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Just two days after regional consumer electronics chain Circuit City declared bankruptcy, Best Buy has slashed its earnings forecast for the upcoming holiday season and much of 2009. The retail giant forecast fiscal 2009 earnings of about $2.30 to $2.90 per share, down from a prior forecast of $3.25...

While other consumer electronics makers are headed for a rough holiday season, two standouts in the industry are expected to rise above the rest -- Apple and Dell. A survey by ChangeWave concluded that the U.S. is on the brink of experiencing a "massive breakdown in consumer spending" just in time f...

Four years after Microsoft paid US$1.6 billion to Sun Microsystems to settle an antitrust and patent suit, the once-bitter rivals are teaming up on Internet search. Under an agreement announced Monday, Sun will offer Microsoft's MSN Search toolbar when users download Java Runtime Environment, or JR...

Lost in the furious run-up to the November elections was a Kentucky court ruling that could unravel a long-established legal argument supporting basic e-commerce activity: namely, that local or state governments cannot extend their reach into cyberspace to impose their own laws on a Web site. Becaus...

All those singing cats and clumsy kittens you currently see on YouTube will soon be getting some more feline company at the online video Web site: Leo, the roaring, toothy Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion. The movie studio announced Monday that it would allow a very limited selection of full-length movies a...

Circuit City has filed for reorganization relief in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in Richmond. The retailer -- No. 2 in the electronics goods space after Best Buy -- has clearly been struggling for the last several months. In November alone, it slashed its w...

While online business owners have become more aware of tactics for driving traffic to their Web sites, it is easy to overlook the more basic methods amidst the rise of new Search Engine Optimization techniques involving the content and HTML coding of Web sites. Search engine traffic can be inconsist...

When's the last time you heard an online retailer complain that their banner ads were too well targeted? How about an online publisher lamenting the torrent of accurate user data they were able to capture, or for that matter a user who just wanted more of the ads they were getting to be irrelevant t...

More is better, right? Wrong. In "The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less," Barry Schwartz explains how too many options actually cause more psychological distress than good. And nowhere is the overabundance of choice more prevalent than the Internet, where any given Web site can present us with an ...

Someone is trying to extort money from a company that handles drug prescription benefits for 50 million Americans in what could be one of the more damaging cases of data loss on record. The incident may raise red flags for industry hopes of putting more health care information online in an effort to...

Chief marketing officers are given the unenviable, almost contradictory, task of catching marketing lightning in a bottle on a consistent basis. The problem is that turbulent economic conditions, like the ones we've experience recently, have historically stymied marketing innovation and forced CMOs ...

Cisco reduced its revenue guidance and posted weak earnings, or net income, for its fiscal first quarter, worrying both its own shareholders and those who view the computer networking manufacturer as a bellwether for the tech space. The networking giant turned in an essentially flat performance for ...

In what's become the equivalent of watching a fish flop around outside of water, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang has now come forward with a new plea for Microsoft to purchase his struggling company. Just hours after Google announced it was pulling out of its planned search advertising partnership with Yahoo, ...

A new business advocacy group has launched in New Orleans -- a city that three years out from Hurricane Katrina is still trying to entice all of its former residents to move back home. Called "504ward," a play on the New Orleans' area code of 504, the group's main goal is to help the city attract an...

With tough economic times upon us, it is more important than ever to maximize the effectiveness of search engine marketing initiatives to drive both online and offline conversions. In September and October of 2008, Aberdeen surveyed over 200 organizations to unearth Best-in-Class search engine marke...