Editorial 23/2
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EDITORIAL
Editorial 23/2 Rainer Alt & Karen Heyden & Hubert Österle
Published online: 8 May 2013 # Institute of Information Management, University of St. Gallen 2013
Dear Readers of Electronic Markets, In the last issue we discussed that the Internet has been enhanced with mobile devices which are about to outnumber the human population. While the infrastructure has become almost ubiquitous, other developments have occurred which make use of this availability. Among the prominent are Internet services, such as the World Wide Web (WWW), which has spurred a large number of innovations on the Web itself, such as electronic trading and social media platforms. Many of these web-based services have also become known under the notion of Cloud Computing. We recognize that the ubiquitous infrastructure of the Internet has been the fertilizer of the WWW infrastructure which in turn has become the platform of more user- and/or business-centric services and platforms. Today, we are not only experiencing the modification of key Internet technologies, which date back to the 1970s, in terms of bandwidth, security, and reliability, but also the interaction of at least three infrastructure technologies with more to be expected. At the same time we experience that the entire digital evolution is still at an early stage. Although an increasing number of private and professional users are connected via various devices to the electronic world and most are able to access the WWW, the use to services has several shortcomings. Participation in social media platforms is as proprietary as the usage of most R. Alt (*) : K. Heyden University of Leipzig, Grimmaische Str. 12, 04109 Leipzig, Germany e-mail: [email protected] K. Heyden e-mail: [email protected] H. Österle University of St. Gallen, Müller-Friedberg-Str 8, 9000 St. Gallen, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected]
cloud services, i.e. membership in Facebook and Twitter is as separated from each other as the use of most apps on end-user devices. In the professional or the businessto-business environment, companies are still reluctant to share their enterprise knowledge on so-called multitenant cloud services and are in an orientation phase to integrate social media potentials, such as sharing, cocreation, and close user interaction in their strategies. This opens a broad spectrum for research which – as with all fundamental innovations – needs to address opportunities as well threats. We are happy to present you five research articles in this issue that contribute in their way to understanding aspects of future Internet usage. First, the special theme section on “Electronic Markets and the future Internet: From clouds to semantics” includes three pieces which focus on customer acquisition with social media and the adoption of cloud computing. Our guest editors Ricardo Colomo-Palacios, Pedro Soto-Acosta, T. Ramayah and Meir Russ will introduce them in detail in their preface and we are grateful for their effort in organizing this special theme. In the general re
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