"The Internet will shift power from the centre to the periphery," Pieter Geldenhuys, project manager of the Unisa Programme in Electronic Commerce (PEC), said today.
Speaking at the inaugural lecture of PEC at the Unisa Graduate School of Business Leadership, Geldenhuys said the growth in the Internet and the increasing bandwidth available to users would "change the ball game forever".
Geldenhuys noted that the growth of the Internet would impact not only the ways people do things in the future but also the relationships between people and their roles in the world of commerce. He said that these changes would assign new roles to media. "In the future, people can be the user, producer and publisher of media ... forever changing the roles of people traditionally in the media infrastructure.
"Forget smart cards," said Geldenhuys. "The smart card of the future is the cellphone." He added that by 2003, there would be around 500 million cellphones sold annually.
"The revolution will happen in Europe based on the GSM networks. Because of Gilder`s Law (that bandwidth will double every 12 months) you will be able to watch television using the Internet protocol in the near future."
Because of this, said Geldenhuys, there will be a fundamental shift in the business place.
Among these changes, he said, would be the declining costs of advertising offered by new technologies such as short message services (SMS) and the option to advertise to a "market of one". "The future of advertising will be the key to catalysts in the future of this media."
Geldenhuys also pointed to the short-range connection protocol Bluetooth as affecting a fundamental change in technology. Geldenhuys said that the growth in Bluetooth devices would grow from 750 million in 2002 to more than 2 billion in 2004. "Bluetooth will be a defining revolution."
The Unisa Programme in Electronic Commerce, which runs for the first time this year, is an eight-month course aimed at managers and executives who want to develop an in-depth understanding of the challenges facing management in the electronic marketplace. The programme covers strategy, marketing and systems technologies as well as financial management and entrepreneurship.
Geldenhuys said the programme served not only academic needs "but is finely tuned to the needs and requirements of the e-business pioneers".
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