Industry Research

Digitization

Digitization is the process of converting information into a digital format . In this format, information is organized into discrete units of data (called bits) that can be separately addressed (usually in multiple-bit groups called bytes). This is the binary data that computers and many devices with computing capacity (such as digital cameras and digital hearing aids) can process.
Text and images can be digitized similarly: a scanner captures an image (which may be an image of text) and converts it to an image file, such as a bitmap . An optical character recognition ( OCR ) program analyzes a text image for light and dark areas in order to identify each alphabetic letter or numeric digit, and converts each character into an ASCIIcode.
Audio and video digitization uses one of many analog-to-digital conversion processes in which a continuously variable (analog) signal is changed, without altering its essential content, into a multi-level (digital) signal. The process of sampling measures the amplitude(signal strength) of an analog waveform at evenly spaced time markers and represents the samples as numerical values for input as digital data.

E-Commerce

E-commerce (also written as e-Commerce, eCommerce or similar variants), short for electronic commerce, is trading in products or services using computer networks, such as the Internet. Electronic commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce,electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange(EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems. Modern electronic commerce typically uses theWorld Wide Web for at least one part of the transaction's life cycle, although it may also use other technologies such as e-mail.

E-commerce businesses may employ some or all of the following:

• Online shopping web sites for retail sales direct to consumers
• Providing or participating in online marketplaces, which process
• Third-party business-to-consumer or consumer-to-consumer sales
• Business-to-business buying and selling
• Gathering and using demographic data through web contacts and social media
• Business-to-business electronic data interchange
• Marketing to prospective and established customers by e-mail or fax
• Engaging in pretail for launching new products and services