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Amazon.com has agreed to pay US$40 million to settle a year-old patent infringement lawsuit just days before the case was set to go to trial. Amazon will make the one-time payment to Soverain Software of Chicago. In exchange, Soverain agreed to drop all claims that Amazon violated five of its "core ...

The Web has been one of the fastest growing sales channels for multi-channel retailers and thus is often regarded with some trepidation and less esteem than traditional retail channels. However, the Web might be starting to show signs of maturity. Meanwhile, according to recent reports from Forreste...

Yahoo has said it will invest US$1 billion in China-based e-commerce company Alibaba.com, targeting a market exploding with growth and ripe with new opportunities. The terms of the deal, which Yahoo billed as a long-term strategic partnership, call for Alibaba to take over Yahoo China and for Yahoo ...

Online sales approached US$39 billion in the quarter ending in June, according to a report from Boston-based Forrester Research. That's a 25 percent increase over a comparable period last year and a slight increase over the quarter ending in April when sales were US$38 billion. Forrester analyst Car...

A new bill introduced by a Democratic Senator from Arkansas aimed at taxing online porn sites -- at a 25 percent rate -- is raising Constitutional concerns among legal scholars. The bill is called the Internet Safety and Child Protection Act of 2005 (S 1507), and has been referred to the Senate Fin...

Following the footsteps of rivals and possibly laying the groundwork for new marketing channels, Google has added RSS and Atom content feeds to its news search product -- which has been in beta form for the better part of two years. Google added RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and Atom feed links to...

To change or not to change, that's the big question. A very large number of corporations, big and small, are faced with the question of how and when they should bite the bullet and change their name or whether they should simply do nothing. Why? Sometimes -- and more often it is like an underground ...

As a provider of office furniture to enterprises of all sizes, Haworth, a company with US$1.4 billion in sales to businesses around the world, knew it could benefit by improving its use of e-commerce technology in order to gain efficiency through automation. After all, many of Haworth's customers, f...

A rumored deal whereby Yahoo would purchase a US$1 billion stake in Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba is highlighting the efforts by U.S. companies, also including eBay and Google, to get deeper into the Chinese market. This difficult endeavor includes issues of resistance to foreign investment and...

E*Trade Financial today announced its second acquisition in as many days, scooping up an investment advisory firm in a deal that augments its much larger, US$700 million buy of Harrisdirect. E*Trade did not disclose the purchase price it will pay for Boston-area-based Kobren Insight Management, a re...

Two advertisers have filed a lawsuit against Google, saying the search giant did not live up to its promise to cap the amount of charges advertisers could incur in any given day. The suit was filed in the Superior Court of California in Santa Clara County and seeks class action status, which would e...

Another sign that e-commerce has come of age appeared yesterday as JupiterResearch predicted online advertising would reach US$18.9 billion by 2010 -- almost double last year's gross of $9.6 billion. Much of that revenue growth will be stoked by search engine advertising, which garnered 40 percent o...

Seeking to keep pace with rivals in a rapidly consolidating industry, E*Trade Financial will buy Harrisdirect for US$700 million in cash. E*Trade said the purchase of Harrisdirect, an online-only brokerage owned by the BMO Financial Group -- parent company of the Bank of Montreal -- would be "highly...

Shares of Cisco Systems and Nokia were both trading higher today after reports that Cisco was weighing a move to take over all or part of the mobile equipment maker in a bid to boost its ability to provide both fixed wire-line and wireless services to its stable of enterprise customers. Neither comp...

Real Simple Syndication (RSS) -- the technology used to create feeds of information directly to a user from Web sites and blogs -- is in its nascent stages of development, but it's one marketers should be taking a hard look at as a future vehicle for their wares. Marketers who shun RSS now might rea...