The Internet boom has lured the population of real life into feverishly investing into a space of vacuum --- until we better know the difference anyway. Some touts the Internet as yet another medium, albeit one that is bidirectional, speedy, and far reaching. Viewing it as an expanded sales network, complete with capacity for one-to-one marketing and low-cost customer support, many simply take it the easy way and place their storefronts on the web, hoping to miraculously stand out as a leader in tomorrow's cyberspace.

I want to disappoint those who think the new world is simply an extension of the old, and those who wish their accumulated knowledge about business in real life still apply. If there were not serious difference between the two, pioneers of the cyberspace would not have to be there to emphasize a new social order, or netiquette as we call it today.

From the Real to the Virtual

The evidence of the virtualization of reality, or better known as the information age, can be seen in the financial market. Everyday, over one trillion U.S. dollars (the equivalent of the total output of American companies in a business quarter) change hands over the electronic wires, based purely on speculations about the future. While no real product as we know it is being produced in the trading process, the investment and hence the focus of the world shifts, to the extend that it dictates how the real economy will grow.

The cyberspace is built on information, on faith and on hopes, not unlike the financial market. If speculation can move investments around the world like it does today, there is no way we can set a limit on what the power of cyberspace will become. Today the vacuum is already sucking in countless investments --- based on blind hopes alone --- to feed its unstoppable growth in installed base and transport hardware. A growing percentage of us are hanging on the border of cyberspace, learning what it is like to make friends via electrons or identify each other by a string of alphabets and dots. Sooner or later, we will all cross the border and become a citizen of that new world.

Productive Customers

Many of us experience our first cyberspace contact with either our first email or the first posted article. In other words, we experience the web by publishing, and we are producers on a public medium like never before. Unlike traditional media, there is virtually no cost in becoming a productive information publisher.

Those who publish and produce information in cyberspace are molding the cyber culture. Their familiarity with the new world allows them to live it to its fullest and lead others to create the power center in cyberspace. An Internet business that wishes to be the leader of tomorrow must be able to find a way to do business with all these predominant publishers. By leveraging on the customer's reach and power to publish, a new business can effortlessly draw in a staff of comrades to march forward together.

Traces of productive customers can be found by examining arguably today's most successful Internet business --- Amazon.com Books. Amazon.com utilizes at least two tools to leverage on information created by each customer: reader's reviews and purchase association. Reader's reviews resemble traditional book reviews, only this time all Internet surfers have the ability to write a review. Purchase association identifies books that are often placed in the same order, thereby providing buyers information about other books that have proved interesting to previous buyers of a similar interest.

The above list of possibilities with productive consumers is miniscule at best compared to what it will become. I expect this to be one major determinant that differentiates business winners from losers in cyberspace.

Community Replacing Branding

The cyberspace is a place where any two entities can communicate directly and instantly. A web is a more exact term to describe this intertwining relationship than network does --- there is always a link between two nodes on a web and participants can almost always bypass any intermediate arbitrator.

Traditionally, branding has allowed consumers to simplify the selection process prior to buying, as well as to identify with the group of similar taste. In cyberspace where members form a web of relationships, these functions can easily be over taken and may render branding unfavorable for its overhead costs. A cyber community can swiftly change from brand to brand all without losing the benefits they used to receive. Community simply overtakes the role of branding.

Today's citizens of online communities can easily recommend quality goods through online bulletin boards. Buying experiences of community members accumulate and peer reviews easily identify best buys. The buying power of communities like never before easily forces sellers to yield in bargaining processes. The possibility goes on.

Many traditionalists maintain that the Internet not unlike real life, and compare today's cyberspace to primordial human societies where the role of communities is at the center of all business actions. These maintain that cyber culture will have to undergo the way of nature and follow the path human society had been through: market economy, monetary systems, laws, nationalism, etc. We seem to be heading toward where real life is at today. Internet business in that scenario will simply be what we already have here and now.

This view does not take into consideration that traditional economy had to bear with a highly crippled or non-existent information infrastructure. Business decisions were mostly local and actions took lots of time, by today's standards anyway. The cyberspace is much more like today's volatile financial system. Information shuttles rapidly between nodes, and decisions and actions are global and instantaneous in every sense. With the flow goes all the values and business transactions of the new world. We may not ever need the market system as we know it today.

The highly fluctuating speculative market gives us a sense of how tomorrow's economic system may work: we will be in a ultra fast-moving market and we will not be alone. There will be software programs present with us in the same dimension, helping us alongside in purchase decisions or competing directly against us to find a better deal for its master. Businesses are likely to have a hard time if they decide to assume today's practices will allow them to outperform software robots that can carry out trillions of computations per second and likely to make hundreds of transactions per day. We need to learn to live in a completely new market economy.

While there is not one settled view of what tomorrow's dominant Internet business practice will be, there are several avenues of pursuit already gathered interested and prescient investigators. These three volumes provide some of the stepping stones up the way towards understanding cyberspace.

1. Civilizing Cyberspace: policy, power, and the information superhighway (Steven E. Miller, ACM Press). Chapters include: Where is Cyberspace; the Policy Starting Point; What is a National Information Infrastructure; Framing the Public Policy Debate; Protecting the Public Interest; the Government's Agenda; the Players and Their Plans; Universal Service; Democracy and Free Speech; Privacy, Civil Liberties, and Encryption; Community, Diversity and Citizenship; Economic Development; and Citizen Action.

2. The Death of Money: how the electronic economy has destablized the world's markets and created financial chaos (Joel Kurtzman, Back Bay Books). Chapters include: Magabyte Money; the Quant Factor; the Roots of Megabyte Money; A Weightless Dollar; Storing Value; Creating Money; the Global Money-making Machine; the Electronic Economy Goes Haywire; Adventures in Cyberspace; Electronic Losses; the Money Equations; Make the Way for the Programs; Compuers Run the Show; Opposing Forces; Complexity and the Markets; the Endless Hole; the Social Costs; Stablizing an Unstable World.

3. Life on the Screen: identity in the age of the Internet (Sherry Turkle, Simon & Shuster). Chapters include: A Tale of Two Aesthetics; the Triumph of Tinkering; Making a Pass at a Robot; Taking Things at Interface Value; the Quality of Emergence; Artificial Life as the New Frontier; Aspects of the Self; TinySex and Gender Trouble; Virtuality and Its Discontents; Identity Crisis.