Designing Home Online
California Home + Design magazine has recently released an online resource for all of your home design needs. With listings from local tile companies to lighting vendors to contractors, the new Home + Design Resource has an in-depth directory of local businesses with most of the current listings focused on Northern California.
1979
Videotex was being researched since much earlier for supplying the end users with textual information. Much work was done in UK on videotext, it was a two way message service and developed basically for information sending where “many companies” were interested in, but on the backdrop of all that Michael Aldrich in 1979 gave the “concept of teleshopping” (today online shopping) which revolutionized the way businesses happen.
Same happened in the US around that year with services like The Source and CompuServe.
1982
Minitel succeeded Videotext as online service making online purchases, check share market, search telephone directory and could even chat. This is one of the most successful services before WWW using telephone lines, It was launched in France successfully but in UK as well but to less success.
1987
With Swreg (offshoot of CompuServe) the community of software developers and shareware authors got an online market where they could sell their product using “Merchant account”. Thus online shopping started for then software industry people.
1990
Tim Berners-Lee wrote the WorldWideWeb and gave the first browser to view the web which changed most of things; a whole new revolution started, which till date is ON.
1992
Revolutionary book by J.H. Snider and Terra Ziporyn namely; Future Shop: How New Technologies Will Change the Way We Shop and What We Buy. St. Martin’s Press.
1994
Netscape released Navigator browser, later introduced Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption for secure transaction. Pizza Hut started online ordering on their webpage, cars, bikes and adult content as well started selling on the internet.
1995
Amazon.com started selling each and everything online, and along with that Jeff Bezos starts first commercial-free 24 hour, internet-only radio stations. Then Radio HK and NetRadio start broadcasting. Companies like Dell and Cisco started using internet in all their transactions. Online auction started by eBay.
1998
United States started selling Electronic postal stamps online wherein they could be purchased and downloaded for print.
1999
Acquisition of Business.com by eCompanies in US $7.5 million. Napster the peer-to-peer file sharing software launches. Home decorative items started selling on ATG Stores.
2000
The dot-com bust as we know it today wasn’t something that happened in a day, over speculation for a period of time (approx. 1995-2000) where just the prefix “e-” or “.com” in names could make stock prices rise at great rates. This saw a great many companies rise and fall.
Many entrepreneurs came up with brilliant plans and most got pretty “generous” venture capitalists, most of these firms started working on the principle “expand the market and later profits will cover all present debts and losses.” This speculation was constantly taking the market upwards with NASDAQ at a peak of 5132.52 points on March 10, 2000. After this the market goes down and with them the over speculating ones were just wiped off the market.
2002
PayPal the company which offered an alternative (through internet) to cash or check payment was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion. CSN Stores and NetShops were founded with the concept of domain specific commodity and sprung with many online stores, going for one item on each website.
2003
Online shopping matures showing to the world their confidence Amazon.com posted first yearly profit and thus again making presence on the stock market.
2007
Acquisition of Business.com by R.H. Donnelley for $345 million, making way for bigger players in technology domain.
2008
Tremendous growth in US in Ecommerce with sales figures touching $204 billion, a decent 17% rise from the previous year.
2009
Online Retailer – Amazon.com has an estimated turnover on a daily basis is over US $2.5 trillion with growth rate of 14% annually. Ebay having sales of US $1.89 billion, these numbers alone speak.
