Media enabling e-business

Composite media are essential to support e-business, providing information about services as well as an integral part of business processes. e-business, the transformation of key business processes through the use of Internet technologies is rapidly changing processes and the ways they are connected. As technology improves, simple text and icon interfaces will expand to include richer media, including images, animations, audio and video. Furthermore, many business activities will change to take advantage of new types of information. Interactive video clips will make new forms of self-service possible. Simultaneous presentation of images, prices, and sound can bring the excitement of real-world auctions to electronic marketplaces. Multiple videos and multimedia interaction can make remote education more intense than traditional classrooms. Collaborative planning and experimentation will benefit from 3-D visualization, interactive data analysis, and ongoing discussions. The number of users and amount of usage will continue their exponential rise. These changes will have a deep effect on the engineering of the systems as well as challenging our ability to design the interfaces and deliver the information.

In this talk we will present some of the key technological challenges and directions for meeting them. To create such advanced applications, information must be created, modified for different modalities and device resolutions as well as user needs and expectations, then distributed reliably. Media must be fully integrated into the e-business framework rather than as attractive sideshows. For example, IBM?s HotMedia Java technology can create, integrate, manage, and distribute rich media in low-bandwidth Internet environments as well as take advantage of broadband connections. It can support fancy banner ads, commerce transaction, as well as providing catalogs and training materials. As we move forward, composite and complex media standards such as MPEG-4, SMIL and MPEG-7 will allow the efficient dynamic creation, handling and management of such data. e-business will be the driving application for advanced multimedia. Rich media have the potential for changing the way we work, for the better. The same composite media data will then be used in the converging worlds of the Next Generation Internet, pervasive e-business, and broadcasting.