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Despite strong opposition from business groups and a lawsuit, the Obama administration is making E-Verify, an online verification program, mandatory for businesses working with the federal government. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on Wednesday announced support for the p...

Maybe Amazon's dreams of beaches filled with summer readers clicking on Kindles instead of riffling through a James Patterson or Clive Cussler page-turner didn't quite pan out. Or maybe economic stimulus funds haven't trickled down far enough to get recession-weary consumers thinking of e-book reade...

Up to 70 percent of online shoppers abandon their shopping carts before completing the checkout process, according to SeeWhy, a company specializing in abandonment tracking software. This rate, which rose substantially from 2005 to 2008, is in part a reflection of the intensified comparative shoppin...

Microsoft reportedly is in preliminary talks to settle two pending antitrust investigations now before the European Commission. Microsoft wants to end these probes before the Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes leaves office at the end of the year, according to the scuttlebutt. Both of the antitru...

Large, mid-size and small businesses that were already using Gmail for their communications needs may have forgotten that the email application was still officially a beta app -- that is, a work in progress, with all the tinkering and occasional downtime that goes along with the label. On Tuesday, h...

It seemed like a logical leap: If you already provide shoppers with coupons online, what's to stop you from offering them an online source for e-gift cards? So the founders of online gift card company CashStar pooled resources with online shopping coupon mogul Coupons Inc. to create an outlet for m...

Pandora Radio Founder Tim Westergren had been one of the most vocal critics of the royalty rates that small online radio broadcasters were forced to pay per government edict. However, Tuesday's announcement of an agreement between those webcasters and SoundExchange, the organization tasked by the re...

"Green IT" has been a tech industry cause celebre for the past few years, first arising as the potential effects of global warming were coming increasingly to the fore and then enjoying a significant boost as the global recession compounded the practical value of data center energy efficiency and po...

Best Buy is rolling out a pilot program for a new product category: electronic Segways. The company has announced it will be selling these vehicles in 20 stores in Washington, Oregon and California, with electric motorcycles to join the mix later this summer. There had been expectations that Best Bu...

He was into cloud computing before cloud computing was cool. Before that, he'd given the world its first real Web browser. He's a board member of eBay and Facebook, and he's invested in some must-watch Web 2.0 companies: Digg, Twitter, Ning, etc. So when Marc Andreessen announced on his blog Sunday ...

Nothing is as heart-wrenching to an e-tailer as watching a customer abandon a full cart just seconds before consummating the deal. To be so close yet so cashless is more than frustrating; it's harmful to an e-tailer's health. A virtual armory of tools are in use to woo, cajole, prompt and push consu...

You search, you find, you click "buy." Your e-commerce quest is nearly complete. You get to that checkout screen, and you think it's all good. Then the shipping charges get tacked onto your total, and you're left thinking that $9.95 deal didn't end up being such a bargain after all. Then there are t...

Job insecurity combined with financial fear-mongering has consumers slashing their budgets. Cellphone and premium TV services look like easy items to eliminate. Typically, however, those services tie users to contracts as well as three ugly words: early termination fees. Can customers break those co...

"With great power comes great responsibility" is an oft-quoted line from the first "Spider-Man" film. Without torturing the "web" metaphor beyond its breaking point, it also applies to your friendly neighborhood Internet service provider. A maze of legislation, regulations and business practices dat...

The final day of reckoning in the four-year battle between TiVo and EchoStar has been pushed out a little further. Late Wednesday evening, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit granted EchoStar's request to stay a contempt order imposed by the U.S. District Court the day before, until it...