It's a Question of Technology - Q&A Q - I have been hearing a lot about the Internet and eCommerce. Why should I do business on the Web? A - Having a Web presence can do many things for your business. Consider the following statistics: 83 million Internet users in the U.S. 56 million eShoppers 23 million eBuyers 4.5 million people will "go online" in the next 3 months $35 billion in eCommerce in 1998 $170 billion estimated by the year 2003 65 million new Internet users in the next 3 years With figures like this, why wouldn't you want a web site for your business? This is the marketing channel of the 21st century! Shopping on the Internet is safe. There have been no verifiable cases of hackers stealing credit card info from a secure shopping site. Some consumers are still skeptical, but many already do things that are much more susceptible to fraud. Just about every one with a credit card has handed their card to the waiter/waitress at a restaurant to pay for the meal. Do you know what that person is doing with your card? (This is not intended to imply that any wrongdoing has happened locally, but it has happened elsewhere!) What about catalog shopping - placing the order with a cordless phone? Any one with a police scanner can pick up the frequency used by cordless phones, and the caller would never know he or she is being listened to! With a Web site, your business can operate 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, in a Global market! Now instead of selling your "widgets" just to the fine residents of the Rim Country, you can sell them to any one in the world. Your business operations can be streamlined - case in point: our Rim Country Chamber of Commerce. The figures outlined in the October newsletter prove this point. You can grow your business by leaps and bounds, and that's just the beginning! So what are you waiting for? Q - What is a browser and where can I purchase this item? A - A browser is the software program that enables you to view Web pages. The two most common are the Netscape Communicator suite, and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Both are available for downloading free from the Internet, and your Internet Service Provider should also be able to provide you with this software, free of charge. Q - I have a 3-year-old computer that seems to take forever to process data from the Internet. Why is this? A - In the computer technology market, new products are introduced so fast that it seems your computer is "out of date" as soon as you buy it and take it home! So in this instance, a 3-year-old computer is still a functioning system, but it may not be capable of handling the amount of information that is out there in a "timely" fashion. The three main components that relate to the speed of your computer and the incoming information are your processor, modem, and amount of RAM memory. The most recent additions in the processor market are now operating at 600 MHz or faster, although a 400 MHz processor will handle most tasks quite well. Modems are capable of transferring information at 56 kilobytes per second. Your phone line may not support that speed, but upgrading your modem is a low cost way of improving the speed of information transfers. RAM is also a major factor in how well your computer "computes". I like to use an analogy I heard many years ago to describe the difference between RAM memory and hard drive memory. Pretend you are doing research at a large library. Think of RAM as the size of the desk you are working at, and the multitudes of shelves as your hard drive. The books on those shelves represent your software programs. The book doesn't take up much space when it is closed and sitting on a shelf, but you can't use it that way. So you take several books from the shelves and open them on your desk. The desk will soon get covered with the books, and you might start a second layer. Now it is taking you longer to retrieve information from the books on your desk. If you want to add any more, you will either have to close some and put them away, or you will have to find a bigger desk! You might even get so frustrated that you just "freeze up" and refuse to do any more work without clearing the whole desk and starting over! As you can see from this analogy, having a "large desk" to work from helps prevent problems, and keeps your programs running as fast as possible. - - -