forgot when the design or theoretical make their market entry plan - is the simple things - who would like to pay for such service - is the service so good that the consumers will pay for it?

When I my self, together with my excellent team of "hackers" back in early 1983, started to develop a public BBS service with free E-Mail and Conference and search engine utilities, it was hard to understand how big such service would be 15 years later. The Service we started had the name CompuText™. By having such long experience I can insure you that there is few concepts, which passes my own objective judgment and will get a clear go-ahead, due to the lack of true revenues.

E-Commerce in a long perspective.
The E-Commerce boom, which we have seen the last couple of years, derives from a Wall Street demand of large earnings, from shares, not from services who generates true earnings back to its investors and innovators. That's a dangerous path, and as we will see, the balloon will also soon crack.

Beside the "hype" we have now a tremendous opportunity to do business in a new way, there even a small village in Pakistan, India or any other country can make their business directly to the home in US, Europe. It is no longer needed any middle-hands and the profit for a producer of gods or services can be kept.

The number of Internet users are expected to grow from what is said to day to be nearly 350 million to exceed 500 million already 2002, and some estimations talk about one billion Internet users within just a few years.

The large explosion of users today, comes obviously from US and Europe, and we will see a quick increase from other regions such as South America, the Middle East, Africa, Pakistan, India, Far East and China. 

But one important question to ask your self, is, will these markets do as "we" did in the US or in Europe?

Are the consumer-behaviour the same, the culture the same, the way we do business the same?

Ready to GO on the Internet?
I would strongly recommend, any predictions towards the number of users, who eventually would be interested of a new service and start to use Internet, to look into aspects, such as the maturity of the consumer. It will take much longer to achieve the market figures as they today are presented. We may have the user, but the time for them to be mature, takes longer.

Training and education is vital and if we look at the average usage in Europe or in US, the time spent on Internet are still not so high, so don't expect to much from new regions.

Senior user - good advisors, that's maybe a new workforce we should pay larger attention to, they have long experience from a long life, there valuable advise can help the new user communities.

Trade and Pay?
What is crucial to look at, is how to secure e-Business and how to get paid for services or products any one would sell over the internet. In the US you are born with a VISA and a MasterCard, in Europe you do business by order the gods, get it delivered and than wait for the bill to come.

Is this how it works in the world?

Not at all, the larger population who will be the large consumers and the large users group in the future Internet Society, will expect to do business the way they are used to.

I my self believe, that the largest growth, will comes from transactions, there you first pay in an amount on a type of "cyber-account" and than make your trade. This way of doing business also are more likely the way the consumer are used to do business in the regions there we will see the largest consumer-on-the-net growth. Such way, also take a way a number of hurdles and can also in a well organized way create trust and reliability for what you buy, if using Internet.

Pre-paid transactions, are not so popular to talk about today, neither in US nor in Europe, just because the "system" are not build to handle trade in such way.

But by looking into the the issue, little more in detail, then it start to make a lot of sense:

If you don't have the money, you cant spend.

I would say that the largest growth in e-business for the next 10 years will come from Pay & Trade.