Archive

In a holiday shopping season that was strong across the board for e-commerce but relatively weak for offline retailers, video gaming got a turbo-powered boost. Leading console maker Sony sold 8.5 million PlayStation2 units worldwide, up 24 percent compared with the 2001 holiday period. In North Amer...

On paper, Symantec appears to be one of the hottest tech companies around. Propelled in part by users' need to defend against a rash of destructive and well-publicized computer worms like Code Red, Nimda and SirCam, its stock price has jumped 70 percent in the past year. Nonetheless, leading industr...

Gateway has revealed that its fourth-quarter earnings will not meet expectations because a flurry of promotional offers, including a first-ever two-for-one offer on PCs, failed to lift sales to sufficient levels. The company said it expects to book sales of $1.06 billion, well short of its earlier e...

Holiday sales rose 24 percent over last year's levels to $13.7 billion, boosted by strong growth in online clothing sales and changes in the makeup of the Web shopping population, according to a new report from Goldman Sachs, Harris Interactive and Nielsen//NetRatings. Still, the biggest test of the...

Few things are more precious to an enterprise than information. Using it effectively -- which oftens means sharing it efficiently -- can provide a competitive edge, helping separate winners from also-rans. But data is precious in another way: It must be protected, not only against outside threats, b...

In a move to simplify its user interface, search engine Ask Jeeves has announced it will discontinue use of banner ads on all of its Web sites, instead focusing on sponsored searches, paid for by advertisers, to generate revenue. Ask Jeeves has been testing a banner-free site since last summer, acco...

As recently as a few years ago, IT personnel were trained to harden their network perimeter, barring outsiders entirely. In contrast, today's security environment is far less clear-cut -- and the role of firewalls is expanding. "A lot of new developments are going on at once," Richard Stiennon, Inte...

As 2003 dawns, several signs indicate that the U.S. economy is starting to improve. With those welcome tidings in mind, some workers in the e-commerce sector may be hoping for a reprise of the late 1990s, when jobs were plentiful, stock options were actually worth something, and the general high-tec...

Driven by convenience and efficiency, e-commerce spending most likely topped $74 billion in 2002, a 39 percent jump from 2001, according to Web traffic measurement firm comScore Media Metrix. Meanwhile, Forrester senior retail analyst Carrie Johnson told the E-Commerce Times that the research firm e...

The bad news is no secret, but it bears repeating: If you have bought anything online in the past several years, your personal information, including your home address and credit card number, is probably accessible via the Internet -- and available to people with less-than-noble intentions. Fortunat...

The Semiconductor Industry Association, a trade group that counts Intel and AMD among its members, has announced that global sales of semiconductors increased just 1.9 percent to $12.51 billion in November compared with October levels. The slow growth rate, which bucks the usual holiday spending tre...

Recognizing that more consumers than ever would take to the Internet for holiday shopping this year, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission warned consumers to be cautious. Their first piece of advice: Deal with only those companies that you know and trust. But because the Web is a blind medium, sometime...

Hoping to avoid long lines at the register and searching for bargains, holiday e-shoppers turned to books, music, videos and DVDs as the No. 1 category for their gift purchasing. Books, music and video represented 17.8 percent of all holiday spending, accounting for nearly $1.9 billion this season, ...

As corporate data accumulates at an exponential rate, the work of millions of employees, produced on computers keystroke by keystroke, has produced a virtual monster of a problem. The growing heap of computer files, which includes companies' most sensitive data, can no longer be ignored, leading to ...

Storage software maker Veritas has scooped up two smaller firms in deals worth about $600 million, leading a pre-holiday buying spree by software companies that has rapidly accelerated the pace of industry consolidation. In a separate deal, business intelligence software provider Cognos said it will...