Articles by Mary Hillebrand

Oil companies have had a boom-bust relationship with high technology since the high-profit days of the 1970s, when several oil companies, most notably Exxon, pumped millions into largely unsuccessful high tech start-ups such as Zilog, Qwip and Qwix When the profits ran dry after the OPEC oil embargo ended, so did the high tech investments. Now, wit...

Apparently not content with the vast number of existing studies that predict a rosy future for online business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce, the U.S. Department of Commerce has announced plans to launch its own effort to measure the growing market sector This year's study will be the start of an annual series "aimed at maximizing technology's posit...

Dominant online auctioneer eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) extended its reach to 850 U.S. cities Tuesday through an agreement with CitiQuest.com, a national network of city-specific portals Under the agreement, visitors to specific city sites within CitiQuest will be able to click on an eBay icon to connect directly to one of the 57 regional auction sites that...

E-commerce security solutions provider Entrust Technologies (Nasdaq: ENTU) has launched an initiative with Research In Motion (Nasdaq: RIMM) to offer secure wireless e-commerce solutions to the mobile marketplace Research In Motion (RIM), a provider of wireless data products and services, will first add the Entrust/Express security solution to its ...

Uniform Code Council, Inc. (UCC) subsidiary UCCnet is constructing a giant Web site that will allow companies to exchange Universal Product Code (UPC) information electronically throughout their supply chains The business-to-business (B2B) network will allow information about UPC products such as price changes, new-item introductions, maintenance, ...

Twenty-seven airline companies, led by American Airlines, United Airlines, Northwest Airlines, Continental Airlines, and Delta Airlines, have banded together to form a travel Web site that will offer online discounted fares and ticketing The as yet unnamed site is seen by some observers to be an effort to control the end-to-end travel process, whic...

Zale Corp, one of North America's largest specialty jewelry retailer, will add the sparkle of diamonds to WeddingChannel.com's online wedding planning service In an agreement announced Tuesday, Zale (NYSE: ZLC) and WeddingChannel have joined hands in a brick-and-click marketing deal to cross-promote each other's products and services.

American drugstore giant CVS (NYSE: CVS) and health information Web site Healtheon/WebMD (Nasdaq: HLTH) announced today that they have forged a five-year, exclusive alliance The agreement calls for the Woonsocket, Rhode Island-based CVS to be the exclusive online pharmacy for Healtheon/Web MD and in the health channels of partners Lycos, Excite@Hom...

Spanish-language online retailer Espanol.com has found that few Hispanic Internet shoppers in the United States care whether their shopping destinations are in English or Spanish The study of 2,000 Internet-ready U.S. Hispanics, commissioned by Espanol.com and conducted by Research & Research, Inc., found that 51 percent of respondents are either i...

For those who have gotten comfortable buying products online, here are two questions. First, how do you get the stuff you buy serviced? Second, can you get an extended warranty like the kind that is readily available from most brick-and-mortar sites? These questions are part of the myriad of back-end e-commerce issues that have pushed many analysts...

NBC's new Internet venture NBCi (Nasdaq: NBCI) announced today that it is joining with shopping network ValueVision International (Nasdaq: VVTV) to make a $20 million (US$) equity investment in online consumer electronics retailer ROXY.com The deal will showcase ROXY.com's product offerings on NBCi's flagship portal, Snap, and across the NBCi Web p...

The U.S. Department of Commerce will be doling out $12.5 million (US$) in grants to local governments and non-profit organizations as a small step in closing the so-called digital divide between Americans who access the Internet for business, education and home use, and those who cannot afford to The grants are available under the department's cont...

A new Web-based service from PrivacyBot is offering e-commerce businesses the ability to create and display a customized privacy policy to its customers. It also allows the site to display the Trustmark seal of approval for a price of $30 per year The Trustmark seal is a graphic that Web sites can post to give consumers one-click verification of a ...

The 1999 holiday shopping season may have boosted many online companies' hopes for continuing growth, but the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business says that such hopes may be unfounded In its 1999 Wharton Virtual Test Market, the school found that online personal spending is not increasing at the same rate it had been a year ago,...

Lycos, Inc. (NASDAQ: LCOS), which saw the number of shoppers on its network increase 450 percent during the 1999 holiday season, has announced that is taking a 14 percent stake in Internet Commerce Services Corp. (iCOMS) and is forming a strategic partnership to build both companies' e-commerce businesses iCOMS provides electronic commerce applicat...

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-based USABancShares.com (NASDAQ: USAB) announced Wednesday that it will launch a private banking site to specialize in serving the financial needs of the business-to-business Internet community The new site, to be called B2Banc.com, will offer a variety of customized financial packages, including Internet access service a...

Ricardo.de, a small challenger for Germany's online auction business, has parlayed a live auctioneer and other services into a formidable 400,000 person-strong subscriber base According to Ricardo.de, the site has now surpassed eBay Germany as the most popular online auction site in that country. The local start-up is actually competing with severa...

Further fueling speculation that Net stocks and rushed IPOs have set e-commerce up for a retrograde period, Value America (Nasdaq: VUSA) is cutting its workforce nearly in half and will reduce its product offerings to a handful of categories that are proven sellers on the Internet Value America, which launched its online department store in Februar...

With a nod toward the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has announced plans to use an arbitration panel to resolve disputes over domain name ownership before cases reach the courts WIPO established its own internal arbitration panel early this month to handle such disput...

A new study released this week by The Boston Consulting Group shows that 25 percent of all business-to-business purchases will be made online by 2003 The figures, which are based on an expected growth rate of 33 percent per year from 1998 to 2003, indicate that the online market will be worth as much as $2.8 trillion (US$) in transaction value.