E-markets seen as the next frontier for business

What's that smell? It's the scent of things to come. The story goes, that soon, we'll be able to smell a product from our computers before buying it from an electronic shop, now that DigiScents, a California-based company has developed a technology called iSmell. Makes sense.

Those with a nose for business in Cyberland stand to make mountains of capital or fade into oblivion, as we saw last week when the six-month-old British e-tailer Boo.com went belly-up. PricewaterhouseCoopers says that seven out of 28 publicly-traded Net firms in Britain will run out of cash in the next six months.

There are many ventures everywhere surrounded by smoke and mirrors.

Risk of becoming yesterday's news or not, the smell of money continues to drive business and people with ideas to the Internet. Cisco estimates that about 70,000 Web sites are created every day. How many of those will have a long life- span will not be known, but one thing is certain, the potential to generate business by leveraging the power of the Internet is staggering, although estimates vary.

Electronic commerce, defined by the US Census Bureau as 'any transaction completed over a computer network that involves the transfer of ownership or rights to use goods or services', will generate business worth US$7.29 trillion worldwide by 2004, up from US$145 billion last year, the GartnerGroup, a technology business adviser, says. The value is forecast to reach US$403 billion in 2000 and US$953 billion in 2001.

Forrester Research says that in the US alone, electronic business from one business to another (B2B) will be worth US$2.7 trillion by 2004. Spending on packaged e-commerce software will reach US$14.5 billion in 2003, rising from just US$3.1 billion in 1999.