SAN FRANCISCO, (Reuters) - Next year the Internet will be a little easier to use, data will be simpler to find, some connections will be faster and many Web sites will be more personal with more incentives to shop online.
These improvements will be fuelled by some emerging technologies that industry analysts say will become more widely deployed next year, including a new generation data formatting technology for Web pages, personalisation software, and high-speed cable modems.
Companies that are buckling down and focusing on the creation of new store fronts are expected to stick initially with new but proven technologies in an effort to quickly grab a piece of the fast-moving boom in electronic commerce.
So in a landscape where a leading Internet pioneer and innovator Netscape Communications Corp. <NSCP.O> succumbs to a merger with the world's largest online service, America Online Inc.<AOL.N>. -- known for bringing millions of "newbies" to the Internet -- pragamatism and commercialism will be the driving forces of the Internet next year.
MAKING MONEY IS THE BIG GOAL
When America Online surprised the technology world with its $4.2 billion merger with Netscape last month, executives said the biggest force behind the deal was AOL's quest to be a one-stop-shop for companies and consumers who want to participate in electronic commerce.
Electronic commerce is growing by leaps and bounds and 1999 revenues from transactions conducted over the Internet, including from business to business, will jump to $71.3 billion, up from an anticipated $31.3 billion this year, according to Zona Research, based in Redwood City, California.
Each day, more businesses, large, medium and small, begin to embrace the web, moving quickly from a place to promote and advertise their products, to actually selling online.
One novel sales technique, offered by Internet-savvy companies like bookseller Amazon.com <AMZN.O> and CDNow.com, is to watch the purchasing patterns of customers, and offer them other products, based on their prior purchases and what other like-minded customers are buying.
Some are using collaborative filtering technology from start-up companies like Minneapolis-based NetPerceptions and Andromedia's LikeMinds Co. in San Francisco.
San Francisco-based jeans maker Levi Strauss, for example, has just launched its first e-commerce site with an online store at levi.com, which uses collaborative filtering software in a "Style Finder" that makes recommendations for new looks that would fit with a customer's own personal style, based on music, clothing and entertainment preferences.
"We spent a lot of time talking to consumers and let consumers drive the development process," said company spokesman Jeff Beckman. "They said don't throw a lot of technology at me because it's new and interesting. Give it to me in ways that helps me access your product."
Levi's said that 74 percent of its customers reported that the recommendations picked by the collaborative filtering software were "spot on" with products they were looking for.
SUCCESSOR TO HTML WILL LEAD TO MORE IMPROVEMENTS
Another behind-the-scenes technology that will help speed the delivery of information requested by a user is called XML, which stands for Extensible Markup Language and is widely viewed as the successor to HTML, the hypertext markup language used in Web page creation.
"XML is a lingua franca...it lets everyone agree on how to describe a document (and its contents), how to transport it and how to inter-operate with other languages," said Don DePalma, a principal analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
While XML is really a technology for "tagging" documents, it allows for faster distribution of documents, because the stored content can be uniquely tagged with a particular field, enabling a user to more narrowly focus a search.
For example, a medical publisher can tag the word penicillin using an "allergies" tag, so that the user gets only search results for the word penicillin within the context of the topic group "allergies."
XML is already a standard and is being adopted by the industry in droves, including by all the major search engines, and all the big software makers, including Microsoft Corp <MSFT.O>.
TheStreet.com, an online investment and financial news Web site, plans to adopt XML as part of a new content management and e-commerce system for early 1999, so it can more easily syndicate its content and streamline the editorial process.
Workflow technology, software which manages a business process, will also be in widespread use to manage Web site publishing processes, DePalma said, adding that the accidental release of the U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics October payroll data last month could have been averted with workflow.
"Workflow is a gotta-have capability," DePalma said.
CABLE MODEMS LEAD TO FASTER NET ACCESS
As consumers and business users alike continue to battle the World Wide Wait using standard modems, one of several high-speed access options will be more widely available next year, high speed cable modems, according to Dataquest, a unit of the Gartner Group.
Dataquest predicts that cable modem use will rise again next year, from 492,000 in 1998, as more cable companies begin offering the high-speed cable services such as At Home Corp and the Time-Warner Inc. <TWX.N> and Media One venture, RoadRunner.
"Broadband cable Internet service providers (ISPs) and their affiliated cable network operators have a significant market opportunity to gain market share from incumbent dial-up ISPs," said Dataquest analyst Patti Reali.
Other technologies which may begin to surface next year include voice-activated software used on the Web, more application server software for Web commerce. In the meantime, companies will focus on learning to sell on the Net.
"We view 1999 as the year of pragmatism," said DePalma of Forrester. "You have to walk before you can run. You can't overnight have this wonderfully powerful Amazon.com"
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