Archive

I'm willing to bet it's a relevant statistic of the software industry that somewhere, at any given time, some poor schmo's Web browser is crashing. No browser has the kind of failsafe architecture that characterizes many operating systems and databases. That's a problem, because browsers are fast be...

Gartner has confirmed what many high-tech firms already believed, releasing a report that labels 2002 the "most difficult year" on record for the worldwide information technology services industry. The market for IT services actually shrunk compared with 2001, falling 0.6 percent to $536 billion, Ga...

In recent months, a few large e-tailers, including Target.com and Walmart.com, started charging sales tax on purchases made through their sites. If more e-businesses hop on the bandwagon in coming months, the trickle may become a trend. The timing certainly seems right: With many state governments f...

Rapidly expanding search engine Google has launched a blitz of overseas initiatives, establishing local news search services in Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia. The effort is an attempt to build on the early success of Google News, a U.S. service that aggregates thousands of news stories fr...

Just a few years ago, getting an e-business off the ground was as easy as drawing up a business plan and finding the venture capital to fund it. Those days, to put it mildly, are over. But this does not mean businesses that rely on the Web are no longer sprouting. While most e-biz startups are not d...

The Federal Trade Commission plans to review whether Microsoft violated a consent agreement with the agency over the privacy of its Passport online password system, following the revelation of a flaw that could have compromised millions of consumers' private data. Microsoft said it has fixed the pro...

Back in early 2000, mobile commerce seemed to have sky-high potential. A global survey found that 61 percent of respondents imagined they soon would be using wireless devices as universal payment tools, and the analysts who compiled the survey predicted that overall revenue generated by m-commerce w...

Nearly 31 million U.S. Internet users aged 18 and older have downloaded music in the past month -- but nearly three-quarters of those people also have purchased music either online or in music stores in the past three months, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. That finding supports a long-held argume...

It's time to end the mystery. That blur in the sky over Silicon Valley last week wasn't a bird or a plane. It wasn't a UFO either. It was the president of the United States. He stopped in the valley, fresh from declaring victory over Iraq on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific, to hawk his tax cut. B...

Thanks to millions of dollars in investments on the merchant end and widespread upgrades to broadband connections by consumers, e-commerce has begun to move at a faster pace. Still, transactions can bog down, especially over dial-up connections, and security remains one of the biggest impediments to...

Representative Phil Barnhart of the Oregon state legislature in March introduced a bill that would compel the state to pledge to strongly consider Linux and other open source programs in all future purchase decisions. Regardless of what you think of Microsoft's newly released Windows 2003 server, Li...

Cisco Systems sounded a familiar refrain in reporting its quarterly results, saying profits were up but sales declined as demand for its networking gear remained soft, forcing the company to scale back its efforts to develop next-generation products. Net income was $987 million, a penny per share be...

The browser wars of a few years ago now seem like a footnote in Internet history. With 90 percent market share, Microsoft's Internet Explorer is king of the hill, Yankee Group senior analyst Rob Lancaster told the E-Commerce Times. However, even though Redmond seems to have won, some interesting bro...

Palm's latest trick is a combination organizer/camera/MP3 player/movie player called the Zire 71 -- the second version of the company's consumer-model PDA. The bad news is, the Zire 71 has a slow camera that takes fuzzy pictures and an MP3 player that's never quite loud enough. The good news is, for...

Hewlett-Packard has announced a slew of new products, services and strategies in an effort to capture a greater share of computing business at the world's largest enterprises. The "Adaptive Enterprise Strategy" rollout coincides with the one-year anniversary of the still-controversial $19 billion HP...