Business

A recent study found that online advertising is holding its own compared with traditional advertising revenue. And analysts expect the current steady state will give way to growth as soon as economic news improves. "The areas that we see continuing to grow in terms of share of online advertising ...

Since launching its European auction site, Yahoo! has trailed far behind eBay. Rather than simply conceding to the competition, the company found a more lucrative strategy: It teamed up with its rival. EBay and Yahoo! Europe will pool their marketing resources to advertise eBay's sites via extens...

If you can hold your breath just a bit longer, demand for IT services will rebound. That is the shared conclusion of two new surveys -- one by research company IDC and the other a joint effort of research firm Gartner and financial services powerhouse Goldman Sachs. According to Gartner, an uptic...

Apologizing for "inappropriate communications" among analysts during the tech stock boom of the 1990s -- but not admitting wrongdoing -- Merrill Lynch has reached a $100 million settlement with New York and other states. The company agreed to implement several changes in how it is organized inter...

Microsoft is preparing to launch a $10 million marketing campaign and software tools to lure users who are unhappy with AOL's services. MSN product manager Lisa Gurry told the E-Commerce Times that many AOL users have switched to MSN "because they were tired of the over-simplified, over-commercializ...

Microsoft may have thought it could make software upgrades easier for customers -- and secure a steady revenue stream -- by mandating an automatic upgrade plan for applications and operating system software, but the company should rethink its strategy, analysts said. "The ill will generated with ...

The U.S. Copyright Office has rejected Webcasting royalty rates proposed by the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel. The panel has been working to determine what rates would satisfy the concerns of record companies without shutting down the nascent Webcasting industry. Concerned with the potentia...

Less than a year after its controversial debut, travel site Orbitz has announced plans to raise as much as $125 million through an initial public offering. "This is an awfully fast IPO filing," Morningstar.com analyst David Kathman told the E-Commerce Times. "Orbitz may be trying to strike while ...

Juniper Networks has announced plans to acquire rival Unisphere Networks from its parent company, Siemens AG, in an effort to win market share from dominant telecom equipment provider Cisco Systems. The cash and stock deal is valued at about $740 million. "Juniper paid $380 million in cash for a ...

The driving force behind Sears' $1.98 billion purchase of Lands' End was the clothing brand itself. But Lands' End's reputation for merging catalog and online sales and providing high-quality customer service played a role as well. According to GartnerG2 analyst Kevin Murphy, the trick for Sears ...

The best way to learn is by doing. Along the way, e-commerce has found that some ideas that seemed promising at first are best left in the dustbin of technology history. "Good companies are flexible enough to try something and [then] pull back if it doesn't work the way they had hoped or if it ca...

Although Microsoft had to cut the price of its Xbox console last week to keep pace with rival Sony in the gaming hardware market, the company is poised to announce a $1 billion investment in an online game service that could smoke the competition. "Microsoft is going to do a land grab here," Jupiter...

Economic doldrums continue to erode confidence and drive cost-cutting among IT buyers, according to Gartner Dataquest, and all segments of the IT services market will feel the pinch. IT services revenue will grow a meager 2.8 percent to $557 billion this year, the research firm said. However, Abe...

The strange saga of music swapping site Napster took another twist as media giant Bertelsmann announced it has reached an agreement to purchase the site and said most of the key executives who resigned last week will return. The deal calls for Bertelsmann to pay up to $8 million to the venture ca...

When you want something done right, there are times when doing it yourself is not the best option. Even the best companies need to recognize the limitations of their operational expertise and know when to outsource certain e-business functions. When deciding what to outsource, Aberdeen Group rese...