Archive

The months of rumor and speculation about Amazon.com joining the digital music download business appear to be reaching a fever pitch and observers say it's only a matter of time before Amazon's music service debuts and makes a run at market leader Apple. Amazon could not be reached for comment on th...

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decided today that telephone companies that offer high-speed Internet access do not have to share their wire lines with other DSL providers. By classifying DSL as a information service, the FCC freed telecoms from federal telecommunications regulations. Th...

In a move that might be a timely boost to its ability to compete head-on with Yahoo and MSN and others as a one-stop portal, America Online has said it bought online data storage and backup firm Xdrive for an undisclosed sum. AOL said that with privately held Xdrive on board, it would be able to boo...

Lately, so much has been written about ever-increasing real estate prices. Can these prices just go on increasing? Or will they abruptly stop, and then fall precipitously? The experts are divided on whether or not the bubble will burst. However, one thing is certain: the price rise can't go on forev...

Bidding to capture a piece of a potentially lucrative vertical area of search, Yahoo has launched a test of an audio search engine that gives users the ability to comb through some 50 million audio files, from audio blogs and other spoken word programs to downloadable songs and albums. The Yahoo Aud...

Sloth can be a deadly sin, or at least a potentially litigious one, and the rise of blogging on the Internet has peaked concern about this pitfall. The issue arises because bloggers, many or most of them amateurs, often overdose on cut-and-paste editing, which can result in copyright violations, Pau...

Yahoo has launched a self-service ad-placement network that is designed to offer small publishers, including bloggers, access to revenue from contextually relevant advertising, a service already offered by rival Google. Yahoo said the beta version of the expanded Yahoo Publisher Network is aimed at ...

It's no secret that consumers all over the world are far more politically savvy than they were a decade ago. They clearly support or oppose their own country's internal or external governmental policies. Most country's foreign policies, whether straight or sugarcoated, strategically branded or fals...

Casinos in Nevada might become the first to explore a new area of the Internet gambling frontier, enabling users to gamble on mobile devices while they're in and around casinos. A recently passed law makes Nevada the first state in the U.S. to allow the use of hand-held devices for gambling at casin...

Dogpile.com, the most heavily visited meta-search engine on the Web, has said it would add Microsoft's relatively new MSN Search tool to the array of engines it uses and also said that contrary to popular belief, different search engines provide vastly different results. The addition of MSN Search m...

Claria Corp. makes some US$100 million a year selling pop-up advertising on the Internet, but with the launch of its PersonalWeb product this month, it's hoping to hitch a ride on a bigger gravy train. With PersonalWeb, a permission-based vehicle for slotting customized advertising into Web pages, t...

American relations with China may be seen from both a political perspective and in regard to how U.S. firms are seeking to enter the Chinese market. We begin here with the political perspective and then examine strategies for U.S. firms seeking to enter Chinese markets. It can be hard for many peopl...

Seeking to lay claim to a technology that could help create a syndication network for advertising that would be distributed the way blogs and other newsfeeds are now, Google has applied for a patent for its RSS advertising feed. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a widely used technology that ena...

Yahoo today announced agreements with both CNN.com and ABC News in which both news organizations will provide daily video news feeds to Yahoo News starting next month. CNN.com will offer extensive video clips daily and ABC News will offer a robust package of on demand video content. All of the video...

Ask Jeeves launched a new paid listings program today, putting an automated, self-service auction system in place that mimics what search leaders Yahoo and Google offer to advertisers. The company said the Ask Jeeves Sponsored Listings system would make it easier for advertisers to buy, manage and o...