Archive

Consumers have steadily embraced the Web for their retail shopping needs over the last 10 years. Online spending in 2003 was almost US$55 billion and is expected to top $60 billion for 2004, according to reports from eMarketer. Although some shoppers still have concerns about credit card security or...

As Hurricane Ivan bore down on the southeast coast of the United States this week, Wall Street energy traders feared the worst. What if the storm damaged or destroyed oil pipelines or offshore drilling platforms? The price of crude oil spiked as the hurricane roared through the Gulf of Mexico toward...

America Online, the largest Internet service provider, said it would stop using Microsoft's Sender ID technology to filter unwanted e-mail being sent to its millions of members, and instead embrace an open-source friendly alternative. AOL's decision came just days after a subgroup of the Internet En...

Trying to avert a trans-Atlantic trade war over government subsidies to Airbus, U.S. and European negotiators found little to agree on yesterday during a five-hour meeting in Brussels, Belgium. "We had a useful and frank discussion," John Veroneau, general counsel to the U.S. trade representative an...

Qualcomm today projected it will realize higher earnings in the current quarter than previously expected, with revenues up 60 to 62 percent over the same time last year and up 4 to 5 percent for the quarter. A notable part of the increase was attributed to the company expecting to produce more of it...

Since Sarbanes-Oxley (S0X) was enacted into law on July 30, 2002, management has been scrambling to comply with the Act. In a previous column, "Sarbanes-Oxley: Insurmountable Hurdle for Small Business?," I gave some background as to what gave rise to SOX, how Congress reacted to the public outcry, a...

Activity in the Philadelphia region's manufacturing sector continues to improve, according to firms surveyed for this month's Business Outlook Survey released today by the Federal Reserve Bank in Philadelphia. While the indicator for general activity fell from its August reading, indicators for new ...

Adding the latest competitive twist to the online music space, XM Satellite Radio said it would launch an Internet version of its commercial-free radio service next month. XM said it would offer a Web-only subscription to its satellite service for US$7.99 per month. Subscribers to its radio service,...

Does the operation of a Web site mean that your company can be dragged into court in any jurisdiction? This is a question that has been the subject of numerous lawsuits in both the U.S. and other countries. Here are summaries of a few recent U.S. decisions that provide some guidance on this issue. I...

Infineon Technologies AG announced today that it has reached an agreement with the United States Department of Justice, Antitrust Division. Infineon will plead guilty to a charge related to the violation of U.S. antitrust laws in connection with the pricing in its Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM)...

On the surface, at least, Oracle is having a very good month. Last week, it defied many pundits by successfully overturning the Department of Justice's block on its PeopleSoft acquisition. On Tuesday, Oracle turned in first-quarter earnings that beat analyst expectations. Oracle posted earnings of U...

Today's hot topic is Google and the search-engine ranking of brand identities. All businesses, whether big or small, are trying to dominate the accessibility of their corporate images and brand names, mostly via cyber mediums, fluid Web sites, new cyber branding and digital domain name management te...

Oracle today announced that its first quarter earnings per share increased 18 percent to US10 cents per share, compared to the first quarter last year, outperforming Wall Street expectations that were closer to 9 cents per share. In afterhours trading following the release of the earnings numbers, O...

IBM has announced several new services and technologies to help push radio frequency identification (RFID) systems to industrial companies. The new services are geared toward the automotive, aerospace, defense, manufacturing, chemicals and paper and electronics industries. IBM has partnered with Phi...

A plan to employ Microsoft technology as a standard for identification of e-mail senders to help curb spam has been rejected by a key Internet technical group because of concerns the software giant might seek to enforce its patent rights in the future. A subgroup of the Internet Engineering Task For...