Business

Amazon.com has agreed to pay US$40 million to settle a year-old patent infringement lawsuit just days before the case was set to go to trial. Amazon will make the one-time payment to Soverain Software of Chicago. In exchange, Soverain agreed to drop all claims that Amazon violated five of its "core ...

Yahoo has said it will invest US$1 billion in China-based e-commerce company Alibaba.com, targeting a market exploding with growth and ripe with new opportunities. The terms of the deal, which Yahoo billed as a long-term strategic partnership, call for Alibaba to take over Yahoo China and for Yahoo ...

A new bill introduced by a Democratic Senator from Arkansas aimed at taxing online porn sites -- at a 25 percent rate -- is raising Constitutional concerns among legal scholars. The bill is called the Internet Safety and Child Protection Act of 2005 (S 1507), and has been referred to the Senate Fin...

To change or not to change, that's the big question. A very large number of corporations, big and small, are faced with the question of how and when they should bite the bullet and change their name or whether they should simply do nothing. Why? Sometimes -- and more often it is like an underground ...

As a provider of office furniture to enterprises of all sizes, Haworth, a company with US$1.4 billion in sales to businesses around the world, knew it could benefit by improving its use of e-commerce technology in order to gain efficiency through automation. After all, many of Haworth's customers, f...

A rumored deal whereby Yahoo would purchase a US$1 billion stake in Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba is highlighting the efforts by U.S. companies, also including eBay and Google, to get deeper into the Chinese market. This difficult endeavor includes issues of resistance to foreign investment and...

Two advertisers have filed a lawsuit against Google, saying the search giant did not live up to its promise to cap the amount of charges advertisers could incur in any given day. The suit was filed in the Superior Court of California in Santa Clara County and seeks class action status, which would e...

Shares of Cisco Systems and Nokia were both trading higher today after reports that Cisco was weighing a move to take over all or part of the mobile equipment maker in a bid to boost its ability to provide both fixed wire-line and wireless services to its stable of enterprise customers. Neither comp...

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decided today that telephone companies that offer high-speed Internet access do not have to share their wire lines with other DSL providers. By classifying DSL as a information service, the FCC freed telecoms from federal telecommunications regulations. Th...

In a move that might be a timely boost to its ability to compete head-on with Yahoo and MSN and others as a one-stop portal, America Online has said it bought online data storage and backup firm Xdrive for an undisclosed sum. AOL said that with privately held Xdrive on board, it would be able to boo...

Sloth can be a deadly sin, or at least a potentially litigious one, and the rise of blogging on the Internet has peaked concern about this pitfall. The issue arises because bloggers, many or most of them amateurs, often overdose on cut-and-paste editing, which can result in copyright violations, Pau...

Yahoo has launched a self-service ad-placement network that is designed to offer small publishers, including bloggers, access to revenue from contextually relevant advertising, a service already offered by rival Google. Yahoo said the beta version of the expanded Yahoo Publisher Network is aimed at ...

It's no secret that consumers all over the world are far more politically savvy than they were a decade ago. They clearly support or oppose their own country's internal or external governmental policies. Most country's foreign policies, whether straight or sugarcoated, strategically branded or fals...

American relations with China may be seen from both a political perspective and in regard to how U.S. firms are seeking to enter the Chinese market. We begin here with the political perspective and then examine strategies for U.S. firms seeking to enter Chinese markets. It can be hard for many peopl...

Eying expanding opportunities in the corporate mobile data realm, Sybase said today it had agreed to buy a software company that makes middleware for enterprises. Sybase said it would pay about US$71.3 million in cash to acquire Extended Systems, an 11-year-old company whose main product, known as O...