E-Commerce

"...the estimated value of goods and services sold through online business-to-business trading hubs...is expected to grow to $680 billion by the year 2004."
- Dataquest Inc.

"Business-to-business e-commerce will grow three times faster than business-to-consumer e-commerce...expected to expand to $1.3 trillion by 2003-12 times that of the business-to-consumer market."
- Forrester Research

"Cost savings from an e-business model produce greater profit margins than increases in sales revenue typically 60-80%, depending upon implementation costs."
- Giga Information Group

"Business-to-business electronic commerce in the United States is about to enter a high-growth phase, increasing from $138 billion in 1999 to more than $541 billion in 2003."
- Yankee Group

"The business-to-business marketplace is predicted to surge to $380 by the end of 2003."
- Dataquest Inc.

Traffic volumes and the size of the infomass in the Networked Society

Consider these estimated figures recently published from Jupiter Research for current annual volumes of data:

1. Mobile & land lines carry 17.3 exabytes - (10 to the 60th power)
2. TV Broadcasts carry 3,500 terabytes - (10 to the 12th power)
3. Internet information held on-line 170 terabytes (17 x Library of Congress)
4. Instant Messaging - 5 Billion messages or 274 terabytes
5. E-mail contains 400,000 terabytes