Archive

With an eye toward selling half of its air travel tickets online by 2003, British Airways has announced that it will cut 6,500 jobs over that three-year span.

IBM announced yesterday that a six-month experiment with five major record labels has successfully emulated a traditional music store online. According to the company, the store allows music to be downloaded, but prevents illegal copying.

Separate reports released Wednesday by research firms GartnerGroup and Deloitte & Touche show that while security dangers at e-commerce sites are on the rise, many organizations are failing to develop clearly defined policies to cope with consumer vulnerability.

An online fund-raising campaign has reportedly paid big bucks for U.S. Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) in his run for the Republican nomination in the upcoming presidential race, and his organizers are preparing for more via a live streaming fund-raiser on February 10th.

Charles Schwab & Co., the granddaddy of discount brokers, has all but suddenly changed roles from being the hunter to the hunted.

Former U.S. Secretary of Education and two-time presidential candidate Lamar Alexander is entering the world of e-commerce as the founder and chairman of Simplexis.com, a Web site that is designed to help public schools save money by procuring goods and services online.

Earlier this week, Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates told a gathering at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland that European e-commerce continues to be hamstrung by high per-minute telephone tolls.

Discover Financial Services announced today that it is now offering its cardholders the option to have images of their existing Discover cards placed on their computer desktops for online shopping and one-click access to account and purchasing information.

Washington-based watchdog organization the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) has launched a hard-line campaign against an alleged effort by online advertising service DoubleClick, Inc. (Nasdaq:DCLK) to track individual identities and actions online and tie them to offline behavior.

Kmart, the second-largest discount retail operation in the U.S., has announced that it will offer shares of its common stock directly to its 180 million shoppers on its recently-launched BlueLight.com Web site. Most stocks normally must be purchased from brokerages.

Editor's Note: This expanded coverage is brought to you as a follow-up to our story, Dot-Coms Betting Big Bucks on Super Bowl Sunday, which ran on January 28th, 2000.

Business-to-business (B2B) online trading community operator VerticalNet, Inc. has formed a joint European venture with global communications company British Telecommunications (BT) and venture capital fund Internet Capital Group (ICG).

At the opening of the LinuxWorld Conference in New York City this week, database titan Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL) expanded its investment in Linux by announcing that its e-commerce enabling dot-com Suite is now available for the open-source operating system.

Online business security applications provider Diversinet Corp. (Nasdaq: DVNT) announced Tuesday that it has joined The Radicchio Initiative, an industry coalition that has been established to push public key infrastructure (PKI)-based wireless e-commerce security standards.

E-tail giant Amazon.com has announced its third major promotional deal in roughly a week, bringing its tally to a tidy $332.5 million (US$).