Volume 48, Issue 4

Due to the increasing growth of the global economy, the world´s natural resources become depleted. Behind this background, especially the design of sustainable energy systems turns out to be a true challenge. In SESAM — Self Organisation and Spontaneity in Liberalised and Harmonised Markets — we consider that a Internet-based market following an open liberalised model is most likely to provide for a resource conserving energy use. In this article the framework of this market, that is our vision of a sustainable energy system is introduced. Besides, the economic as well as jurisprudential design of the market is presented. Finally a description of the necessary information and communication infrastructure is given.

In recent years, technologies like XML, web services, service-oriented architectures and semantic webs have induced radical changes in our economies, affecting a wide range of industries, such as manufacturing, software engineering and the service sector. These new technologies enable the provision of numerous value-added services to the consumer. Based upon recent research conducted at the Berlin Center for Internet Economics, this paper is going to discuss potential benefits and risks of such services with a particular focus on point-of-sale customer care in the retail sector.

The aim of the interdisciplinary project PREMIUM (Price and Revenue Model on the Internet) is the analysis of the revenue models on the Internet as well as the new pricing opportunities on the Internet. This article describes the approach taken and the main results of the project.

Media companies are potentially more subject to changes induced by innovative information and communication technologies. Already the narrowband and stationary first-generation internet has deeply affected the media industry. New companies have established themselves in the market, have taken over the functions and tasks of established companies and created new offerings. Potentially the changes emanating from the second-generation internet will strike the media industry even harder. Broadband access will allow to access not only print and audio, but also video content. Therefore, there is virtually no company in the industry which is not affected by the current strategic changes. The intermedia research project analyzes the potential impact of the so-called content intermediaries in the media industry in ten sub-projects, involving contributions from the three distinct disciplines of management science, computer science, and communication science. This article provides insight into the work and intermediate results of intermedia by briefly discussing three central and intensively discussed phenonema. First, the logic of converging platforms and diverging end devices is explained. Further I will discuss why horizontal integration of media companies will be a major trend in the industry. At last, I will point out the necessity of a thoughtful strategy concerning the personalization of media content.

This paper describes the reserach goals and the first findings of Mediaconomy, which is an interdisciplinary project of the University of Göttingen. The fields of interest are mobile internet and scholarly communication.

This article gives an overview of the research project nova-net: Innovation in the Internet Economy, which is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Besides the presentation of the research framework and research areas, details on method development and implementation in the research area Trend Monitoring and Scenario Management are provided. The focus lies thereby on the description of the Scenario Management Framework SEMAFOR in conjunction with a newly developed scenario development method, as well as their implementation with the web application generator WAgen.

Most companies today are challenged by integrating the internet in their business processes. Thus, “Internet Economy” as a discipline has to be considered an economy of the integration of internet-based and non-internet-based phenomena. In practice, this requires a deeper understanding of the coexistence of “new” and “old” rules in economy. A theoretical basis can be drawn from studies in the field of “hybridity”. In this paper, hybridity will be formalized as a pattern. To give an example, the pattern will then be applied for the design of an internet-based communication system for social networking.

Interactive 3D Graphics today is almost entirely dominated by triangle rasterization, which however becomes increasingly problematic with respect to therewith achievable image quality. An alternative to triangle rasterization is ray tracing, which is generally known for its superior image quality, but due to its high computational demands is usually perceived to be incompatible with interactivity. This thesis presents several new techniques that finally allow for achieving realtime ray tracing performance on PCs and PC clusters. In particular, this also finally allows for computing global illumination at interactive rates.