Virtual Community and Online Game Players

Since the Internet and other IT technologies have become more popular than ever before, the amount of time people spend with computers and IT products, such as Internet and online games, has increased tremendously. The continuing boom of information and communication technology is causing the Internet to become a part of everyone’s life. People use the Internet not only as a tool for their jobs, but also to participate in virtual communities. Even if the rate of Internet uptake slows considerably (Weisenbacher, 2002), the trend still remains growing. There were 275.5 million people using the Internet in February 2000. That number had changed to 605.60 million in September 2002 (Nua Ltd., 2002). According to Horrigan’s study (2001), 84 percent of Internet users in America have participated in a virtual community. Moreover, apart from the number of people using Internet, the average time spent doing any activity online is increasing.

Tourism Networks and Clusters

The push towards networked information and communication technologies (ICT), combined with increased customer expectations, has put extraordinary pressure on the information-centric and service-based tourism industry to include the Internet as a major new marketing channel. To date, most research into the implications of the Internet, especially for small tourism firms, has revealed many individual business barriers in relation to ICT adoption. There is widespread consensus that industry preparedness in terms of ICT and e-business skills and training falls well short of the requirements to operate within a now ICT-driven sector (Braun, 2004; Hollick, 2003). As Evans et al. (2001) have noted, small tourism firms may well remain lost in the electronic marketplace unless they are assisted in the usage of ICT tools and acquire the skills needed to participate in the digital economy. With technological change underpinning a global economy, small tourism firms can take advantage of their geographic concentration to form a virtual tourism network or cluster to develop competitive advantage for tourism their destination. In the context of emerging technologies and related e-business models, this article discusses the role of virtual tourism networks, clustering and value chains for small tourism operators in freely assembled destinations. In discussing destination benefits and barriers surrounding SME clustering and networking, business acumen and business performance are highlighted. It is proposed in this article that successful destination clusters can be created by boosting tourism operator performance, and matching skills and infrastructure with visitor expectations.

Synchronous Collaboration and Instruction

Some of the very first Internet technologies to be used for learning or distance education and training were the World Wide Web and e-mail. The World Wide Web allowed multimedia or hypermedia-based instructional content to be loaded on a Web server and browsed using HTML-based browsers, and Internet-based e-mail systems allowed learners and facilitators to correspond asynchronously—anytime, anyplace. However, one of the most significant contributions of Internet-based technologies toward training and collaboration in the last few years has been the introduction of synchronous collaboration technologies. Synchronous collaboration technologies truly create a new medium that brings facilitators and participants together in a dynamic and live environment through which highly interactive communication can occur—closing down the barriers for communication and learning.

Sense of Virtual Community

Virtual communities have been an issue in academic research since the 1990s (c.f., Fernback & Thompson, 1995; Hagel & Armstrong, 1997; Preece, 2000; Rheingold, 2000). In the simplest terms, a virtual community could be defined as a group of people who communicate with each other via electronic media (Romm et al., 1997, p. 261). It was recognized early on that a virtual community may foster a “sense of belonging” (Figallo, 1998), “a social contract” (Sproull & Faraj, 1997) or “an internal set of social norms” (Burnett & Bonnici, 2003). It has also been suggested that these attributes would make such a community more powerful (Figallo, 1998) and successful (Wallace, 1999), representing the glue that keeps people together. According to a recent empirical study (Leimeister et al., 2004), members of virtual communities value these issues highly; for instance, establishing codes of behavior and building trust among members were evaluated among the most important success factors of virtual communities.

Spatial Autocorrelation and Association Measures

Several classical statements relating to the definition of GIS can be found in specialized literature such as the GIS International Journal, expressing the idea that spatial analysis can somehow be useful. GIS is successful not only because it integrates data, but it also enables us to share data in different departments or segments of our organizations. I like this notion of putting the world’s pieces back together again (ArcNews, 2000). “GIS is simultaneously the telescope, the microscope, the computer and the Xerox machine of regional analysis and the synthesis of spatial data” (Abler, 1988). “GIS is a system of hardware, software and liveware implemented with the aim of storing, processing, visualizing and analyzing data of a spatial nature. Other definitions are also possible” (Painho, 1999). “GIS is a tool for revealing what is otherwise invisible in geographical information” (Longley, Goodchild, Maguire, & Rhind, 2001). Certainly, GIS is not a graphic database.

Social Interaction Effects

Direct social interactions between economic agents (people) are important in determining their choices. When choosing a new car, you will likely ask some of your friends or acquaintances what their opinion is on different types and brands of cars. When choosing a new photo camera, you are likely to visit an Internet forum to see what other peoples’ opinions are on the different brands and types of cameras. These are examples of social interaction. Social interaction effects are therefore important in determining buying behavior. The rise of the Internet has considerably facilitated such social interactions, making social interaction effects even more important.

Sharing Knowledge in Virtual Communities

The ongoing expansion of organizations’ international activities has led to a search for solutions to assist in the creation and transfer of knowledge among them, in an attempt to increase their profits (Laurie, 2002). Knowledge sharing solutions describe three frameworks where knowledge sharing occurs: virtual communities, knowledge communities, and virtual knowledge communities.

Service-Oriented Architectures and ESB in VE Integration

Service-oriented architectures (SOA), mostly based on Web services (W3C), provide an industrial standard for deploying, publishing, discovering, and invoking enterprise’s services. From its emergence, many specialists have predicted that SOA will revolutionize the distributed computing paradigm and it will make various kinds of e-business (e.g., virtual enterprises, inter-enterprise collaboration, and ASP paradigms) a reality. This article examines the service-oriented architectures (SOA) applied to innovative organization schemes such as virtual enterprises (VE) to resolve the enterprise organizational structure integration problem. The evolution of software architectures from traditional to SOA is presented, along with the characteristics, advantages and disadvantages, and problems and difficulties in applying the SOA, while also focusing on the compatibility between SOA and modern organizational structures. The new standard in the service orchestration level BPEL is considered as a language for business process modelling and its impact to the integration problem is examined. New messaging protocols and frameworks such as the enterprise service bus (ESB) or messaging service bus are also examined. The main focus is on the SOA technology trends of modern organizational structures with regards their formation and integration. The comparison between SOA and traditional architectures provides a clear path to their adoption in various cases.

Semantic E-Business Challenges and Directions

The emergence of semantic Web opens up boundless new opportunities for e-business. According to Tim Berners-Lee, Hendler, and Lassila (2001), “the semantic Web is an extension of the current Web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation”. A more formal definition by W3C (2001) refers that, “the semantic Web is the representation of data on the World Wide Web. It is a collaborative effort led by W3C with participation from a large number of researchers and industrial partners. It is based on the resource description framework (RDF), which integrates a variety of applications using eXtensible Markup Language (XML) for syntax and uniform resource identifiers (URIs) for naming”. The capability of the semantic Web to add meaning to information, stored in such way that it can be searched and processed as well as recent advances in semantic Web-based technologies provide the mechanisms for semantic knowledge representation, exchange and collaboration of e-business processes and applications.

Scales and Dynamics in Outsourcing

Outsourcing is used to describe the situation where a firm decides to subcontract assembly and/or service functions to an external supplier, either locally or abroad. When activities are subcontracted abroad, the term offshore outsourcing often applies. While offshore assembling activities have taken place for some time, the phenomenon of outsourcing services abroad is quite new. Several factors have contributed to these altered circumstances. First, the development of information and communication technologies (ICT) implies that services can, to a great degree, also be located at arm’s length or elsewhere in the flat world (Friedman, 2005). Second, institutional changes have opened access to new markets for goods and services as well as skilled labor, for instance in Eastern Europe and China. Third, the increased competition through globalization pushes firms to adapt quickly to new contexts and to achieve efficiency in order to maintain competitiveness.