Building With 'Clicks and Mortar'

Once the items are sold, AuctionDrop cuts a check and mails it to you.

In addition to inspiring new businesses, the Internet continues to transform traditional businesses like the food service industry.

Thanks to information technology, restaurants and food providers are re-imagining their core identities, looking to recast themselves as the vanguard of what Internet pundit Glenn Reynolds calls "the comfy-chair revolution": businesses offering not just traditional consumer goods for sale but pleasant public spaces for people to meet, work, study and relax as well.

For example, Starbucks has made a big bet that customers will want wireless Internet access in coffeehouses, the better to linger longer over their lattes. So it has partnered with telecom service provider T-Mobile to equip all its stores with wireless Internet access.

McDonald's also has expressed interest in wiring its restaurants and recently announced it would be introducing gourmet coffee shops called McCafes in the United States. The effort to wire its stores seems to fit hand in glove with its domestic coffee bars initiative.

Other retailers are forcing themselves to adapt and change too. The huge and hugely successful chain store Wal-Mart announced plans to open a digital music store. It's still working out the details, but it's not difficult to imagine loading the kids into the minivan and heading to a Wal-Mart for diapers, trash bags and dog food and, once there, letting the kids hang out in the online music store burning CDs for the car trip home.

And thanks to the increasing prevalence of broadband connections at home, e-commerce sales continue climbing impressively, despite the uncertain economic climate of the last few years.

Almost 40% of homes have a broadband connection today, and that number is expected to jump to almost 80% in the next five years, according to UC Berkeley's John Battelle. Online shopping grew by 24% in the third quarter of this year over last, according to BizRate.com, and Forrester Research estimates that online sales will top $100 billion this year.

In the movie "Field of Dreams," the character Ray Kinsella, played by Kevin Costner, is reassured about his plan to build a baseball diamond in a corn field with the line, "If you build it, they will come." Now that consumers are poised to cross the $100-billion mark in annual online sales and retailing, and as businesses continue to emerge and evolve in response to demand for technology goods and services, it appears that the same bit of wisdom is applicable to the Internet and IT as well.