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Remember when the tech rebound was supposed to happen during 2002? Now, a recent Goldman Sachs report has pushed back a meaningful rebound in corporate IT spending until mid-2003 at the earliest, predicting flat numbers until then. Many of the largest companies are still mourning truckloads of cash spent on the latest gadgets during the tech boom.

Seeking to recoup millions of dollars that he maintains rightfully belong to shareholders, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has filed a civil suit against five telecom executives who profited from IPOs during the late 1990s and into 2002 The five executives -- including former WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers -- all allegedly received access to p...

When Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) announced its second-quarter 2002 results, its outlook seemed promising: Sales of books, CDs and DVDs were up 20 percent compared with the year-ago period. The company's first-quarter report also was positive, showing a 15 percent increase from the first quarter of 2001 However, not everything the e-tailer touches tur...

Such onetime high-profile visionaries as Thomas Middlehoff, Jean-Marie Messier and Robert Pittman have lately departed their firms in droves, leaving corporate spectators to wonder whether broadband is broken. Messier's vision of seamless media convergence may still have life at Vivendi-Universal, however. Vivendi subsidiary MP4.com is taking a re...

In a move that will boost production of computer chips found in common consumer electronics equipment, the European Union regulatory board reportedly has approved a joint venture between Germany's Infineon Technologies (NYSE: IFX), Motorola (NYSE: MOT) and Agere Systems Each of those three companies will own one-third of the new firm, to be known a...

Server technology improvements are poised to turbocharge the way companies run their e-commerce operations, ranging from the way they process transactions to the methods they use to snag new sales. In the not-so-distant future -- perhaps even next year -- consumers could begin to see results of this transformation as hardware processing power increases and more companies incorporate broadband capabilities into their servers...

Two years after it angered privacy advocates by altering its privacy policy, Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) has told a group of state attorneys general that it will change the guidelines again to make them more consumer-friendly. Amazon, which said the changes will be made within a few weeks, plans to provide consumers with examples of how their data m...

Many online retailers have spent considerable time and money trying to duplicatethe success of Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN), and some say the market is ripe for a new e-commerce giant to rise from the wreckage of the dot-com economy and take the market by storm But the market conditions that spawned Amazon no longer exist, according to Giga Informatio...

Software development is a much different animal than it was 20 years ago. Today's programs rely on interprocess communication and shared memory that often result in tens of millions of lines of code, compared with just a few kilobytes of code in decades-old programs As program size has increased, so has the number of security flaws. In the latest d...

The perfect online customer spends thousands of dollars per year on a wide variety of merchandise and returns repeatedly to order more goods. For e-tailers, the quest for such a customer is like the search for the Holy Grail. No one leaps into the e-commerce waters as a fully formed mega shopper. Only over time do occasional Web surfers mature into first-time buyers and eventually repeat purchasers...

Three former Homestore.com (Nasdaq: HOMS) executives plan to plead guilty to charges stemming from millions of dollars of accounting misstatements and reportedly will cooperate with investigators as a federal probe moves forward. According to several published reports, the company's former chief financial officer, former chief operating officer an...

In the post-boom era of e-commerce, the gurus whose ideas and actions set the bar and tone for the industry may seem familiar. Although yesteryear's fast-growth mantra has been replaced by a different chant -- profits, profits! -- first-wave icons like Jeff Bezos of Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) and Meg Whitman of eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) are still leading the way.

Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) each will spend US$25 million during the next two-and-a-half years in an effort to foster more widespread adoption of the .NET Web services initiative among e-businesses. The $50 million campaign, announced late Monday by the two tech giants, calls for the training of 5,000 HP sales professi...

Before Steve Jobs retook the reins at Apple Computer (Nasdaq: AAPL) in 1997, many in the industry had begun to sound the death knell for the innovative but beleaguered company But in a stunning turnaround, Apple pulled itself out of a pool of red ink and began booking positive earnings. Now, despite shrinking market share -- about 4 percent compare...

There is little question that the number of home users accessing the Internet via broadband will continue to grow. With promotional packages pushing the convenience of an "always-on" connection, consumers likely will be attracted to this technology in droves By the end of 2007, broadband's share of the Internet access market will have more than tri...

The sticker price of high-speed Internet access remains too highfor a majority of U.S. residents, although the service is now available in most areas of the country, according to a government report released by the U.S. Department of Commerce's Office of Technology Policy The Commerce Department said that more than half of American homes have Inter...

Though they attract a large percentage of the online buying audience, e-tail giants like Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) and eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) do not necessarily compete directly against other e-tailers, according to a new report from Nielsen//NetRatings The report argues that even though the two mammoth sites reach one-fourth of the online population, e-t...

The stock market and the dot-com world may be down for now, but that does not mean launching a new e-business is out of the question True, the startup funding spigots have slowed to a drip, and entrepreneurs looking to strike it rich quick with little risk to their own wallets can forget about it. But experts say these factors did not stop business...

In its annual 10-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) reported that its order backlog has fallen 30 percent over the past year. The networking giant said that as of September 9th, its backlog totaled about US$1.4 billion, down from about $2 billion last year However, Cisco executives wrote in the filing, "...

In a business traditionally built on partnerships and cooperation, Dell Computer (Nasdaq: DELL) seems bent on making more enemies than friends of late In July, Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) terminated a four-year reseller agreement with Dell that reportedly brought HP as much as US$100 million per year in revenue. The companies, which have long been ...