Business

Shoppers might not have left the mall completely behind during the 2004 holiday shopping season, but it is clear that consumers did more shopping from the comfort of their living rooms than ever before. Amazon.com was among the first to declare festive earnings in this year's record-breaking holiday...

Revisiting a well-worn trend of consolidation in the information technology analysis industry, Gartner has said it would acquire Meta Group in a deal worth US$162 million. The all-cash deal, which Gartner said it would fund with money it has on hand and a line of credit, values Meta Group stock at $...

The week of December 13 -- the second of this year's two prime weeks of the online holiday shopping season -- saw a record US$2.2 billion of purchases, and Monday of that week was the top online shopping day of the year, according to VeriSign's latest e-commerce data. The total volume of online sale...

Because people spend a great amount of their time and energy at work, they long to belong to a company that makes them feel better about themselves and makes them feel that they do more than just earn a paycheck -- they want to feel like they have a purpose and make a difference. In addition to the ...

The Washington Post Company announced today that it has reached a deal to acquire the online magazine Slate from Microsoft for an undisclosed sum. "Slate has been a pioneer in Internet publishing, and it is a fine magazine," Donald Graham, chairman and chief executive officer of the Washington Post ...

Microsoft today lost its bid to put European antitrust regulators' sanctions against it on hold -- including requirements that it share its source code and make different versions of Windows available -- while it fights what is expected to be another epic courtroom battle over whether it used its ma...

In a move to distinguish itself from its successful travel properties in an increasingly competitive landscape, IAC/InterActiveCorp. will spin off Expedia and its other related travel Web sites next year as a separate publicly traded company, company officials said. "We believe greater value can be ...

Taking a stab at being near the forefront of the mobile commerce and streaming music movements, Sprint today launched Music Choice, a mobile music service that gives users of its multimedia phones access to a catalog of digital music feeds. The service, the first streaming music service available fo...

Recent activity in the business process management (BPM) space signals a coming of age for an application that until recently was the focus of pure-play BPM providers. So says Chuck Ames, president and CEO of Oak Grove Systems, a BPM software company based in Calabasas, California. JBoss' recent jBP...

Cisco Systems today announced plans to buy privately held Protego Networks, part of a year-long acquisition spree aimed at rounding out Cisco's network security offerings. Cisco said it would pay US$65 million in cash for Protego, which was founded in 2002 by two former Cisco executives and makes se...

Microsoft reportedly has sold a Utah-based development studio that makes its sports video games, the second time in recent months that the company has sold off a game-development operation, effectively changing the gaming industry landscape. The studio, known as Indie Built, was sold for an undisclo...

For Microsoft, Christmas might come early this week -- or the ghosts of market dominance past might come back to haunt the software giant -- as a key court ruling is expected Wednesday that will determine whether the penalties assessed by European regulators are set aside while a trial unfolds in co...

EBay has expressed "outrage" over the arrest of the chief executive of its operations in India because a user of its shopping and auction portal, Baazee.com, listed a controversial pornographic video clip. EBay said in a statement that it was "outraged" that Avnish Bajaj, an Indian-born U.S. citizen...

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has announced that its member companies filed a new wave of copyright infringement lawsuits against 754 individual file-sharers. A share of this wave of lawsuits filed Wednesday was brought against users of university computer networks. Twenty ind...

The recent wave of mergers crashed into the e-commerce space today when auction giant eBay said it would acquire Rent.com for US$415 million in cash and stock. The purchase extends eBay's already sprawling reach into the rental real estate industry. Rent.com lists apartments and homes for rent, rely...