Opera Software AS
Instituttsveien 23
P.O.Box 122
2007 Kjeller, Norway
+47 63 84 86 34
http://opera.nta.no or operasoftware.com
Requirements:
Opera is available in 16 and 32 bit versions, 16bit version for Windows NT3.51, for Windows 3.1x, for Win32s extensions, for OS/2 and UNIX WABI. The 32bit version only runs on Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0. Dos 5.0 or higher.
"...runs happily on a 386SX with 6MB (2 MB) of memory. The program is only 1MB and fits easily on a floppy."
E-commerce Resources (Web Developer's Journal). How to build online shopping sites. Tutorials on internet security, credit card merchant accounts, shopping cart software, and other electronic commerce help for home or small business.
eCommerce, Ecommerce, Electrionic Commerce, Web Commerce, whatever you want to call it, for us it's selling things over the Internet. You want to take orders on your Web site, your customers will pay for things with credit cards. It might be retail and it might be business-to-business.
We've assembled some articles and opinion pieces
that should help you find your way though the electonic commerce maze to get the
piece of cheese we hear is at the end.
Building
a Simple Ecommerce Web Site
You don't need to spend $millions to build an ecommerce
Web site. There are viable do-it-yourself alternatives at hand. These are cost
effective and require little technical expertise.
Tune
Your Ecommerce Site for the Rush
Christmas Rush, Easter Rush, Summer Rush or a bit
of brisk business next Friday. It doesn't matter when, the principles are the
same. Your servers and bandwidth have to be big enough. Your systems have to be
solid.
Is
SSL dead?
Most security experts have been aware of problems
with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), but they haven't been exploited extensively.
Chances are they will be, though.
Adding
A Dealer Locator To Your Site
Many large corporate Web sites have a "dealer locator"
feature that lets a user enter a zip code and get a list of the closest locations
to them. It turns out to be both cheap and easy to do.
Hey
wait! You didn't pay for that!
There's a dirty little secret about shopping carts: <whisper> most shopping
carts are abandoned full of merchandise before they ever get to the checkout counter!</whisper>
Find out how to reduce your abandonment rate.
Ecommerce
Tutorial
A detailed, three-part tutorial about how to set
up a simple ecommerce Web site.
Ecommerce
on a Budget
A simple, dependable, and inexpensive ecommerce solution
for small businesses is proposed.
E-commerce
in the UK
Multimillion pound savings are emerging from use
of the Web in the UK. Investment bank Schroders are looking to cut over one million
pounds from their annual buying costs. However, it's not all a smooth ride, as
Freeserve will confirm.
Do
the banks hold back E-commerce in the UK?
In the UK, doing business on the Internet is in
some ways still a frontier-town activity. The worst of the outlaws in this game
of Cowboys and Indians are the UK banks and credit card companies.
Shopping
Cart Programs Compared
Need a shopping cart? Here's an overview of your
options, from homegrown JavaScript to easy-to-implement turnkey solutions for
merchants.
NetObjects
Authoring Server Suite 3.0
NetObjects is shooting to alleviate the bottleneck
created when Webmasters are forced to do all the work of developing and deploying
Web content to Internet and Intranet sites.
EDI
as the Backbone of Electronic Commerce
Large and medium-sized companies have been doing business with each other electronically
for years via Electronic Data Interchange (EDI).
Toolkits
for a Distributed, Agent-Based Web Commerce System
This is an 8-part series. As information on the Internet
becomes more dynamic and heterogeneous, 'software agents' have been touted as
the new building blocks for a new Internet structure.
Ecommerce Environment
Why The Web Still Isn't Ready For Consumers
Despite early projections, consumers have not been overwhelming e-retailers with business. The questions we need to ask ourselves are why, and is there anything positive we can do to improve the situation?
Reducing
Online Credit Card Fraud
Credit card company figures show that 90 per cent
of consumers are reimbursed when their cards are used fraudulently, while 75 per
cent of online retailers have to eat the cost when they're the victims of credit
card fraud.
Gambling
Online And Offshore
Online betting and gaming revenues are predicted
to reach $10 billion by 2002. Interactive betting services are looking to attract
a new audience - the middle classes and women.
Dotcom
Bubble - "The Emperor Has No Clothes!"
Expect valuations in ecommerce companies and other
consumer business to go down even further. Somebody has noticed the Emperor is
nude and the stock market and venture capitalists are no longer prepared to pay
for his wardrobe.
You
Paid How Much For That Domain Name?
The domain name Business.com was recently sold for
a staggering $8 million. If you've got a domain name to sell, or you'd like to
buy one, where on the Internet should you start looking, and how much will it
be worth?
Archive
Electronic
CommerceBy Frank Griffel, Tuan Tu, Winfreid
Lamersdorf (editors)
Book review.
Web Commerce
Cookbookby Gordon McComb
Book review. Explains how to set up sites to sell
either tangible goods, or content. Includes a wealth of useful CGI scripts and
HTML templates.
Internet Commerceby Andrew Dahl and Leslie Lesnick
This is also a pretty comprehensive guide.
Frontiers
of Electronic Commerceby Ravi
Kalakota and Andrew B. Whinston
This textbook covers credit card systems, EDI, electronic
cash systems, security, and much more.
Electronic
Commerce - A Manager's Guide by
Ravi Kalakota and Andrew B. Whinston
As those of you who have read some of my earlier rantings will know, I can't say that I've been delighted with either Netscape's or Microsoft's version 4 browser offerings. Both suffer from bloat, big-brotherism, and bugs! Furthermore, the ongoing arms race means that they often implement new features of HTML in totally different ways. So, when I heard that an alternative browser called Opera is beginning to carve out a share of the browser market, and that it has already established a certain cult following, I was keen to check it out.
June 13, 1998
Opera claims to be a browser for pros: something that does the job well, and has plenty of features but not so much schnickschnack. It certainly makes a good first impression. Weighing in at a little over 1 meg, the installable file downloads quickly, and the program installs in seconds. Also, when you run Opera, it doesn't insult your intelligence by telling you that your site "does not have a DNS entry" just because you forgot to plug the modem in!
These guys have the balls to put links to both Netscape and Explorer right on their download page. They invite you to go ahead and try both, confident that you'll be back to pay for Opera.
As advertised, Opera is geared a little more to the experienced Internet user. It shows a lot more geekish info onscreen than the other guys do, and the interface is more customizable. You can have multiple browser windows open within one Opera window, and you can even remember them on exit, so you could have a whole set of pages that open on startup, or simply go back to the last sites you were looking at.
There are a lot of other handy features, but…
I don't like the way form fields look. Netscape and Microsoft give a form field a little "3D" border that people have gotten used to seeing. This visual cue makes it clear where form fields are. In Opera, a form field has only a single line around it, and just looks like any ol' little box.
Implementation of advanced elements is spotty. The FONT tag doesn't seem to work sometimes (I know we're not supposed to use the FONT tag anymore, but…). Java and Javascript sometimes work, sometimes don't. The little Java doodad on the Web Developer's Journal home page doesn't work in Opera, so they need to get with it.
The status bar shows a lot of details about what's going on when you load a page. That's very cool. However, it also hides the URL while a page is loading, to show connection info. Not cool. We like to see the URL that we're headed towards at all times, so we can see if it redirects, or so we can grab it or change it at the last minute.
Opera doesn't always handle email very well. If you choose Outlook as your mail program, it'll open Outlook when you click on a mail link, but not actually address a message. If you choose Netscape mail, it will open a new message with email address ready to go, but it also opens a new browser window. With Eudora it works correctly. Hmmm…are they trying to tell us something? Opera has its own integrated email client, too.
These quibbles, though important, are nothing that can't be fixed with a new release or two. If Opera can come through with what they sort of promise - a browser that really implements all of HTML 4.0 - then they'll have a hot product on their hands. What remains to be seen, however, is whether they can cut it against the competition. The two Big Brother browsers may be kind of lame, but they do the job, and are standards of a sort. Oh, and also…Not only are they both free, but most computer buyers these days get Explorer built right in, if not set to pop up the first time they power up the box.
Most surfers don't need two browsers, any more than most people need two word processors. Most folks just pick one of the big boys. And as long as that's the case, Web developers will have to have a copy of each of the aforementioned boys. So it seems to me that Opera may have a tough time finding much of a market beyond their loyal following of Opera-heads. On the other hand, it looks like the team behind Opera know their stuff, and I'm always in favor of more alternatives, especially when the two leading products are so…so…
This product is well worth checking out, and these people well worth supporting. Download Opera, or check out their site, at: http://opera.nta.no.
