Archive

As we begin to wrap up development efforts for the holiday lockdown, we often get into conversations with our partners about strategies and priorities for 2010. (Yes, we'll be there before you know it!) For many retailers, 2009 has been the year of social media. Investment so far has been primarily ...

Google is amping up its display ad capabilities with the acquisition of startup Teracent, which has developed machine-learning algorithms that can create and customize an ad in real-time, based on user preferences and other characteristics. There are thousand of such "creative elements" that can be ...

Interested parties the world over anxiously wait as the U.S. top court prepares its ruling regarding the patentability of business methods. The U.S. Supreme Court recently heard arguments in the matter of Bernard Bilski and Rand Warsaw v. David Kappos in an appeal from the U.S. Court of Appeals for...

Roku is making additional types of content available via its set-top players with the introduction of the Roku Channel Store. Participants so far include Pandora, Facebook Photos, Revision3, Mediafly, TWiT, blip.tv, Flickr, FrameChannel, Motionbox and MobileTribe. Other providers are developing apps...

Call it the "New Moon" strategy at Microsoft. Team Google and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. are having a lovers' quarrel over search aggregation of news content; Murdoch claims Team Google is nothing but a bloodthirsty vampire draining potential ad revenue. So like a hunky werewolf in a certain blockb...

While retailers are facing increased competition, many have recognized that the way to thrive today is to invest in new ways to engage and serve their customers. Many are taking a fresh look at one of the cornerstones of the online experience: site search. Good site search can enable more personal ...

The early indicators that Windows 7 is doing well seem to be piling up. CEO Steve Ballmer gave that perception a boost at the company's annual shareholders meeting on Thursday, announcing that Microsoft "has already sold twice as many units of Windows 7 than any other operating system ever launched ...

Many companies would give up their right to right-click to be able to duplicate Apple's success with iTunes. However, only one actually has the pieces already in place to do that, and its executives announced their intentions Thursday to take on Steve Jobs' company with its own online content servic...

It's fitting that the last stop on my tour of travel-planning Web sites for the E-Commerce Times was American Airlines. The site illustrates all of the problems that spurred this special look at travel sites in the first place. Travel sites have developed a reputation for being hard to navigate and ...

From high-flying Internet pioneer to movie punchline: AOL's nadir may have come when Nicole Kidman's character in the 2004 remake of "The Stepford Wives" asks a group of husbands of robotic spouses where they work. "AOL," answers one man. "Is that why the women are so slow?" Kidman responds. The jok...

The Pink Ghetto is a largely invisible, often unmentioned and unacknowledged place littered with impediments to womens' upward mobility in the workplace. Women in the Pink Ghetto do not get equal pay for equal work, are not offered the same opportunities as their male coworkers, are not promoted as ...

The U.S. Senate Commerce Committee has released a report slamming the online business practices of three direct marketing companies -- Affinion, Vertrue and Webloyalty -- along with hundreds of online Web sites and retailers that participate in these practices. Many of the participating retailers a...

If Activision is to be believed, then its new "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2" video game has blown away all competition with the lethality of a Javelin missile plowing through Russian terrorists. Included in the smoking wreckage: not just previous gaming bestsellers like "Grand Theft Auto IV" and "...

After more than two years of crowing about "software plus service" rather than Software as a Service for its cloud computing strategy, the finish line is finally in sight for Microsoft's Azure. The company announced Tuesday at its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles that Azure will off...

Oh, the joy of downloading and installing free software -- only to have a bunch of unwanted, tag-along junkware, or worse, malware, automatically installed on your computer. Why has this unacceptable practice been the norm in the software industry for so many years? The fact is, software publishers ...