Business

Oracle has opened a second business development center on the Chinese mainland and has unveiled a program to help Japanese companies tackle this emerging marketplace. The company said its second China Development Center (CDC), now open for business in Beijing, will help Chinese companies accelerate ...

In an effort to downplay rumors that Hewlett-Packard will seek to beef up its consulting division by purchasing a major computer services company, such as EDS, HP CEO Carly Fiorina said she has passed on opportunities to make additional acquisitions. Instead, she said, she will focus on her company'...

In part 1 of this article, "The High-Stakes World of Online Gambling," the E-Commerce Times looked at the state of the Internet betting industry and its remarkable popularity. Roughly half of the industry's revenues come from U.S. residents. Even with the potential for anti-gambling laws on the hori...

Just as Las Vegas pioneer Bugsy Siegel imagined a city of dice games and slot machines in the middle of the desert, entrepreneurs looked at the Web a few years ago and saw an audience hungry for online gaming. They were right to suspect there was gold in all those clicks. A December 2002 report by t...

Intel and AMD, the two largest makers of computer chips, have said they will cut prices, setting the stage for PC prices to drop in time for the peak holiday sales season. The move is designed to clear inventory of older chip models in anticipation of next-generation product releases. Additional pri...

Executives at search engine powerhouse Google have been meeting with investment bankers in recent weeks, fueling widespread speculation that the company will stage an initial public offering soon, possibly in the first quarter of 2004. The company reportedly is exploring numerous options, from tradi...

Microsoft has said it will expand its "most valuable professionals" program, offering access to code that powers Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. Previously, access through the Shared Source Initiative, which Microsoft launched more than two years ago to help quell concerns about se...

The matchup many fans and advertisers had hoped to see in baseball's World Series failed to materialize this year as both the Chicago Cubs and the Boston Red Sox fell apart just short of advancing to the Fall Classic. Nevertheless, fans' feverish interest in the playoffs may have helped propel the o...

Amazon.com beat earnings expectations in its third quarter with a profit of $16 million and predicted another record-smashing holiday season, but the e-tailer's relatively subdued forecast for 2004 raised renewed worries about the valuations of many Internet-sector stocks. The strong quarter, driven...

So you want to be the boss -- the head technology honcho with the CIO title. But when you shake off that daydream, you look around and see the cubicle of a low- to mid-level IT manager. How can a garden-variety IT professional break into the ranks of C-level management? According to executives who w...

Declaring itself the early leader in the race to win market share in the digital music arena, Apple has announced it sold more than 1 million songs in less than four days after launching a Windows version of its iTunes music download site. Apple CEO Steve Jobs said his company's goal is to sell 100 ...

Following a spate of civil suits filed against music consumers in September, the RIAA has launched the next phase of its war on digital piracy. The organization has sent a total of 204 letters to individuals, each of whom, it claims, has made at least 1,000 songs available for upload on peer-to-peer...

For years, Google has been the company to beat in the online search sector. Use of the company's search engine is so widespread that in a recent TV movie, the main character joked that she attended "Google University" to research her health problems. However, Google is not content to rest on its ...

VeriSign has announced it plans to sell its Network Solutions business unit to Pivotal Private Equity, a Phoenix, Arizona-based firm known for acquiring underperforming companies, for approximately $100 million. Gartner principal analyst Ted Chamberlin told the E-Commerce Times that Network Solution...

The SCO Group has landed $50 million in private financing from Baystar Capital, which it said it will use to expand its business and add strength to its multibillion-dollar legal battles with IBM and others. Those lawsuits focus on alleged use of SCO's proprietary Unix code in the Linux operating sy...