Business

Frequently, clients and friends ask my opinion about the economic stimulus package. Is it really working? Does it make any economic sense? Aren't we digging a deeper hole for our children, our grandchildren and ourselves? These are understandable concerns, and they reflect the anxiety of the America...

A turf war is going on in the mobile applications market as various companies try to carve out a foothold. The players include handset vendors such as RIM, Palm, Apple, LG and Samsung; mobile operating system developers like Google with its Android platform; software vendors such as Microsoft; and w...

Did someone just blink in the great Google vs. News Corp. paid content smackdown? The latest round of digital brinksmanship involving how the search giant aggregates news stories behind paywalls got more interesting Tuesday when Google announced a couple of measures to placate publishers, including ...

Online sales were up almost 14 percent year over year for 2009's Cyber Monday, the first Monday after Thanksgiving and traditionally a big selling day for online retailers. Shoppers spent over 38 percent more per order compared to 2008's figures, and they bought nearly 10 percent more items per orde...

IBM's recent Connect 2009 analyst conference provided fascinating insights into one of the company's most valuable assets -- its software group organization. IBM has long been recognized as a purveyor of enterprise-class computing systems, but during the past decade, the company's global services or...

Amazon's e-reader device, the Kindle, experienced its best sales month ever in November, according to the company, which made the announcement even before Cyber Monday purchases were tallied. Amazon did not release any actual numbers to back up its claim, however. It is unclear whether Amazon was ta...

Major magazine publishers are about to launch a new attempt to digitize their content, according to a recent article in the New York Observer. The publishers reportedly include Conde Nast, Hearst and Time. It's said they're getting ready to form a new company that will prepare digital versions of th...

Fifty-nine U.S. senators are asking European antitrust regulators to conclude their review of the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems. The move, led by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, is an unusual one for the U.S. legislative body. It follows a similar action by the Depar...

You may think it's annoying when you see the same commercial repeated during a 2:30 ad break in prime time, but have no fear -- there is a method to an advertiser's madness. They simply want to make sure you are exposed to that product's branding/logo even as you're fast-forwarding past it on a digi...

Google is amping up its display ad capabilities with the acquisition of startup Teracent, which has developed machine-learning algorithms that can create and customize an ad in real-time, based on user preferences and other characteristics. There are thousand of such "creative elements" that can be ...

Interested parties the world over anxiously wait as the U.S. top court prepares its ruling regarding the patentability of business methods. The U.S. Supreme Court recently heard arguments in the matter of Bernard Bilski and Rand Warsaw v. David Kappos in an appeal from the U.S. Court of Appeals for...

Call it the "New Moon" strategy at Microsoft. Team Google and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. are having a lovers' quarrel over search aggregation of news content; Murdoch claims Team Google is nothing but a bloodthirsty vampire draining potential ad revenue. So like a hunky werewolf in a certain blockb...

Many companies would give up their right to right-click to be able to duplicate Apple's success with iTunes. However, only one actually has the pieces already in place to do that, and its executives announced their intentions Thursday to take on Steve Jobs' company with its own online content servic...

From high-flying Internet pioneer to movie punchline: AOL's nadir may have come when Nicole Kidman's character in the 2004 remake of "The Stepford Wives" asks a group of husbands of robotic spouses where they work. "AOL," answers one man. "Is that why the women are so slow?" Kidman responds. The jok...

The U.S. Senate Commerce Committee has released a report slamming the online business practices of three direct marketing companies -- Affinion, Vertrue and Webloyalty -- along with hundreds of online Web sites and retailers that participate in these practices. Many of the participating retailers a...