There are three big names in gaming consoles: Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.Sony offers the Playstation (PS3) range,Microsoft Xbox and Nintendo Wii.There is considerable action happening around 3-D, with Nintendo unveiling the first portable gaming console.You won't need special glasses to play games in 3-D on Nintendo newest handheld device, 3-DS, but it's not available right now.The technology behind the 3-DS requires viewers to sit at a certain angle and distance from the screen.

The latest Playstation from Sony, PS3, has all the features to play 3-D games.Through a firmware, all existing PS3 can be upgraded to 3-D.This firmware is available on the Playstation website (playstation.com) free of charge.You'll need a 3-D TV and 3-D glasses along with the PS3 to enjoy 3-D gaming.

Compared to earlier versions (PS2 and PSP handheld), PS3 is a top-level version that's way beyond a gaming console.It becomes a central playback device in your house that can play Blu-ray movies and DVDs, and has built-in Wi-Fi and a large storage space for games, movies, music, videos and photos.Its built-in Blu-ray player shows HD movies at 1080p.

PS3 costs about Rs 19.990.But, "it's a value-for-money device as it features Blu-ray playback, HD gaming, 120 GB hard disk space, Net compability, capability of playing photos and music and showing on TV.Also , one PS3 can talk to another PS3 and share the game.Add to that 3-D compability ",says Athindriya Bose, country manager-Playstation, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe.

Microsoft Xbox 360 is also 3-D capable and 3-D games for the system are available today.Jaspreet Bindra, regional director, entertainment and devices division, Microsoft Corporation (India),says, "While others focus their efforts on 3-D as the market evolves, Microsoft is more excited about growth and innovation potential of controller-free games and entertainment-an experience you can get only on Xbox 360.Kinect will add value to the future of 3-D gaming by making it more interactive and fun."

The Kinect's motion-sensing technology for Xbox 360 dispenses with handheld andinstead makes you the controller.It senses your movements, your gestures as well as voice and changes the way you play and experience entertainment.

The Kinect sensor is claimed to be the world's first to combine an RGB camera, depth sensor, multi-array microphone and custom processor running proprietary software sll in one device.Unlike 2-D camera and controllers, Kinect tracks your full body movement in 3-D, while responding to commands, directions, even a difference of emotion in your voice.Kinect will let you play driving games, for example, by simply moving your hands as if turning a car's steering wheel.

Electronic devices when in use generate heat.These are normally equipped to dissipate this heat, but fail to do so completely.Unfortunately, circuits on a computer chip have temperature-dependent perfomance: when chips become too hot, they slow down.PCs are usually air-cooled, relying on simple fans to prevent the electronics from  overheating, but for larger systems such as servers, server farms and data centres, forced air-cooling is sometimes not sufficient.Air-cooling methods,which use fans to blow air across the chips, are not ideal for supercomputers or large server banks.Servers and data centres consume enormous amounts of power simply to run the electronics and keep them from overheating.Thus there is a need to develop extreme-temperature electronic (ETE) components for high-temperature applications.

Reducing the heat generated by CPUs of computers is an important research area now, and all the major chip makers are actively developing chips that consume less power and thus generate less heat.Designed to continuously operate for at least five years at 225 degree celecius,the standard electronic products family is targeted at sensor signal conditioning, data acquisition and control applications in hostile environments, and offers significant reliability and perfomance advantages over traditional silicon integrated circuits when the operating temperatures are greater than 150 degree celcius.

Although the present market for extreme-temperature electronics is small, it could develop tremendously if the automotive market opens up.The benefits of deploying extreme-temperature electronics, to say the least, include elimination of auxiliary cooling with massive heat-sink or heat-pipe design, lighter weight and smaller size, and integration of sensors and other transducers directly at the crucial location of interest. 

E- commerce is referred to as a new business technique that takes care of the requirements of firms, consumers etc for cutting costs and enhancing the goods quality & the speed of services.

The requirement for e-commerce comes from the need inside the business to make good & efficient use of computing, which means to make use of omputer technology in such a way to enhance business processes and exchange of information both inside and across an enterprise

Electronic commerce applications are quite varied. In its most common form, it is also used to denote the exchange of business information using EDI ( Electronic Data Interchange), E-mail, EFT(electronic funds transfer) etc, and other similar technologies.

The business functions like payment and funds transfer, management of inventory, electronic catalogs etc act as initiators to the entire order management cycle that incorporates the more established notions of electronic commerce. In short, what we are witnessing is the use of the term electronic commerce as an umbrella concept to integrate a wide range of new and old applications.

ARCHITECTURAL FRAMEWORK FOR ELECTRONIC COMMERCE

In general, a frame work is intended to define and create tools that integrate the information found in today’s closed systems and allow the development of e-commerce applications. The architecture should focus on synthesizing the diverse resources already in place in corporations to facilitate the integration of data and software for better applications. The electronic commerce application architecture consists of six layers of functionality, or functionality, or services: (1) applications; (2) brokerage services, data or transaction management: (3) interface and support layers; (4) secure messaging, security, and electronic document interchange; (5) middleware and structured document interchange ; and (6) network infrastructure and basic communications services.

1.      Electronic Commerce Application Services

The application services layer of e-commerce will be comprised of existing and future applications built on the innate architecture. Three distinct classes of e- commerce applications can be there; customer-to-business, business-to-business, and intra-organization.

Consumer-to-business Transactions

The consumers can learn about products differently through electronic publishing , purchase them differently by making use of electronic cash and payment systems which are secured, and can have them delivered differently.

Business-to-business Transactions

Here, businesses, governments, and many companies depend on computer-to-computer communication as a fast and economical way to commence business transactions. Small companies are also trying to see the benefits of making use of the same methods. Business-to-business transactions requires the use of EDI and electronic mail for purchasing goods and services, buying information and consulting services, submitting requests for proposals and receiving proposals.

Intra-organizational transactions

A company becomes market driven by spreading throughout information about its customers and competitors, by spreading strategic making so that all units of the firm can participate and by checking their commitment to customers continuously, by making improved customer satisfaction an objective. For maintaining the relationships that are critical to delivering superior customer value, management must pay close attention to service, both before and after sales.

2.      Information Brokerage and Management

The information brokerage and management layer provides service integration through the notion of information brokerages, the development of which is necessitated by the increasing information resource fragmentation. We use notion of information brokerage to represent an intermediary who provides service integration between customers and information providers, given some constraint such as low-price, fast service or profit maximization for a client.

Information brokerage does more than just searching. It addresses the issue of adding value to the information that is retrieved. For instance, in foreign exchange trading, information is retrieved about the latest currency exchange rates in order to hedge currency holdings to minimize risk and maximize profit.

Another aspect of the brokerage function is the support for data management and traditional transaction services. Brokerages may provide tools to accomplish more sophisticated, time-delayed updates or future-compensating transactions. These tools include software agents, distributed query generator, the distributed transaction generator and the declarative resource constraint base-which describes a business’s rules and environment information.

Software agents are used to implement information brokerages. Agents are encapsulations of users instruction that perform all kinds of tasks in electronic marketplaces spread across networks. Information brokerages dispatch agents capable of information resource gathering, negotiating deals and performing transactions.

Although the notion of software agents sounds very seductive, it will take a while to solve the problems of inter-agent communication, interoperable agents and other headaches that come with distributed computing and networking.

3.      Interface and Support Services

Interface and support services, will provide interfaces for applications such as interactive catalogs and supports directory services –functions required for information search and access. Interactive catalogs are the customized interface to consumer applications such as home shopping. An interactive catalog is an extension o the paper-based catalog and incorporates additional features such as sophisticated graphics and video to make the advertising more attractive.

Directories, on the other hand, operate behind the scenes and attempt to organize the enormous amount of information and transactions generated to facilitate electronic commerce. The primary difference between the two is that unlike interactive catalogs, which deal with people, directory support services interact directly with software applications.

4.      Secure Messaging and Structured Document Interchange Services

The importance of the fourth layer, secured messaging, is clear. Broadly defined, messaging, is the software that sits between the network infrastructure and the clients or electronic commerce applications, masking the peculiarities of the environment. In general, messaging products are not applications that solve problems; they are more enablers of the applications that solve problems.

Messaging services offer solutions for communicating non-formatted (unstructured) data-letters, memos, reports-as well as formatted (structured) data such as purchase orders, shipping notices and invoices. It supports both synchronous (immediate) and asynchronous (delayed) message delivery and processing.

Messaging is well-suited for both client-server and peer-to-peer computing models.

The main disadvantages of messaging are the new types of applications it enables – which appear to be more complex, especially to traditional programmers-and the jungle of standards it involves. Also, security, privacy and confidentiality through data encryption and authentication techniques are important issues that need to be resolved.

5.      Middleware Services

Middleware is a relatively new concept that emerged only recently. With the growth of networks, client-server technology and all other forms of communicating between/among unlike platforms the problems of getting all the pieces to work together grew. In simple terms, middleware is the ultimate mediator between diverse software programme that enables them talk to one another.

Another reason for middleware is the computing shift from application centric to data centric. To achieve data-centric computing, middleware services focus on three elements, transparency, transaction security and management and distributed object management and services.

6.      Transparency

Transparency implies users should be unaware that they are accessing multiple systems. Transparency is essential for dealing with higher-level issues than physical media and interconnection that the underlying network infrastructure is in charge of. The ideal picture is one of a “virtual” (“network; a collection of work-group, departmental, enterprises and inter enterprise LANs that appears to the end user or client application to be a seamless and easily accessed whole.

Transparency is achieved using middleware that facilitates a computing environment which is distributed. The goal is from the applications to send a request to the middleware layer, which then satisfies the request any way it can, using remote information.

WORLD WIDE WEB (WWW) AS THE ARCHITECTURE

Electronic commerce depends on the unspoken assumption that computers co-operate efficiently for seamless sharing of information. Unfortunately, this assumption of interoperability has not been supported by the realities of practical computing. Computing is still a world make up of many technical directions, product implementations and completing vendors.

The web community of developers and users is tackling these complex problems.

The Web architecture is made up of three primary entities ; client browser, web browser and third party services. The client browser usually interacts with the WWW server, which acts as an intermediary in the interaction with third-party services.

The client browser is rested on the user’s PC or workstation and provides an interface to the various type of content. The browser has to be smart enough to understand what file it is downloading and what browser connection it requires to activate to display the file. Browsers are also capable of manipulating local files.

Web server functions can be categorized into information retrieval, data and transaction management, and security. The third party services could be other web servers that make up the digital library, information processing tools and electronic payment systems.

There are some basic concepts regarding e-commerce. We have fitted this as consumer oriented because all that we are dealing is how to supply the items needed by the consumer at his doorsteps.

Basic Tenets of E-Commerce in a Consumer Oriented Scenario

It has been said that the convergence of money, commerce, computing and networks form the global consumer market place. Though it is true in most cases, the earliest (or rudimentary) systems had computers being replaced by other electronic devices like the television or even telephone. It is to be noted that there are several other, related areas that need to be address while setting up an e-commerce system. Though it is desirable that the entire system is automated, it may be possible that one/more of these activities may be transacted in a traditional manner. For example, while the order is placed over phone, further negotiations may be made with the sales representative calling on the buyer, the payment may be made through a cheque etc. to begin with, we include systems where in only a part of the operations are done through electronic means also as e-commerce systems.

Some of the fundamental issues that need to be addressed before consumer oriented e-commerce can be made broad based are listed below :

1. Standard business practices and processes for buying and selling of products as well as services need to be established.
2. Easy to use and well accepted software and hardware implementations of the various stages of e-commerce like order taking, payment, delivery, after sales interactions etc. need to be established.
3. Secure commercial and transport practices that make the parties believe that they are not at the mercy of anybody else for the safety of their information and goods need to be in place.

It may be noted that each one of the above requirements can be established only over a period of time with several trial and error methods. Ironically, e-commerce can grow in a very big way only when these requirements are fully available and are within the grasp of the average user.

We next look at a few applications of e-commerce in some detail, to understand the implications of e-commerce in a full scale.

We look at the following concepts in some detail :

1. Basic banking services
2. Home shopping
3. Home entertainment
4. Micro transaction for information

Basic Banking Services

The concepts under basic banking services are what a normal customer would be transacting with his bank most of the time. They are mainly related to personal finances. It can be safely be presumed that most of normal transactions that a customer has with his bank can be classified into the following :

1. Checking his account statements
2. Round the clock banking (ATM)
3. Payment of bills etc.
4. Fund transfer and
5. Updating of his pass books etc.

Indeed most of these can be done through telephone with suitable passwords etc. except round the clock banking. The concept of Automated Teller Machines is to allow the customer to draw money from his account at any part of the day (or night). In fact, ATMs are today thought to be one single concept that changes the way banks functioned. The customer need not go to the bank at all for his most important service. In other words, both the bank and the customer became faceless to each other. But it helped the customer by ensuring that he need not modify his working schedule to visit the bank. At the same time, the banks need not resort to concept like split hours, opening on holidays etc. to project themselves as customer friendly.

It can be noted that the individual ATMs are connected to a Bank Switching Centre. The Switching Centre’s of several banks are interconnected to an association switching centre ( May be all banks of a particular region, for example). All such centre are globally connected to a main switching centre. While the actual operations are not important to note that the PC are any such computers are not employed at the customer level. It is also argued that an average customer is more comfortable with the process of simple insertion of a card rather than complicated operations on PCs. However, we include the ATMs also under e-commerce.

Home Shopping

The next example is home shopping. For simplicity, we presume it is television based shopping. It may be noted that this concept is picking up now in India in a small way, wherein the channels set apart only a very small portion of their broadcasting time to teleshopping.

In the simplest case, the channels describe the various aspects of their product and the customer can order items over phone. The goods are delivered to his home and payment can be made in the normal modes.

In a more sophisticated version, orders can be placed online (through computers) and payment also can be made through credit/debit cards. It may be noted that several concepts of traditional marketing like negotiation, trial testing etc. are missing from this scheme and it is most suitable for those customers who are almost sure of what they need to buy who are too busy to go to the shops. Otherwise, there is hardly any concept of interaction and there is little scope to ensure the quality of product,after sales services etc.

Home Entertainment

The next example of this type of commerce is home entertainment. Dubbed online movies, it is possible for the user to select a movie/CD online and make his cable operator play the movie exclusively for him (movie on demand) cause against payment. Payment can be either online/billed to his account. It is also possible to play interactive games online/download them to your computer to play .the concept of downloading games/news etc, at a cost to the mobiles is also a similar concept. It may be noted that in all these cases, the physical movement of the customer /trader is avoided, of course, the computer need not always be a part of the deal.

Micro Transactions for Information

The telephone directories provide a basic type of micro transaction. If you want by one particular of item- say – books – they list the addresses and phone numbers of the various book dealers whom you may contact. Similar facilities are available on the internet- may be for number of items and also with more details. IT may include detailed catalogues, other related information etc. of course, the customer has to pay a small charge for visiting the site- each time he visits the site. This can be thought of as an extension of the earlier described television based ordering. You don’t have to order only those items that are shown in the computer, but search for an item that you need. Also ordering is on line. Some preliminary two way interaction are also possible.

Several modifications and value addition to the above mentioned preliminary scheme are possible. Ofcourse, each value addition also adds cost.

1.      Desirable characteristics of E-marketing

Common sense tells us that few transactions are more congenial for e-marketing than others. We list out the desirable features of a hypothetical market pace – let us call it e-market.

2.      A minimal size of the phase

Obviously for any such place to thrive is a critical size, below which it is not profitable to operate. This minimal number of buyers and sellers characterizes the profitability of the place.

3.      A scope for interactions

Interactions include trial runs of the products, classifications of doubts on the part of the customers, details of after sales services, ability to compare different products and of course scope for negotiations and bargaining. Negotiations can be on account of cost, value additions, terms and conditions, delivery dates etc.

4.      Scope for designing new products

The customer need not only buy only what is available. He can ask for modifications, upgradations etc. The supplier must be able to accept these and produce made to order items.

5.      A seamless connection to the marketplace

It is obvious that each customer will be operating with a different type of computer, software, connectivity etc. There should be available standards so that any of these customers will be able to attach himself to any of the markets without changing his hardware/software/ interfaces etc.

6.      Recourse for disgruntled users

It is native to believe that transaction of such a place to end up in complete satisfaction to all parties concerned. Especially because of the facelessness of the customer and the supplier, there should be a standard recourse to settle such disputes.