Conference links technology, business

To match the rapid pace of technology and get a leg up on the competition, Wharton MBA students organized the third annual Wharton Technology Conference, held Friday at the Philadelphia Convention Center. The conference brought together members of the business community and those working in the academic sphere, generating dialogue about the controversial role that technology could play with its growing involvement in domestic and global commerce through the Internet. Michael Putnam, a researcher and associate with Forrester Research -- an independent research company that deals mainly with technology -- acted as the moderator for a discussion called "E-commerce: The New World Order in Business." The panel discussed Internet sites such as Yahoo! and Amazon.com. Putnam set the tone of the discussion by introducing slides showing the rapid growth of electronic commerce and its potential for even greater growth. Also on the panel was Wharton alumnus Bruce Brownstein, the sales director at the eBay on-line auction site, who said that Internet companies face much lower overhead than most other businesses when the company expands. The closing keynote address of the conference was given by John Patrick, vice president of Internet technology at IBM and the man responsible for the Thinkpad line of notebook computers. Patrick's vision for the potential of the Internet was in giving "power to the people" by providing information whose content would be decided not by editors, but by the personal interests of the computer user. This potential was described as being largely untapped, limited only by the availability of technology resources and the current limitations in the bandwidth of the Internet. "It seems like everybody is connected [by the Internet], but if you take the number of people connected as a percentage of the world, it rounds to zero," Patrick said. The limitless growth of the Internet and its connection with the global economy were prominent aspects of Patrick's address. "[Many institutions have] no more room to build buildings, but think of the possibilities to expand in their software," he said. Patrick also pointed out the potential problems in regulating Internet commerce. "Technology is important but public policy is equally important," he said, citing self-regulation as the best means to enforce responsibility. "Regulating the Internet is like regulating the wind." Audience reaction to the conference was decidedly positive and concentrated on the business opportunities that the conference explored. "It offered food for thought in terms of better preparing students," said Peter Shoudy, the director of faculty research in Wharton computing. "If this is happening today, we need to know what to provide for tomorrow."