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U.S. federal authorities have sued to shut down an online pyramid scheme posing as an investment club The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a civil action in a Dallas, Texas federal court on August 24th to stop Le Club Prive (LCP), a Panamanian corporation based in The Netherlands, from defrauding investors.

Online retailers are cutting costs and paying more attention to how they spend their marketing dollars, according to a quarterly survey released Wednesday by the Boston Consulting Group and Shop.org As a result of this shift, the survey found, customer acquisition costs fell in the second quarter, as order conversion and loyalty rates rose.

The Information Age is killing critical thinking. The steady barrage of more facts and figures than any human mind can digest results in absurdly swift processing with little or no reflection, much less complex deliberation. The ever increasing pressure to rush to judgment can lead to strangely counterproductive conclusions -- as in the case of what to do with notorious ex-hackers who are ready to go back to work...

Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC) suffered a setback in its bid to produce ever-speedier microprocessors Monday when it announced it would halt production of its fastest version to date of the Pentium III chip Intel confirmed that its 1.13 gigahertz (GHz) Pentium III chip, which was shipped July 31st, has a flaw that causes some applications to fail under...

Ailing online pharmacy PlanetRx.com Inc. (Nasdaq: PLRX) said Monday it will relocate its corporate headquarters from South San Francisco, California to Memphis, Tennessee as part of a plan to cut expenses and reduce cash burn PlanetRx, which has been looking for ways to raise cash, opened a 175,000-square-foot distribution center in Memphis in May....

Online auction houses have taken the dubious honor of generating the most fraud cases on the Internet, according to a survey taken by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) The Internet Fraud Complaint Center (IFCC), a joint undertaking of the FBI and the Department of Justice, said Tuesday that it has received 1,000 complaints per week sin...

The Internet economy will by 2002 employ more than 10 million people across a variety of industries in the United States and Europe, according to a study released Monday by Chicago, Illinois-based Andersen Consulting The report, "Internet Enabled Job Creation and the Digital Revolution," concluded that even though some individuals in traditional in...

The most recognized e-tailer in the United States, Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN), announced Tuesday that it will launch a French-language site Thursday. According to the company, Amazon.fr will be "dedicated to customers in France and to French-speaking customers around the world." "This is a store created for and designed by French people, which for t...

With American television unable to offset a massive time-zone gap, the upcoming Summer Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia is likely to draw more Internet users than any other event in the Web's history, according to lead technology sponsor IBM Big Blue, which initially said it would get more than 1 billion hits, now estimates that its site will rec...

It wasn't so long ago that e-mail belonged to a relatively small in-group who knew it as a fun, fast and cheap way to communicate. The technology made it possible to chat with co-workers while looking busy, to talk to people outside work without tying up the phones, and to communicate across time zones without waking anyone All that was possible be...

Unless they've had their head in the sand, anyone following the Internet Economy knows that one of today's most hotly debated issues is privacy -- with a capital "P." Yet for e-businesses that want to sell successfully online and instill trust in their customers, privacy is not always a black and white matter.

A new survey released by the Association of British Insurers (ABI) predicts that cybercrime -- including Internet fraud, e-mail abuse, hacking, and viruses -- will increase over the next 20 years The report, "Future Crime Trends in the United Kingdom," comes days after three men were arrested for using bogus accounts to steal money from Egg, one of...

Further tightening its hold on the online travel market, Sabre Holdings Corporation (Nasdaq: TSG) announced Monday that it will acquire GetThere, Inc. (Nasdaq: GTHR) in a deal worth $757 million (US$). Under the terms of the deal, GetThere will be combined with the Sabre Business Travel Solutions (BTS) unit to create an online travel platform for corporations and suppliers. The new Sabre company will operate under the GetThere name and will be based in Menlo Park, California, where GetThere is currently headquartered.

According to a new study by NFO Interactive, consumers who buy products online often keep items they might otherwise return because they do not want to pay fees to return the shipments About one-fifth of online shoppers said they have kept products purchased online in order to avoid the fees, the Greenwich, Connecticut-based firm said.

The difference between "virtual" and "actual" is nowhere more important than in the world of online fashion. Buying clothing, footwear, jewelry and accessories involves far more subjectivity than shopping for products like books, CDs or electronics, and most people want to get up close and personal before committing to a new wardrobe item or an expensive gift...

New York City-based Jefferson Market, which began 60 years ago as a small neighborhood shop, has become the first grocer to make its services available to Internet-enabled cellular phones The announcement was made Thursday by Jefferson Market's online partner, Peachtree Network, Inc., which said it hopes by Labor Day to extend wireless service to a...

A coalition of 4,200 Ford dealers is forming FordDirect.com, which will enable Net users to select, purchase and finance new automobiles online. Customers can select the Ford dealers that will complete their transactions FordDirect will be jointly owned by Ford dealers and the Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F), with an independent management team appointed ...

A survey released Thursday by the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) indicates that e-commerce is paying off handsomely for car dealers that have a well-established Internet presence According to NADA, dealerships that have been operating Web sites since 1995 sell some 13 new vehicles per month, compared to just five new vehicle sales f...

Some dot-com failures seem to come out of the blue, with few public indications of struggle before the companies actually fail. But in other cases, the slow and painful descent unfolds under a hot spotlight as the whole world watches It is no accident that online grocer Streamline.com (NasdaqNM: SLNE) chose to make its severe money woes public -- U...

In an ironic twist in the online privacy debate, TRUSTe, an organization that monitors Internet privacy issues, was caught violating its own privacy policy Thursday through the use of a third-party software program TRUSTe, a coalition of such online firms as America Online, Excite@Home and Microsoft, said it took steps to remove the offending progr...