The Role of Technology

The selection of a particular technology will depend on which market process is favored by users. For example, the push model of Internet advertising gives customers control over marketing, but assumes consumers are passive—and too lazy to participate. The pull model, on the other hand, recognizes the incentive of consumers to actively participate in the market process and to reveal their preferences. For push models to succeed, virtual sellers need to restrict buyers' active participation, perhaps by promoting technologies that disable such features. However, sellers often ignore the extent to which virtual buyers are willing to participate in the market as well as the fact that available technologies can turn such willingness into action. Thus, to predict which enabling technology will be favored, consideration must be given to the objectives of virtual players and what market process will best support those objectives. The so-called web broadcasting and the new generation of push technologies are in fact variants of the pull model, because they enable consumers to select contents. Whether any given delivery scheme is called a pull or push model, its distinguishing feature lies in the way it interacts with recipients. In other words, the players and processes determine which of the enabling technologies will be most useful, not vice versa. Some of today's nascent technologies are bound to be standards by the year2015. Important features that will shape the future include computer processing, storage, communication, and presentation. Computer Processing: Computer processing power will continue to experience exponential growth, doubling in some 18 months. Personal computers with gigahertz clock speed will offer consumers the processing power to receive, select, and present daily news, e-mails, and various information available on the net. The human brain performs between 10 trillion and 1,000 trillion operations per second. By 2015,desktop computers will reach the low echelon of this human-like computational performance. With such computing power, a networked intelligence, and access to the depository of human knowledge, a computer will behave like an expert who assists in decision-making based on facts and knowledge. Storage: Read-and-write DVDs (formerly known as digital video discs)will become standard storage devices for digital documents, each disc holding over 10 gigabytes of data. These discs will replace CDs an dvideo tapes when audio equipment, video players, digital HDTV, and computers are all linked together. For larger file storage and backups, magnetic tapes or hard drives will continue to hold an edge over optical disks, but files will be stored in central servers. Users will store their files on these servers and download when necessary. Original files on the server will be closely linked by icons and aliases to their copies on a personal computer or display device. Data integrity will be maintained through automatic updating without the chore of uploading or downloading. Communication: After a transitional popularity of ISDN networks, the last mile will demand more bandwidth and faster connection. While optical fiber networks will make bandwidth a plentiful resource in the backbone, congestion in access ramps to the information infrastructure will call for efficient mechanisms for resource allocation. However, new products sent over fiber optic networks will be still larger and more complicated. As a result, bandwidth management will be important, but the challenge will be to devise products that take advantage of bandwidth rather than saving on bandwidth. Along with fiber optic cable networks, high-frequency non-cable networks using microwave and satellite communications will carry digital signals. There will no longer be differences between local switching telephone networks, mobile phone networks, long distance carriers, digital data services, and the Internet. All digital communications will become interchangeable and interoperable. Presentation: Presentation (display) devices will be integrated: it will be possible to move digital HDTV sets, computer monitors, security monitors, video phones, and various appliances' control screens wherever desired. Video, audio, data, and multimedia contents—today's video tapes, music CDs, multimedia CDs, and computer floppy disks—will be played by using one standard player. World Wide WebPages will present sophisticated visual simulations of web materials, instead of two-dimensional versions, using virtual reality languages. Virtual reality markup languages (VRMLs) will complete the progress toward a rich and real-life presentation that started with the launching of the World Wide Web 20 years ago. These enabling technologies of the 21st century will support the activities of virtual businesses, governments, and consumer groups in their sales, research, recreation, and other activities. The goal of this chapter is to describe resulting changes in the economic and social sphere of the virtual economy, but it begins by describing the players and other components of this virtual economy, without which the enabling technologies have no value.