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While 2001 is expected to build upon"one of the hottest years ever" for tech mergers and acquisitions (M&A), a report released Wednesday by PricewaterhouseCoopers indicates that potential buyers for technology companies will likely shy away from business-to-consumer (B2C) dot-coms. Instead, according to the report, selective investors will be doin...

When asked recently if he knows what women want, matinee idol Mel Gibson, star of the new motion picture "What Women Want," said simply, "I don't have a clue." If only the e-commerce powers that be were so self aware.Somehow, over the past couple of years, there evolved an assumption that women wanted exclusivity at Web sites -- portals designed on...

Texas Attorney General John Cornyn said Wednesday that his office has filed suit to shut down a Virginia-based tobacco e-tailer, E-Commerce Today, that allegedly failed to take precautions to prevent the sale of tobacco products to Texas minors Cornyn said that E-Commerce Today's e-tail site, Supercheapcigarettes.com, failed to verify that online p...

Traffic to retail Web sites ebbed in the final week of the holiday shoppingseason, according to statistics compiled by Media Metrix, providing furtherevidence that online shoppers completed their shopping early this year E-tail sites saw 31.8 million unique visitors during the week ended December24th, down 10.9 percent from the season's peak of 35....

Making a high profile push to attract new users, online auction leader eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) launched its first national television ad campaign Wednesday with two 30-second spots. The ads ran during prime time TV shows on the three major U.S. networks, including "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" and "The West Wing." The spots also appeared on late-ni...

Magic Software Enterprises (Nasdaq: MGIC) fell 1/8 to 2 3/8 Wednesday afterannouncing that fourth-quarter revenue and earnings will be below previousexpectations "Like many other technology companies, the current weakness in worldwideeconomic conditions, coupled with a slowdown in corporate IT spending, hashad a negative impact on Magic's results,"...

Juno Online Services, Inc. (Nasdaq: JWEB) closed down 1/4 at 11/16 Wednesday after NetZero filed suit against the New York-based Internet accessprovider, alleging patent infringement According to published reports, NetZero says Juno infringed on a patent ithas on a kind of pop-up advertising that is displayed to users of NetZero'sfree Internet acce...

Network Associates, Inc. (Nasdaq: NETA) lost more than half its value Wednesday, plunging 7 1/4 to 4 1/2 after warning of a fourth-quarter loss and announcing thedepartures of three top managers The Santa Clara, California-based provider of Internet security softwaresaid it expects a loss before extraordinary items for the quarter of US$130million ...

Few people quibble over smart card functionality. The cards -- embedded with a memory chip that can store everything from bank balances to prescription information -- can be used for online shopping, network security access and even decoding paid-for digital content such as music and movies....

Online shopping sites received mixed performance reviews during the just-ended holiday shopping season, with overall performance "fair," according to a report released Wednesday by Keynote Systems FedEx.com, VictoriasSecret.com, Buy.com and LandsEnd.com led in terms of overall speed and availability, according to Keynote, an Internet performance-me...

Blue Martini Software (Nasdaq: BLUE) picked up 3 1/2 to 10 1/2 Tuesday after afavorable mention in Barron's magazine, reports said. The stock was reportedly cited as a top pick in the influential finance magazine, which was released over the holiday weekend San Mateo, California-based Blue Martini provides software aimed athelping companies underst...

Holiday shoppers more than doubled their online spending this year, according to numbers released Tuesday by Goldman Sachs and PC Data Online From the first week of November through December 17th, online holiday shoppers spent US$8.7 billion, a 108 percent increase over the $4.2 billion consumers spent online during the same period last year....

NetCreations, Inc. (Nasdaq: NTCR) rose 3/32 to 6 25/32 Tuesday after thee-mail marketing company said it agreed to a US$7 per-share buyout byItalian Internet service provider SEAT Pagine Gialle SpA The deal values NetCreations at a total of about $111 million....

One eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) user has been arrested and another indicted on fraud and money laundering charges stemming from uncompleted auctions on the site, company officials said Tuesday. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) spokeswoman Laura Bosley told the E-Commerce Times that the two investigations involve the alleged defrauding of nearly 250 i...

Yahoo! Inc. surged 1 5/8 to 31 3/16 Tuesday after the online giant saide-tail sales over its properties were strong this holiday season The Santa Clara, California-based Internetcompany said that order volume for its shopping properties outside the United Stateswas more than six times that of last year. Meanwhile, sales in the U.S.nearly doubled fr...

When all else fails, blame the bots That's right: It's not the e-tailers' fault that their Web sites can't handle the hits, or that their servers wilt when automated programs enter the picture alongside human beings. It's not their fault that some guy in Omaha has to wait nine minutes for a page to load. Don't blame us, e-tailers say. Blame the We...

Yahoo! Inc. on Thursday filed documents in U.S. federal court declaring that theFrench government has no right to make the company bar French residents from seeingauctions of Nazi paraphernalia over its U.S.-based Web site The declaratory judgment, filed in San Jose, California, asks the court to concur that the French government has no jurisdictio...

Computer products e-tailer Egghead.com (Nasdaq: EGGS) said Friday that a hacker has breached its computer systems and may have gained access to its customer database The company added that it has retained the "world's leading computer security experts" to investigate the breach and analyze its security measures....

Amazon.com ranked as one of the top online retail sites in markets worldwide during November -- the only multinational brand to do so -- according to data released Thursday by Web measurement firm Media Metrix and its European affiliate, Jupiter MMXI Survey results for the month showed that Amazon beat back its competitors to become the most visite...

Two new studies indicate that consumers remain wary of making last-minute holiday purchases online, although the reports disagree about exactly when this year's holiday shopping reached its zenith According to the Nielsen//NetRatings Holiday E-Commerce Index, released Thursday, traffic to e-tailers in the week ended December 17th (the fourth week a...