What is the Internet? How does it work? How does it provide business value?

In this paper we are going to discuss of the most well-known and unique technological phenomenon of the last centuries ”“ Internet and its numerous advantages for businesses.

Nowadays, millions of people use Internet everyday for their personal and professional needs, most of them are hardly aware of the very roots of its development. Most researchers relate the appearance of Internet as a technology to the Advanced Research Projects Agency ”“ ARPA. The function of this organization was to manage the special research projects, aimed at technological improvements in the military field. Starting from the 1960s ARPA worked upon creating a way for linking several computers to each other, launching various programs at corporations and universities (Lynch, 1993). The creation of such network was supposed to simplify the system of the control over the information flow, especially during the wartimes.

At the beginning of the 1990s the internet network became popular. The project of the new World Wide Web appeared in 1991 on the basis of the invention done by English scientist Tim Berners- Lee two years before. One of the first browsers was ViolaWWW and was later substituted by the Mosaic web browser (Leiner, 1993).

Today internet became an integral part of our lives. Most people can not imagine their existence without the access to internet everyday. As a very powerful means internet took the functions of some other media as well, like for example of newspapers, magazines, radio, television, telephone connections and post. Nowadays the best way of communication in the work place is email communication and it is even difficult to imagine how much time we would have lost if we had not this medium for conducting day-to-day communications in the workplace. Email is the exchange of messages with the help of telecommunication. E-mail is one of the greatest advantages of Internet and the most popular one. Among the advantages of email communication are the following: you save your time and money; you can send not only a text message, but also graphic images and sound files, as attachments (Brigham and Corbett, 1997).  You can be sure that the addressee has got the message if you use delivery notification. This option is very useful and even necessary in the workplace.

The World Wide Web has also brought numerous advantages to its users. In fact WWW is an enormous storage of documents, images and other resources, which are interlinked with each other.  Users have the possibility to navigate in all this information and access the necessary resources. A lot of people are looking for something specific and if they do not know the exact address of the website where to find it, they can use the special search engines, the most popular are Google and Yahoo.

Marketing and advertisement business have also found their places among the possibilities offered by internet. (Gattiker, 1992). All such marketing activities are united under e-commerce. The speed of information spreading and simultaneous access of numerous visitors to the same information are the keys of the online marketing success.

Besides shopping is rather simplified through internet, customers need just several minutes for finding the necessary goods, ordering them and making a payment, without even going out of their home. Internet advertisements are very much oriented on the potential target groups or individuals, which certainly increases the sales

Overall, we can conclude, that internet plays a very important role for any type of business, namely bringing improvements to the processes of communication, advertisement, data collection and so on.