Business

EBay has launched a sports-themed section on its auction site, combining several existing categories, including memorabilia, ticketing, sporting goods and licensed merchandise, into a single section that it says will generate $1 billion in sales this year. Sports sales growth is just one piece of a ...

A recent Goldman Sachs report pushed back a meaningful rebound in corporate IT spending until mid-2003 at the earliest, predicting flat numbers until then. But amid the gloom inherent in this and other dour forecasts, tech bright spots remain in both the enterprise and consumer markets. For example,...

When Amazon.com announced its second-quarter 2002 results, its outlook seemed promising: Sales of books, CDs and DVDs were up 20 percent compared with the year-ago period. The company's first-quarter report also was positive, showing a 15 percent increase from the first quarter of 2001. However, not...

Such onetime high-profile visionaries as Thomas Middlehoff, Jean-Marie Messier and Robert Pittman have lately departed their firms in droves, leaving corporate spectators to wonder whether broadband is broken. Messier's vision of seamless media convergence may still have life at Vivendi-Universal, h...

In a move that will boost production of computer chips found in common consumer electronics equipment, the European Union regulatory board reportedly has approved a joint venture between Germany's Infineon Technologies, Motorola and Agere Systems. Each of those three companies will own one-third of ...

Server technology improvements are poised to turbocharge the way companies run their e-commerce operations, ranging from the way they process transactions to the methods they use to snag new sales. For example, IBM has been developing "self-learning" software that not only ties servers together, but...

Two years after it angered privacy advocates by altering its privacy policy, Amazon.com has told a group of state attorneys general that it will change the guidelines again to make them more consumer-friendly. But Junkbusters president Jason Catlett said the changes are mostly cosmetic and that Amaz...

Many online retailers have spent considerable time and money trying to duplicate the success of Amazon.com, but the market conditions that spawned Amazon no longer exist, according to Giga Information Group analyst Andrew Bartels. "It is unlikely that any existing retailer would let you take over a ...

For e-tailers, the quest for the perfect online customer -- who spends thousands of dollars per year on a wide variety of merchandise and returns repeatedly to order more goods -- is like the search for the Holy Grail. Although the ideal may not be attainable, all merchants look for certain key char...

Three former Homestore.com executives plan to plead guilty to charges stemming from millions of dollars of accounting misstatements and reportedly will cooperate with investigators as a federal probe moves forward. Some published reports suggest the Homestore inquiry is being used to gather informat...

In the post-boom era of e-commerce, the gurus whose ideas and actions set the bar and tone for the industry may seem familiar. Although yesteryear's fast-growth mantra has been replaced by a different chant -- profits, profits! -- first-wave icons like Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Meg Whitman of eBay ar...

Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard each will spend $25 million during the next two-and-a-half years in an effort to foster more widespread adoption of the .NET Web services initiative among e-businesses. The campaign calls for the training of 5,000 HP sales professionals on the finer points of .NET and t...

Before Steve Jobs retook the reins at Apple in 1997, many in the industry had begun to sound the death knell for the innovative but beleaguered company. But in a stunning turnaround, Apple pulled itself out of a pool of red ink and began booking positive earnings. One key reason for its success is A...

There is little question that the number of home users accessing the Internet via broadband will continue to grow. By the end of 2002, the Yankee Group has estimated, 16 million broadband subscribers will be online in the United States, in addition to 54 million dial-up users. And widespread adoptio...

The sticker price of high-speed Internet access remains too high for a majority of U.S. residents, although the service is now available in most areas of the country, according to a government report. The report also suggested that lack of content geared toward broadband users -- such as video game ...