A New Golden Age

"It feels like the 1990s all over again!"

Thus began Donna Hoffman's morning keynote address at a recent gathering of online retailers in Las Vegas. It took awhile for the meaning of her words to sink in. "Are we really ready to think nostalgically about the '90s?" I wondered. And what were the '90s all about, anyway? Images began to slowly filter through the fog in my woefully under-caffeinated brain (remember, this was Vegas): The Gulf War, grunge rock, Dolly the cloned sheep, The Full Monty, OJ, globalization, Pokemon, Forrest Gump.

The fog eventually lifted and I realized that she was referring to dawn of the Internet. According to Hoffman, co-director of the Sloan Center for Internet Retailing at the University of California Riverside, we're now in something akin to a second Golden Age of the Internet, an era marked by a head-spinning development of technologies and advancements in functionality, all enabled by, says Hoffman, "an exponential growth in computing power, storage power and communication power."

It's an era that has brought us what we refer to, rather nebulously, as Web 2.0. We now have freedom to control and create online. Or, as Hoffman says, "Web 2.0 gave the consumers control over their own web navigation experience." And, according to Hoffman, it's an era that will soon usher in Web 3.0, "where the web will begin to understand itself, and augment this user control with the integration of artificial intelligence."

For e-commerce, Hoffman predicts continued growth of "social shopping" that enhances consumers' ability to share and recommend products, "videopinions" to enhance word-of-mouth, human-filtered search, more fully customizable websites that instantly adapt to meet customers' perceived needs or desires and--ultimately--3D printing, scent domes and cybertouch devices that will take digitized information from our computers and transform it in such a way that it appeals to all our senses. Just as we now download and listen to digital music, soon we may be able to experience digital scents and textures.

Unfortunately, you'll find nothing in these pages to help consumers virtually sniff, touch or taste your products. However, whether you're a veteran e-tailer or relatively new to the Internet, we're confident you'll find useful information that will help you take your e-commerce site to the next level.

A good place to start is the "Interactive Marketing Guide." Written by Tony Sziklai, president of Moulton Logistics Management, it's a wonderfully comprehensive resource that details a dozen online marketing techniques, outlines the benefits and drawbacks of each, and even ranks them from the perspective of the direct-to-consumer retailer.

The holiday season is crunch time for any retailer, online or off. In "The Selling Season," Ralf VonSosen, vice president of Infopia, offers five key strategies for maximizing online sales--and making your holidays that much brighter.

Imagine what you could do if you knew the physical location of each customer who came to your website. Not only could you implement more targeted marketing strategies, but you could also find it easier to comply with location-based regulations and even prevent fraud. Quova's Kerry Langstaff will teach you how to do exactly that via IP geolocation in "Location, Location, Location."

And that's just the beginning. With articles on advergaming, RSS and grid computing--in addition to a wealth of e-commerce research--we hope to inspire you to take advantage of the Internet's new Golden Age.

Tom Dellner
Executive Editor