Business

Gone are the days when visiting dusty warehouses and digging through bins of junk were the only ways to buy bargains from the government. Now a number of government agencies have gone high tech and are using Web sites like eBay to auction off surplus property, ranging from jalopies to jewelry. A...

After two consecutive months of declining layoffs, dot-com companies made a record 17,554 job cuts in April, marking an 84 percent increase over the 9,533 e-business jobs cut in March, according to a report released Thursday by job placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas (CGC). "These we...

Despite a recent hesitancy on the part of e-business investors to get involved in the Asia-Pacific market, a report released Friday by IDC predicted that B2B e-commerce in the region will sell more than US$61 billion in direct and indirect materials by the end of 2002, compared to $12.8 billion ...

Taking a cue from rival IBM, Compaq announced late Thursday that it has reached an agreement to buy Internet consultancy Proxicom for US$266 million in cash. The purchase pushes Compaq toward its stated goal of increasing its consulting and services business from 21 percent of its revenue to 30...

KB Toys said Thursday that it is purchasing "substantially all" of defunct e-tailer eToys' inventory for US$5.4 million, as part of eToys' bankruptcy proceedings. KB Toys stressed that although the retail value of the eToys merchandise is estimated to be $40 million, KB Toys does not expect to ...

Driven by a number of consolidation efforts, online book vendor Barnesandnoble.com announced Thursday that it narrowly beat Wall Street estimates and trimmed its losses for the first quarter. The e-tailer, which is majority owned by brick-and-mortar namesake Barnes & Noble and German media gia...

Universal Music Group (UMG) said late Wednesday that it has bought out BMG Entertainment's stake in GetMusic, an online e-commerce and music information site founded jointly by the companies in 1999. "I think we're seeing Universal make a more aggressive move to catch up with BMG," Webnoize rese...

The venture capitalists who got blindsided when the dot-com bubble burst lost a whole lot of money -- real money, to be sure. The question is, who were VC's biggest losers -- the companies and individuals who poured dollars into e-commerce businesses, only to find no riches at the end of the rai...

Online used car retailer iMotors.com hit a dead end Wednesday, announcing that it has shuttered its operations "due to a lack of sufficient capital to continue to grow the business." According to a note posted on its Web site, the San Francisco, California-based company said that it will issue "...

The Nasdaq plunge and accompanying dot-com shakeout are "irrelevant" to the sustained growth of worldwide e-commerce, which shows no signs of slowing, according to a report released Tuesday by IDC. "The shakeout is really more about stock valuations than about fundamentals," IDC chief research o...

Riding strong electronics and international sales through a traditionally slower quarter, Amazon.com posted a pro forma net loss of US$49 million, or 21 cents per share, for the first quarter ended March 31st, beating initial analyst estimates by 3 to 4 cents. "Over the last year, it's become incre...

While automotive Web sites continue to gain traction among Internet users in the United States, data released Wednesday by Jupiter MMXI found that European consumers are increasingly steering towards such sites to research auto purchases, get directions and secure car loans and insurance policie...

Online spending climbed to US$3.5 billion in March -- a 36 percent spike from the $2.6 billion seen last April -- as almost half of all Americans made purchases via the Web, according to data released Tuesday by Nielsen//NetRatings and Harris Interactive. As part of their latest eCommercePulse, ...

Auction leader eBay said Tuesday that it will offer more live auctions, which enable online users to submit bids on traditional auctions around the world. eBay said it will now offer live auctions in 12 categories and, in an apparent bid to generate more interest and traffic, will move the live a...

In an effort to build consumer confidence in e-commerce, the U.S. Better Business Bureau (BBB) and two leading European business organizations announced Monday that they are developing a "trustmark" program to provide international standards for Internet transactions. The project is being undert...