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Seeking to repair an embarrassing discrepancy between the pay of its top executive and the company's staggering financial losses, E*Trade said it has rewritten the contract of CEO Christos M. Cotsakos. Under the new contract terms, Cotsakos will repay about $21 million worth of compensation he re...

In what would be its largest reduction in nearly a decade, IBM reportedly will soon lay off as many as 8,000 workers. Company officials already have issued an earnings warning for the second quarter. "People internally had been expecting this," Harry Tse, vice president of research at the Yankee ...

Numerous products and services are now available to shield consumers and businesses from the ever-increasing barrage of spam. But experts warn that if users are not careful, they could end up blocking some e-mail that they actually want. "What's spam to you could be useful company information to ...

A federal judge has denied a Russian software vendor's motion to dismiss criminal charges that allege the company violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by selling a product designed to break anti-copying technology. Lawyers and other free speech proponents said they are "extremely disappo...

Jupiter Media Metrix and Nielsen//NetRatings have settled a long-pending patent lawsuit in a deal that calls for NetRatings to provide struggling Jupiter with a much-needed capital infusion. According to the settlement's terms, NetRatings will pay Jupiter $15 million in cash to acquire two of Jup...

1-800-Flowers.com plunked down about $12 million recently to buy The Popcorn Factory. The analysts cooed. Ah, the synergies, they mused. The online gift-giving world is changed forever. And e-commerce has been reduced to penny candy. Sure, we don't need to go back to the get-big-quick-or-die-tryi...

The high-tech industry breathed a collective sigh of relief as Cisco reported that its third-quarter operating profit more than tripled to $838 million from the year-ago period. The company also booked a net profit of $729 million, compared with last year's huge net loss. But Giga Information Gro...

EBay has announced plans to work with consulting firm Accenture to help retailers and manufacturers sell excess merchandise directly to eBay's 46 million customers around the world. Separately, eBay signed a two-part agreement that calls for VeriSign to provide security and user verification serv...

E-commerce is garnering converts at an increasing pace, even though it is not grabbing the headlines it once did. Analysts say this quiet explosion is making its mark in back-office streamlining, business-to-business dealings, and efforts to assist customers via self-service Web channels. "The em...

EBay may have an imperfect business model, as Yankee Group analyst Rob Lancaster told the E-Commerce Times, but users clearly are buying into that model, and the auction giant eventually could overshadow other e-tailers as it extends its reach into other areas of e-commerce. Andrew Bartels, an an...

Here's a news story you will not be reading anytime soon: Executive X announced he was resigning his position at Technology Co. Y because the firm couldn't afford to pay him enough to stay. "Laying off people is no fun," X said, "and this Enron thing has everyone worried we'll go bankrupt if our ...

The vast majority of online job seekers visit just one of the top career sites on a regular basis, according to a new report from Jupiter Media Metrix. That finding may escalate an ongoing war between the two largest Web career companies, HotJobs and Monster.com. The study also showed there are t...

Although e-commerce can breathe a bit easier now that a long-standing moratorium on blanket online taxes has been extended, most observers say there will be little more than a brief pause before the battle is joined again. "Until the states can get together on how it's going to work, online retai...

As wireless providers search for the right mix of services to spawn a boom in mobile commerce, they also must develop a data pricing strategy that clicks with customers. According to Yankee Group research director Adam Zawel, the practice of charging based on bytes or kilobytes of data baffles many ...

New legislation aimed at leveling the broadband playing field has revived an old debate between U.S. lawmakers and telecommunications officials. The "Broadband Regulatory Parity Act of 2002" is designed to spur deployment of high-speed Internet services by subjecting all broadband providers to th...