Ask any teenager or college-goer about the biggest advantage of having a computer at home, and in all probability, he’ll say it’s gaming. The gaming industry today stands at over $20 billion (Rs 87,000 crore) in annual revenue. So just mate the Internet, which is a behemoth of unaccountable proportions, with the gaming industry,and what you get is an unimaginable giant.

Gaming on the Internet, as of today, is restricted largely to Flash-based games or simple arcade games of the ‘80s. Sites such as Addictinggames.com and Liquidgeneration.com give a wide variety of games to choose from. Most of these games, at best, are stress relievers or two-minute shootouts.

The idea of making a game to promote a movie or a product has caught on in India only recently, with sites such as Hungama.com and C2W.com creating these customised games. Most of these can be played online. Sites such as Indiagames.com and Mauj.com, too, are exclusive gaming sites from where you can download games both onto your computer as well as your mobile phone.

Gamer communities also populate the Net, most of them giving out cheat codes and walkthroughs for the games available in the market. You will also get CD cracks for almost all games around, and even though it’s illegal, everyone has searched for those at some point or the other.

Multi Player Online Gaming—and by online, we mean the Internet, not a LAN—is yet to take off in many countries, and no prizes for guessing the reason: no broadband. Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming sites such as Ogaming.com are aimed at giving the hardcore gamer, armed with broadband and a powerhouse PC, a chance to pit his skills against some of the best from around the globe.

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Imagine the Internet being just a scientific tool. No bells and whistles, no movies and music. No games and no interesting software to download. Just scientific network. Well, that’s what it started off as, and if it hadn’t been for all the music and movies and gamesavailable on it, the Net would have lived out its entire life in relative obscurity.We all know that sharing music illegally has been clamped down on hard; we’ve all seen Napster being hauled into court and then destroyed. We’ve also caught on to the lure of applications such as BitTorrent that lets us share our files with peers. Most of the shared files are music, movies or videos.

It’s a forgone conclusion that entertainment is a must for any medium to survive. A television that aired only documentaries and news would not catch on to the general population. The Internet today has become this vast database of most things under the sun. Movies, video clips, sound bytes, music. You name it, and the Net will have scores of sites offering these, some of them legally for a price, some illegally.

Entertainment: The Cornerstone Of The Internet Online radio stations by portals such as Yahoo! with their Launchcast service, too, are attracting customers. These services are free if you subscribe for a basic version—you can always pay for the more advanced, customisable ones. New technologies such as Apple’s iTunes music download service, and Podcasting, too, give you your daily dose of entertainment off the Net. However, entertainment on the Internet, a la television,is yet to kick off due to bandwidth and revenue model issues.

Who would want to catch their daily soap on the Net where it would get chopped halfway due to a bad connection? The gaming industry, too, is waiting for ISPs to resolve the issues concerning supplying the user with static broadband. Once that is taken care of, you can be assured of a shoot fest, a movie, and the news all streaming into your home PC.

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E-commerce was touted as the next big economic miracle that would make instant millionaires. Anyone who had a half-baked idea jumped onto the e-commerce bandwagon. What it did was turn out a lot of wise young men and faulty business models. All those who burnt their fingers in the dot-com bust can now give a safe Internet practices lecture!

A few, however, have stuck it out and made those proverbial pots of gold. Business plans and revenue models have been tweaked and worked upon, and conducting business online is no longer as risky as it once was. All it requires is planning and a systematic approach.

One type of online business that’s doing reasonably well is online shopping, with sites such as Amazon.com raking in millions dollars in revenue annually. Auction sites such as eBay and Apple’s iTunes music download site have also shown that a business model based entirely off the Internet is viable. Online shopping has also become safer thanks to better encryption techniques and payment methods such as PayPal. Surveys have also shown that people around the world are increasingly opening up to the idea of buying items off the Web.

Spurred on by these successes, many individuals are venturing back into the once-forbidden dot-com business sector. A number of collectives are also looking at the Internet to further their business interests. Content providers for the media, Web site developers and Flash programmers form a major chunk of Web professionals.Sites such as www.hungama.com and www.c2w.com conduct their entire business on the Internet.

With technology spreading into different spheres, it has become easier for people to conduct business transactions on the Internet. Will this actually kick off the e-commerce boom? Or will we learn a few more lessons from the school of hard knocks? Our guess is only as good as yours!

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A relatively new phenomenon, online networking and collaboration has caught on fast because of its impact on small businesses and professionals. Networking sites such as www.Ryze.com and www.Orkut.com have developed into business networking sites from simple ‘get to meet more people’ sites. These sites let you browse through individual profiles separated into different categories.

There are also sites targeted at specific professions, such as Writer.net which is aimed at writers and potential publishers. Others, such as deviantart.com, concentrate on visual art. There are other sites aimed at programmers and computer professionals. Apart from networking and getting various employment or work-related opportunities, these sites also allow interaction within the community and lead to the birth of new ideas.

Networking and collaboration tools have helped professionals no end A related development on the Web is the birth of sites such as twiki.org and jotspot.com, which act as online project management sites. They act as the user’s own private intranet. The wiki in these sites make them very easy to modify and customise as per the user’s need. Twiki, for example, is an online enterprise collaborationsite. It is designed to run a project development space, a document management system, a knowledge base, or any other groupware tool on an intranet or on the Internet.

The increasing use of technology in small business and projects has lead to a large exchange of ideas, and has given birth to collaborative efforts such as wikipedia.com and Wikinews. This has also transcended the virtual world and has gone into mainstream media. Daily newspapers such as Ohmynews of Korea are testament to the fact that collaborative efforts from the Internet can be carried forward into the real world.

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As we’ve seen in the earlier section, the Internet is a vast source of information. We can of course view all this data off the Web itself, but at times it becomes necessary to store the information on our personal computers, or at some place where it is easily retrievable. Also, some data, such as video files, cannot be viewed as a streaming file if your Internet connection isn’t fast enough. Another major need is that of downloading applications or software onto your computer. All this brings us to the question—where is the one site that will give us all the data that we need?

The answer is, as of now, there is no site from where you can download anything under the sun. That would be tantamount to downloading the entire Internet. The Net has a number of sites that cater to specific download needs. www.Softpedia.com and www.Download.com are some of the more popular destinations. A large number of sites also offer screensaver and wallpaper downloads. Downloading music or movies without paying for them is illegal, and is a copyright violation. The same holds for downloading text or PDFs of books, whose copyrights are not in the public domain. The download facility has been one of the largest reasons for the proliferation of software, music and movie piracy. Some downloaders available today are able to restrict illegal downloads. A spin-off of the popularity of downloads has been P2P file sharing networks.

Technically, these are similar to regular download techniques. In case of a download from a major Web site, you would be accessing their server and download manager. In a P2P network, you download data from a peer’s computer. With stricter implementations of IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) all over the world, the world of downloading anything for free might just end.

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The Internet was developed as a tool to communicate and share
information. It also acts as a repository of information. This means
it has become your one-stop source of information for any kind.
Got a dissertation? Get your data off the Net. Need to research for a presentation? Well, the Internet is there. So much so, that a lot of colleges and universities are converting their books into online reference material. So the question is, what sort of information can we find on the Net?

To put this in perspective, there are 8 billion (800 crore) Web pages that Google ‘crawls’. Of this, we can assume that around 70 per cent of the pages are giving out some sort of information. Some of the most common and reliable methods of looking up information in this humongous pile of information is to scour through an online encyclopaedia like Wikipedia, or just search for Chances are there is some reference to it on the Internet on just about everything on the InternetIV What You Can Do it on a search engine such as Google. Sites such as howstuffworks. com and answers.com are special catalogue sites that dispense information depending on the query. While howstuffworks.com has a Q&A format, answers.com has a search enginetype interface.

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Voice over IP, also called Internet Telephony, is the routing of voiceconversations over the Internet or any IP (Internet Protocol) network.VoIP can be used on any network connection, including ones
that do not have an Internet connection. VoIP has a number of
advantages and it is widely believed that this will replace the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network)—present telecom protocols.

Using VoIP, one can send and receive data files and messages and have a conversation at the same time. VoIP also supports conferencefacilities. However, the biggest advantage that VoIP has is the low calling cost and its ability to work on your existing hardware setup. Also, the functionality is based on a software (protocol),so constant upgrading of your system is not essential. But will VoIP be the next big killer app of the networked world? Not until a few niggling issues are ironed out.

VoIP-based communication Voice over IP is being touted as the new revolution in telephony and is reliant on your computer, broadband modem and other hardware that needs a constant power supply to keep running. In case of a power outage, you’d be left with no communication service. Traditional phone lines do not rely on the electric grid. Moreover, the nature of VoIP makes it difficult to geographically locate a user. This makes emergency calls an impossibility as of now, though ideas to fix this are being thought up. Sound quality is also inferior as compared to the conventional telephone lines due to the high compression techniques required to conserve bandwidth. Some of the more commonly used VoIP networks are Babble, BroadVoice and Skype. Skype is a free VoIP network that uses an IM-type client and has grown in popularity by leaps and bounds since its introduction.

The success of VoIP will depend on whether the issues regarding accessibility and voice quality are addressed. Also, major telecom companies have already pumped in billions of dollars into mobile networks. This will make them reluctant to switch to a new system. In fact, there is already a fight on to ensure that VoIP dies as soon as possible.

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Electronic mail has all but replaced most forms of written communication. When was the last time you received snail-mail from someone? Banks don’t count! Contrary to popular belief, e-mail was present before the Internet was created. In fact, the tools used for e-mail today were the building blocks of the Internet. E-mail moved from being just another application of a network to becoming the killer app of the ARPANET and later, the Internet. So how does email work? Well, it’s not rocket science, but a detailed explanation would require more than a chapter. In a nutshell, messages (mails) are exchanged between hosts using the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) with software such as Sendmail. Users download their messages (received mails) from servers, usually using either the POP or IMAP protocols.

With the increasing number of Internet users, e-mail services, too, have undergone drastic changes. One of the most apparent changes has been the explosion in storage space. With Google entering the mail arena with its free Web mail service, GMail, most providers are now in the race to provide more and more mail storage space. Though the Internet has innumerable number of mail service providers, Yahoo!, GMail and Hotmail remain the most widely used.

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