Archive

Ask.com is looking to women for answers. The 12-year-old search engine is reportedly narrowing its focus to appeal to married women, mostly in the South and Midwest, in its first major move under the direction of new CEO Jim Safka. Ask.com is trimming 40 jobs, according to published reports, as its ...

Seeking to buy time for its directors to explore alternatives before Microsoft can mount a campaign to win seats on its board, Yahoo has modified the way it nominates board members. The portal amended its bylaws to extend the deadline for nominating directors. The deadline was originally March 14 bu...

For anyone doing business online, commerce meets collaboration at a Web 2.0 portal -- a mutual touchpoint for a company, its partners and customers as well as a personalized filter of information and services found on the Web. The goal: aggregating high-value information about people, products and s...

Hoping to become the portal of choice into the mobile Web, Yahoo on Tuesday unveiled onePlace, a content and services management tool meant to become a customized mobile Web starting page. onePlace's bookmarking tools will enable users who access the Internet from smartphones and other handheld devi...

Semiconductor giant Intel has lowered its profitability forecast, sending stock prices tumbling across the board. The company cut its first-quarter gross margin forecast from 56 percent to 54 percent "due to lower than expected prices for NAND flash memory chips," Intel said. All other expectations ...

It may not have been noticed in the whirlwind of online transactions on Web sites like eBay or Amazon, but e-commerce turned 25 on Tuesday. On March 4, 1983, the husband-wife team of Alex Randall and Cameron Hall quietly launched a business revolution that was then the stuff of dreams, when their ye...

SOA has been increasingly adopted during the past five years, with its promised benefits validated by early adopters. One of the clearest lessons learned is that SOA is all about finding a better approach -- rather than a better technology -- for enterprise application development. In 2008, we will ...

Taking aim at Google, Microsoft is making its Internet-hosted software application services available to businesses of all sizes. Microsoft Online Services, a hosted-application program that started last year for businesses with more than 5,000 employees, launched its new all-inclusive service as a ...

In the latest sign the music distribution business continues to be roiled by change, Nine Inch Nails has released its new album in a variety of formats, including giving part of it away on file-sharing technologies such as BitTorrent. The musical act fronted by Trent Reznor has released part of its ...

A spammer is going to prison, thanks to a ruling by a divided Virginia Supreme Court. The state's high court on Friday upheld the first felony conviction for illegal spamming in the U.S. when it ruled 4-3 that Virginia's antispamming law did not violate the free speech rights of Jeremy Jaynes. "This...

Online brokerage E*Trade has named Donald H. Layton as its new chief executive officer, giving the financial services industry veteran the task of stemming a stock price drop and finding profitable growth opportunities. Layton had served as chairman of E*Trade's board since last November, when he ca...

Ever since Microsoft made an unsolicited takeover bid for Yahoo -- a $44.6 billion proposition -- Yahoo has been beset with distractions, which the company readily acknowledged in making its annual report. The loss of key employees and the exodus of advertisers from its platform have been among the ...

My sympathies to those out there who used last month's announcements from T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon as an excuse to quickly jump ship from Sprint Nextel and sign a contract with someone else for an all-you-can-eat talk plan at $100 a month. Sprint was the only major U.S. wireless carrier that d...

During the last few years, so-called virtual worlds have evolved. Second Life is a prominent example -- with a registered user base targeting the 10 million mark. Avatars build virtual houses, purchase virtual goods and engage in electronic transactions. Conducting business in these virtual worlds i...

Even in a post CAN-SPAM world, where legal protections and technological advances give consumers more control than ever over their inboxes, e-mail remains a key component of many interactive marketing strategies. Commercial e-mail remains a cost-effective way to reach consumers, especially for busin...