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Continuing the E-Commerce Times' exploration of travel-planning Web sites, I paddled over to Kayak this week, and after a few minutes of playing around with the site, I was inexplicably struck with the desire for ice cream. Specifically, Haagen Dazs' five simple ingredients ice cream. No doubt, you...

In what may signal the earliest start for the holiday shopping season ever -- at least as it applies to the video game industry -- Nintendo of America on Thursday confirmed that will indeed be dropping the price of its Wii console by $50 to $199. This is Nintendo's first price cut for its market-lea...

The world is yours, or at least that's the promise e-commerce offers. Get your products, services or information online, and you can gain customers anywhere. It can be challenging, though, to build an active worldwide customer base that buys and comes back for more. It's a competitive world, and stu...

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison can be a wellspring of newsworthy comments. Little wonder, then, that for close to an hour on Tuesday, IT journalists were rapt as he ruminated on the subjects of the day in an interview with Sun Microsystems' Ed Zander at the Churchill Club in Silicon Valley. Ellison didn't...

Facebook, meet Facecard -- a digital-age marriage of e-commerce and social networking, and that's what the founders of Edo Interactive intended in 2008 when they came up with the idea of prepaid debit cards, or Facecards. In fact, if you ask Edo Interactive CEO Ed Braswell the classic Facebook statu...

You may have seen the link recently sent to you by one of your Facebook friends: If the social network were its own country, it would be among the five largest in the world, thanks to its 300 million members. That "country" includes fertile, undiscovered territory for online advertisers, as represen...

Oftentimes, 100 percent of the value of a startup company may be based on the company's intellectual property. If a company's value is based upon its technology or its branding, it is vital that the startup entrepreneur take the appropriate steps to protect its intellectual property. Beyond the obv...

Amazon has launched its own line of consumer electronics products, starting with audio video cables and blank DVD media. It plans to add more accessories and other items in the coming months. The company is leveraging its formidable brand name for this endeavor, positioning AmazonBasics products for...

For so-called Net neutrality advocates, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski's Monday morning speech at the Brookings Institution must have reached their ears like sweet music -- legally downloaded music, that is, delivered on a very fast wireless connection. Genachowski told the Brookings audience that ...

On March 21, 2006, Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey sent out the first tweet: "Just setting up my twittr." A mere three years later, in February 2009, Twitter had approximately 4 million visitors. At that point, Twitter set an audacious goal of one day reaching 1 billion users and becoming "the pulse ...

A day after Google announced it had bought itself some digital help in its Google Books project by way of reCAPTCHA, reports surfaced of new governmental objections to a settlement the company reached last year with publishers and author groups. The attorneys general of five states have filed a clas...

It's back to the future for Palm, which is dropping Microsoft's Windows Mobile in favor of its own proprietary platform, webOS, unveiled earlier this year. Palm CEO John Rubinstein reportedly told investors in a conference call on Thursday that the company wants to dedicate all of its future develop...

For this week's installment in the E-Commerce Times' series on travel-planning Web sites, I took a spin around Orbitz, completing my tour of the top three aggregators. Thus far, my biggest complaint about travel sites in general has been overcrowded user interfaces that waste space with self promoti...

The headline on the Official Google Blog makes sure you know what a CAPTCHA is; "Google Acquires reCAPTCHA" is written in the now-familiar wavy, squiggly-style font that you are used to seeing when you want to log on to certain Web sites or post links on Facebook. When confronted with a CAPTCHA, you...

Online retail sales are projected to increase by 11 percent this year to US$156 billion, according to Forrester Research. Although that's good news, it's a small decline from last year's growth of 13 percent. It's clear the down economy, with the lack of credit access and low consumer confidence, ha...