Welcome Message from the Editor-in-Chief

Electronic Business (or “e-Business”) is the utilization of information and communication technologies (ICT) in support of various types of business activities. As the economy becomes globalised and organisations are evolving to become service-oriented, together with recent rapid advancement of ICT, especially the Internet, many challenges as well as opportunities have arisen (Chiu, 2010). For example, recent advancement in service computing, mobile computing, cloud computing, and business intelligence applications has wide and deep impact on how businesses are being performed (Leung et al., 2011). Efficiencies and effectiveness have general been much improved, while complexities have emerged. Various emerging social, legal, and ethical issues have also drawn wide attention (Chiu et al., 2009). Therefore, knowledge from various disciplines is required to achieve excellence in e-Business in response to the ever complicating requirements in the rapidly evolving global environment. The industry and academia has also been shifting the focus to a cross-disciplinary and holistic approach. The creation, operation, and evolution of the research and practice in e-Business raise concerns that range from highlevel requirements and business modelling through to the deployment of specific implementation technologies and paradigms, as well as involve a wide (and ever growing) range of methods, tools, and technologies. They also cover a broad spectrum of vertical domains, industry segments, and even government sectors. As such, this journal aims at providing an open, formal publication for high quality articles developed by theoreticians, researchers, managers, educators, developers, and practitioners for professionals to face the multiple dimensions and aspects of the opportunities and challenges of e-Business. Articles of this journal are encouraged to present novel combination of multiple aspects of e-Business such as (but are not limited to):

Electronic Business (or "e-Business") is the utilization of information and communication technologies (ICT) in support of various types of business activities.As the economy becomes globalised and organisations are evolving to become service-oriented, together with recent rapid advancement of ICT, especially the Internet, many challenges as well as opportunities have arisen (Chiu, 2010).For example, recent advancement in service computing, mobile computing, cloud computing, and business intelligence applications has wide and deep impact on how businesses are being performed (Leung et al., 2011).Efficiencies and effectiveness have general been much improved, while complexities have emerged.Various emerging social, legal, and ethical issues have also drawn wide attention (Chiu et al., 2009).Therefore, knowledge from various disciplines is required to achieve excellence in e-Business in response to the ever complicating requirements in the rapidly evolving global environment.The industry and academia has also been shifting the focus to a cross-disciplinary and holistic approach.
The creation, operation, and evolution of the research and practice in e-Business raise concerns that range from highlevel requirements and business modelling through to the deployment of specific implementation technologies and paradigms, as well as involve a wide (and ever growing) range of methods, tools, and technologies.They also cover a broad spectrum of vertical domains, industry segments, and even government sectors.
As such, this journal aims at providing an open, formal publication for high quality articles developed by theoreticians, researchers, managers, educators, developers, and practitioners for professionals to face the multiple dimensions and aspects of the opportunities and challenges of e-Business.
Articles of this journal are encouraged to present novel combination of multiple aspects of e-Business such as (but are not limited to): Joha & Janssen present a novel analysis on the required governance capabilities for government transformation to cloud computing and identify 16 discriminating essential capabilities.They further discover that different cloud service and deployment models influence the relevance of capabilities and the relevance might also change over time.In summary, the articles in this inaugural issue illustrate some of the emerging issues and areas pertinent to e-Business research; while, in many ways, also amplifying the many challenges, which remain to be addressed.It is expected that new topics will emerge while existing research will shift concentration in the coming years.His research interest is in e-Business with a crossdisciplinary approach.The results have been widely published in over 150 papers in international journals and conference proceedings, including many practical master and undergraduate project results.He received a best paper award in the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences in 2004.He serves in the editorial boards of several international journals.He co-founded several international workshops and co-edited several journal special issues.He also served as a program committee member for over 100 international conferences and workshops.He is a Senior Member of both the ACM and the IEEE, a life member of the Hong Kong Computer Society, and a member of the ICST.

About the Editor-in-Chief
Dickson K.W. Chiu received the B.Sc. (Hons.)degree in Computer Studies from the University of Hong Kong in 1987.He received the M.Sc. (1994) and the Ph.D. (2000) degrees in Computer Science from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.He started his own IT consultant company while studying part-time.He has also taught at several universities in Hong Kong and served as a research fellow in the City University of Hong Kong.
theories, opportunities, and challenges Web servers.Liu et al. analyse the operation mechanisms of the virtual currency of social networking sites in China and propose some profit models for service suppliers.In their third model, they propose a novel withdrawal mechanism and their survey shows that official exchange and actual money purchase as two attractive withdrawal mechanisms to bring more profits.