Business

Amazon.com, perhaps the premier e-commerce site, has announced its first-ever full-year profit. According to the company's balance sheet, 2003 net income totaled $35 million. In 2002, despite booking a small fourth-quarter profit, the company recorded a full-year net loss of $149 million. Yankee Gro...

Jerry Ungerman, president of firewall leader Check Point Software Technologies, oversees the company's worldwide sales, marketing, business development, product management and technical services. The E-Commerce Times spoke with Ungerman last week, on the eve of the company's release of its new Inter...

Digital music has been around for years, but the legitimate online music industry did not attract a critical mass of consumers until the launch of Apple's iTunes Music Store. Now, Apple has spiffed up iTunes by releasing new versions of its iPod digital music player, making iTunes available to Windo...

The SCO Group has accused Novell of libel, claiming Novell interfered in bad faith with SCO's Unix copyrights. SCO's lawyers filed the lawsuit in state court in Utah, where both companies' headquarters are located. "SCO is trying this case in the press with masterful precision," Ted Schadler, vice p...

Buoyed by a wave of consumer demand for personal computers, number-two chipmaker AMD's business turned profitable during the last quarter of 2003 for the first time in more than two years. AMD said it earned about $43 million in the fourth quarter, a dramatic turnaround from its year-ago loss of $85...

Following the lead of high-profile Linux vendors HP and Novell, Red Hat has announced it will offer legal protection to all existing and future customers of its enterprise installations of the open-source operating system. Novell's decision last week to indemnify customers of its newly acquired SuSE...

Signaling that 2004 likely will be a year of solid growth for the technology industry, IBM has raised its hiring forecast, saying it plans to hire 15,000 new employees in the coming year. The new outlook represents a 50 percent increase in the amount of hiring Big Blue envisions. IBM has said it exp...

Microsoft has lost its bid to have a $512 million patent-infringement award thrown out of court. Instead, a federal judge ruled that a jury acted properly in awarding the payout to Eolas Technologies and the University of California. The award stems from an August 2003 ruling that Microsoft infringe...

The technology sector roared out of the gate with strong earnings reports from IBM, Yahoo and Apple. Optimism about strong sales and profits was muted only by somewhat cautious outlooks for the coming year. "It becomes a matter of the expectations maybe getting ahead of what is still definitely a st...

Many e-businesses, whether they sell physical goods or more intangible services, are casting a covetous eye at the vast potential of the international market. As more people and businesses around the globe connect to the Internet, a growing percentage will come to view it as an alternate -- and perh...

Intel has revealed that its fourth-quarter revenues reached a record $8.74 billion, with net income of $2.2 billion, or 33 cents per share -- more than double the year-ago tally. "[Those numbers are] telling me that corporate enterprises are now loosening the purse strings on capital expenditures," ...

Several bellwether U.S. technology firms got a major boost as Chinese telecom firms dished out more than $2 billion worth of contracts. Motorola emerged as the biggest winner, signing a $556 million deal with China United Telecommunication, known as China Unicom, and a $510 million contract with Chi...

In 2003, Symantec helped customers battle and protect against an ever-growing list of malware, ranging from Blaster, Slammer and SoBig to hundreds of smaller irritants. The company's executives also spanned the globe, making presentations to educate users about the need to secure their PCs and Inter...

Microsoft has announced it will extend some forms of support for two older versions of its Windows operating system well beyond planned phase-out dates. The company now will support both Windows 98 and Windows Millennium Edition (ME) through mid-2006, providing live phone support and issuing patches...

Technology heavyweights IBM and Intel have agreed to provide seed funding for a new legal defense fund aimed at thwarting attempts by The SCO Group to target Linux end users and creators, including Linux inventor Linus Torvalds. The Open Source Development Labs said the two companies, along with Mon...