Ecommerce Update.

• Changing Online Demographics -- The online population in the Asia-Pacific region will surpass that of the United States within five years, according to Jupiter Research. (http://www.jupitercomm.com/company/pressrelease.jsp?doc=pr010112 -- brought to our attention by reader Alan Maltzman.)

That's a pretty significant forecast, which predicts that the U.S. share of the online population will drop to 24% by 2005 (down from today's 36%), while Asia-Pacific's share climbs to 33%. And that begs some rather important questions for every U.S.-centric and English-centric Web site: Jupiter finds that "only one-third of American online businesses are targeting global markets," even though the Internet is clearly a global medium.

For another perspective of "where the traffic is," a Jan. 25 Nua article (http://www.nua.ie/surveys/?f=VS&art_id=905356380&rel=true) describes a StatMarket report that found "55% of all Web traffic worldwide comes from outside of the United States." Geoff Johnston, StatMarket VP, suggests, "This is a wake up call to businesses that have thought about adopting a global Internet strategy, but have yet to implement one."

I suggest that changes such as these, we ignore at our peril...

• Web Hosting -- seems to be rather a Big Thing, considering IDC's findings that Web hosting represented a $4 billion market last year - http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/01/01/22/010122hnwebhost.xml?0123tuam . ("Web hosting" is where your Web pages actually reside on a computer run by another business -- it's probably part of a specialized infrastructure designed to serve your Web pages through redundant, high-speed access to the Internet backbone, along with content and hardware backup facilities.)

IDC expects this business to grow dramatically: by 2004, they expect that Web hosting revenues will climb to over $25 billion!

This is an excerpt from the "Rapidly Changing Face of Computing, " a free weekly multimedia technology journal written by Jeffrey R. Harrow, Principal Member of Technical Staff for the Corporate Strategy group at Compaq. A more extensive version of this discussion, as well as others around the innovations and trends of contemporary computing and the technologies that drive them, are available at http://www.compaq.com/rcfoc . Jeff's opinions do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Compaq. The RCFoC is a service of, and Copyright 2000, Compaq Computer Corp."