Business

Hasbro, maker of the word game Scrabble, has issued the ultimate double challenge to social network Facebook and its wildly popular Scrabble-like application Scrabulous: a lawsuit alleging copyright infringement. The suit, filed Thursday in a New York district court, claims the application violates ...

Sony announced Thursday that the new iteration of its Reader digital book will be able to read electronic books published in the .epub file format, a file type gaining acceptance among major trade book publishers, many of whom have committed to begin publishing forthcoming e-books in the format. Beg...

During the best of times, raising capital is no walk in the park. Today, however, the task can be daunting. After the Bear Stearns debacle and the problems of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, it is more difficult to raise capital than at any other time in recent history. Given today's environment, a comp...

Juniper Networks, a provider of networking systems, has tapped 16-year Microsoft veteran Kevin Johnson to be its CEO. Johnson led Microsoft's platforms and services division, which oversees product development, marketing and strategy for the Windows and online services businesses. As it announced Jo...

As though in defiance of current economic trends, Amazon delivered Q2 earnings that gave investors little to complain about. Net income increased 102 percent to $158 million, or 37 cents a share, compared with net income of $78 million, or 19 cents per share, in the year-ago quarter. Net sales, or r...

Proponents of the beleaguered Child Online Protection Act suffered yet another blow Tuesday when a federal appeals court deemed the law unconstitutional once again. The 1998 law, known as "COPA," aims to keep children from viewing pornographic materials on the Internet by making it a crime for comme...

The world of online business communication has introduced two industry-changing elements for small business: more customers and more competitors. Circa 1999, you were ahead of the competition by simply having a Web site to preview your service or products. By 2004, Web transactions were the norm, an...

Yahoo disappointed shareholders with its second quarter earnings report, posting declining profits that missed Wall Street's expectations. Its quarterly net income fell to $131 million, or 9 cents per share, from $161 million, or 11 cents per share, a year ago. Excluding certain charges, Yahoo reali...

Yahoo and activist investor Carl Icahn have reached a settlement in their bitter battle over control of the company. The two sides have agreed to keep most of the current Yahoo board on the ballot for re-election and to create three new board positions: one for Icahn and two for executives of his re...

Cell phone trafficking operations siphon millions of dollars from the wireless industry and its customers every year. Until recently, little could be done to fight back, but a vigorous counter-attack that has yielded several victories in federal courts across the country is beginning to turn the tid...

While in Manhattan recently, I spoke with several investment bankers and SEC attorneys about the future of reverse mergers and PIPEs. Considering the plight of the economy and the swings in the financial markets, the general consensus was remarkably positive. Reverse mergers have become increasing ...

eBay turned in more than respectable earnings for its second quarter: a 22 percent rise in profits for a net income of $460 million, or 43 cents a share. Yet the online auctioneer's stock value dropped following the news, in part because of its disappointing guidance for the third quarter. After the...

Intel investors received a double whammy of both good and possibly bad news regarding the world's largest chipmaker on Tuesday. Intel's quarterly profits topped analyst estimates by 3 cents. However, the company's guidance for the upcoming quarter was less than what many in the market had been expec...

Online poker is becoming more and more popular in Germany. As a result, the country's strict legal restrictions on gambling are under pressure, and Germany may soon have to open its protected markets to private online poker providers. Currently, private online poker operations violate the new German...

Viacom and Google have agreed to keep the personal information of YouTube users private, even as Viacom gears up for the next stage of litigation in its copyright infringement lawsuit against Google. Google will provide user data to Viacom, but redact information that can be used to make personal i...