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Allocating precious budget dollars is always a challenge in a down economy, and with security threats seeming to loom at every turn, chief information officers are struggling mightily to gauge risks and decide how to counter them This is far from a black-and-white issue. In a Morgan Stanley survey of 225 CIOs, security software ranked second behind...

Six months after Buy.com took a page from Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) by forming an e-commerce outsourcing division, the company has landed its first customer, online movie ticketing site Fandango. United Commerce Service (UCS), as the Buy.com spinoff is known, will create a co-branded Buy.com site for Fandango that will enable the ticketing firm to...

Detecting and preventing online fraud is like fighting neighborhood crime. Residents can put locks on doors and windows, install a security system to detect intruders, and train a dog to monitor the yard. If a break-in occurs despite those precautions, police will investigate and track down any suspects. A local organization may help deal with the loss and provide educational material to help prepare for the future...

Further entrenching itself in the open source software market, IBM (NYSE: IBM) has inked a multiyear deal that calls for the technology giant to offer Red Hat's (Nasdaq: RHAT) top-of-the-line Linux operating system as an option on all of its eServer machines. Specifically, Red Hat will deliver its Linux Advanced Server software to run on IBM's eSe...

In the early days of e-commerce, small businesses flocked to the Web with grandiose visions of transforming mom-and-pop shops into mega retailers. Those visions turned out to be pipe dreams for most merchants, and the dawn of reality convinced many early adopters to retreat to the brick-and-mortar world. But small e-tailers are not finished, accor...

In a last-ditch effort at an image makeover last year, urban delivery service Kozmo.com changed its name to plain old Kozmo. The move did not work -- within a few months, Kozmo was no more -- but it highlighted the prevailing mood of that time. Even true dot-coms were distancing themselves from the Internet label. Now, though, as e-commerce enjoys...

Despite all the reports of bankruptcies and losses, some companies are doing just fine on the Internet. But the list of companies that are "getting rich" may be surprising. Aside from the obvious handful of bellwether e-tailers, such as Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) and eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY), some seemingly unlikely candidates are raking in cash from online shoppers seeking hard-to-find items and deep discounts...

Perhaps bowing to a sluggish PC and hardware economy, Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) on Thursday announced plans to move to a direct sales model for more than 2 million small businesses. Previously, such a model had been reserved for the company's largest enterprise customers. In fact, this initiative marks the first time HP has specifically targeted...

It is widely known that Google has become a dominant player in the search engine space. Founded in September 1998, the company is at least three years younger than most of its competitors but already has surpassed its rivals in terms of popularity. Google regularly draws enough visitors to rank it among the top five most-visited sites on the Web, ...

Use of the Internet to conduct business-to-business (B2B) transactions grew substantially in the second quarter, possibly signaling the early stages of economic recovery, according to a report from Forrester Research and the Institute for Supply Management (ISM). Emphasizing that a single quarter does not constitute a long-term trend, ISM spokespe...

E-tailers have come to the costly understanding that providing a general e-mail address ona Web site is no way to handle customer queries, especially when many of those queries arenever answered. In fact, countless online sales have been lost because a company did notrespond in a timely manner to customer concerns that arose in the middle of thetr...

For a while, dot-com death watches were all the rage. Then even those got a bit stale. After all, how many times can you whistle with astonishment at how much venture capital a company burned through in a short time? The shakeout is in neutral, still gliding downhill but at a much slower rate than the breakneck pace it kept throughout 2001. Occasi...

Amazon.com has sued partner Expedia, claiming the travel site has not lived up to its end of a deal struck almost exactly a year ago between the two online companies. According to Amazon, Expedia failed to make payments called for under terms of the deal, which stipulated that Amazon would receive up to US$16 million from the online travel company...

Although innovation can be a wonderful thing, there is something to be said for sticking to the basics. In fact, that is how venture capitalists seemingly have come to feel about high-tech companies as they contemplate which to fund with now-limited resources "Funding has slowed to a trickle," Forrester research director Charles Rutstein told the E...

Despite computer makers' best efforts to entice business andconsumer spenders with sleek new hardware, upgraded operatingsystems and bundled software packages, growth forecasts for theworldwide PC market have been slashed again, according toresearch firm IDC's most recent study IDC cut its worldwide PC buying forecast for consumer and businesssecto...

E-commerce players often seem to be playing a game of follow the leader, especially when it comes to site design and operations. And while Amazon.com and eBay have enough imitators to keep them flattered indefinitely, other outstanding e-commerce sites also have their share of admirers. These sites score high marks for a variety of reasons and have helped set the standard for e-commerce of the future.

Intel has adjusted its guidance for the third quarter, saying that revenue will fall within the US$6.3 billion to $6.9 billion range it previously provided. However, the company narrowed that range, aiming toward the lower end. "Intel expects revenue to be slightly below the midpoint" of the original range, Paul Otellini, the company's president a...

Pushing into yet another product category, Amazon.com has signed a multiyear partnership with office supply giant Office Depot. The deal adds office supplies to Amazon's ever-expanding roster of product offerings, which now includes books, music, videos and DVDs, kitchen products, electronics and, thanks to recent deals inked with Target, apparel ...

As they gear up for what is expected to be a crucial fourth quarter, e-tailers are anxiously examining the ongoing third quarter for signs of what awaits them in the future. Specifically, many observers are focused on the health of online travel and retail firms, because the travel sector in particular has dragged down the overall economy in the past year...

At long last, everybody's favorite German media conglomerate, Bertelsmann, has swallowed hard and admitted that it bit off a lot more than it could chew on the Internet Bertelsmann has decided to put a couple of its online properties, notably its BOL.com bookselling site, up for sale. So line up if you want to buy a money-losing online operation wi...