ABSTRACT
The past two decades have witnessed the development of several new technologies that have expanded the world’s geographical boundaries and hastened the pace of human communication. Foremost among them is the Internet. The Internet has been steadily woven into all aspects of business and leisure. The Internet has created a new business model that maximizes the potential for instantaneous communication to a worldwide customer base. It has fundamentally changed how retail trade is conducted in terms of information gathering, marketing, production and distribution. Secondly, the argument can be made that the Internet serves as the unofficial demarcation point that separates traditional media from so called new media. New media products and services like e-commerce (Amazon.com, eBay), MP3 file sharing (iTunes), social networking (MySpace, Facebook) and on-line reservation systems (airline, hotel and theater) are the direct consequence of the Internet and the power of intelligent networking.
