Articles by Paul A. Greenberg

It was a news item that wasn't fully unexpected, yet it caught some e-commerce industry observers off guard Last week, online delivery service Kozmo locked up its bikes, cashed in its dreams and became another footnote in the work-in-progress version of electronic commerce history....

It was a news item that wasn't fully unexpected, yet it caught some e-commerce industry observers off guard Last week, online delivery service Kozmo locked up its bikes, cashed in its dreams and became another footnote in the work-in-progress version of electronic commerce history....

It was a news item that wasn't fully unexpected, yet it caught some e-commerce industry observers off guard Last week, online delivery service Kozmo locked up its bikes, cashed in its dreams and became another footnote in the work-in-progress version of electronic commerce history....

Change is in the air, and that is good news for e-commerce. Internet-based selling is about to start Act II. You remember Act I -- the era when e-tailers were going to change the world? After the curtain came down on Act I, assorted naysayers hobnobbed smugly about the foolhardiness of trying to force consumers to adopt e-shopping....

News stories about dot-com layoffs and closures have so frequently stormed the business pages that many have become numb to the downside of e-commerce -- and have even stopped thinking about what to do about the decline We read so much about cash shortages and sluggish sales that news of yet another closing hardly causes a blip on the radar screen....

Are Americans ready to exchange "I dos" or pay their last respects to loved ones via the Internet? Probably not, but an increasing number of computer users are finding their way to the Web to plan weddings and funerals. If it sounds too gimmicky, consider the possible impact these two industries might have on electronic commerce....

As the New Economy fights its way into mainstream American commerce, minority-owned businesses are experiencing a struggle similar to the one they have endured offline for years It's an old story in a new setting: a scenario with which Americans are all too familiar. The potential cultural danger is that it may not be the fittest who survive, but t...

Once again, e-commerce is getting just a bit too comfortable with itself. Just when the dot-com shakeup seems to be leveling off, surviving companies are neglecting one of the key issues that could prove to be its undoing: children's privacy Research has confirmed that children do not discriminate when it comes to the information they share online....

If you blinked last month, you might have missed a small item in the news about venerable entertainment trade publication "Variety." The company's Web site, Variety.com has started charging users for content. Surprised? Why? Because suddenly words are not free on the Internet any longer? Get used to it....

Did you ever wonder where old comedians go when their schtick no longer draws crowds? If you think Jonathan Winters, Milton Berle, Phyllis Diller, George Carlin and Rich Little have simply vanished, then it may be worth a trip to Laugh.com. The new comedy content and e-commerce site is the brainchild of George Carlin, arguably one of the most inno...

Pundits, powerhouses and assorted talking heads were already predicting the demise of retail e-commerce before the current economic downturn. Now, with the conventional wisdom suggesting more doom and gloom, the word on the street -- yes, that Street -- is that e-commerce was great fun, but it was just one of those passing fads Not so fast. It's in...

Just when you may have believed Hugh Hefner was fading from the public consciousness, here comes the news that the 75-year-old founder of Playboy Magazine will launch a major online casino by the end of this year The report comes as no surprise to those who have followed the success story of Playboy Enterprises, but this time there's a catch. Playb...

Amid the unfortunate prognostications about the fate of e-commerce sites, smart marketers are setting their sites on capturing untapped markets Deciding which markets to tackle shouldn't be all that difficult. After all, most e-tailers have narrowly focused their marketing efforts on the supposed "affluent, educated" population we hear so much abou...

After surviving the dot-com shakeout and now a slowing economy, many e-tailers are too distracted to remember one of the essentials of running a smart business: Listen to the customer Why is it that online merchants can't seem to hear what their current and potential customers are telling them?...

Online delivery service Kozmo.com appears to be quietly re-tooling itself, with a tip of the technological hat to the "old economy." The company quietly, yet significantly, dropped the "dot-com" from its name recently, and announced it would mail out almost a half-million printed catalogs, complete with a good old-fashioned toll-free number to call...

By most accounts, last year's holiday season was an encouraging time for e-tailers, especially those Web sites that managed to make gift buying hassle-free.With the exception of online clothing merchants. For some reason, American consumers still can't see their way clear to buy clothes on the Internet. In fact, according to Accenture, 80 percent ...

My first story about Orbitz, the multi-airline mega-site that promised to revolutionize the way Internet users make travel reservations, appeared almost two years ago -- before the site even had a name. T2 (aka Travelocity Terminator) was the working title Now it has a name, but no functionality. Go figure....

When Internet incubator CMGI ended 2000 with the report of a US$636.6 million third-quarter loss, heads were spinning throughout the e-business industry After all, wasn't CMGI the golden child of the new economy? Wasn't CMGI expected to carefully nurture more than 70 dot-coms toward profitability and longevity, thereby proving that e-commerce reall...

E-commerce proponents often believe that anything sold offline is fair game for online sales New Economy cheerleaders might say, for example, that selling health insurance online is as credible a notion as selling baseball memorabilia....

Call it the voice of desperation When asked by a local television station how to account for gross-receipt tax decreases in his city, Albuquerque, New Mexico mayor Jim Baca said, "That's really attributable to a couple things. One is Internet sales, which are not taxed."