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Although comparison shopping motivates many a consumer to shop online, it's second fiddle for small businesses shopping on the Net, according to a study released by JupiterResearch last Friday. The most significant factor governing purchases on the Web by small businesses is previous experience or f...

Google is planning to open a new, 1,000-employee facility in Michigan that will handle its highly profitable AdWords operations -- but Google watchers using this particular decision to augur the company's direction are likely wasting their time. Other than reinforcing Google's intention to continue ...

As expected, lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill Tuesday that would clear the way for a crackdown on Internet gambling. The long-term prospects for the legislation is less clear, however, and the legislation is already being assailed as an election-year ploy by Congressional...

Lucent Technologies warned Monday that lower sales in North America would cause its revenue and profit to drop from a year ago for the quarter that ended in June. Murray Hill, N.J.-based Lucent -- which agreed to be bought by Alcatel of France earlier this year in a deal worth US$13.45 billion -- sa...

Employees at all levels within the enterprise are privy to a wide range of sensitive and proprietary information, which holds a high risk of damage if handled inappropriately. Those same employees are highly reliant upon e-mail for the effective distribution of information. And yet, for most of the...

Though well-intentioned, services that scrub potentially offensive material from DVDs and then resell them as family-friendly versions are violating copyright laws, a court has ruled. U.S. District Court Judge Richard Matsch ruled in favor of major Hollywood studios by saying that a number of compan...

The European Commission is poised to raise the limit on daily fines that Microsoft may face if it does not bring itself into compliance with remedies aimed at addressing its past antitrust behavior on the continent. Reports say the EC will raise the cap on daily fines to the equivalent of US$3.8 mil...

One in five Americans age 12 or older own a digital music player, according to a study released last week by a global market research firm. The study, which is prepared quarterly by Ipsos Insight of New York City, noted that younger music listeners are driving growth in the DMP market, with some 54 ...

Fixed and wireless phone giant Verizon this week filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission details of a possible plan to spin off its U.S. print and online yellow pages business. The company said it had not yet made a final decision on the directories spinoff, but signaled it would divest it...

eBay has determined the Google Checkout system, which launched last week after months of speculation, is not an acceptable form of payment for eBay auctions or fixed-price sales. Checkout, which launched amid swirling questions about how a Google payment system would impact eBay's own PayPal, does n...

In January 2005, I wrote an article for the E-Commerce Times entitled "VoIP Here to Stay." In that article, I stated, "The future of VoIP is, to a significant extent, now!" It's hard to imagine that the column was written only about a year and a half ago. At that time, Vonage had about 350,000 custo...

Although the Department of Veterans Affairs may be able to relax slightly now that the laptop containing sensitive information on millions of veterans and military personnel has been recovered, the incident highlights the role government plays in ensuring data security. "It is a hot political issue ...

With the fallout from its messy divorce with Toys "R" Us still reverberating around the Internet, Amazon.com on Thursday launched replacements for what was one of the most popular departments in its virtual mega-store. Amazon, which handled online sales for toysrus.com for about five years before th...

AOL may offer its full menu of services, including e-mail, at no cost to anyone with a high-speed Internet connection. The Time Warner unit could be forsaking as much as US$2 billion in annual subscription fees in an attempt to drive more traffic -- and hopefully more ad revenues -- to its Internet ...

Just two weeks after selling a major portion of its mobile communications chip business, Intel said Wednesday it would invest US$600 million into a WiMax services provider that previously had designs on an IPO. In a move that offers further insight into how Intel intends to remain a player in the mo...