Business

Name-your-price e-tailer Priceline.com (Nasdaq: PCLN) and insurer W.R. Berkley Corporation (Nasdaq: BKLY) announced Wednesday a joint venture that will offer name-your-price automobile insurance through Priceline's Web site.

While investors hold their breath waiting for Amazon to turn the profitability corner, the folks over at Buy.com seem to be holding their street map upside down, searching in vain for the profitability neighborhood.

Back when the Internet was still known as the "Information Superhighway," many pundits predicted that "interactivity" would soon change the way everyday people live.

In what the company is calling the "first wave of a new global campaign" against Net piracy, Microsoft announced Tuesday that it has taken action to remove 7,500 Web site postings in 33 countries that were allegedly selling counterfeit and other illegal copies of Microsoft software.

The U.S. presidential candidate who would have the most dramatic effect on e-commerce if elected is not hard to identify.

If the Internet were a giant classroom, eBay would be the fair-haired child who never gets into trouble and always gets an "A" just because she always has. Never mind that on the playground she's just as likely as the next kid to give someone a sharp kick in the shins.

"No one is buying this company's stock for this year or even next year," analyst Joseph Buttarazzi of Adams, Harkness & Hill said. "They're looking at 2002 or beyond."

Satisfied with the number of readers paying or promising to pay for the first installment of his new serial novel "The Plant," Stephen King announced Monday that he plans to write and publish a third segment on his StephenKing.com Web site.

Barnesandnoble.com (Nasdaq: BNBN) reported a wider-than-expected loss for the second quarter late Monday, as the company spent money on a slew of new ventures amid a general slowdown in e-commerce. Company officials also said the loss for the year may be higher than previously predicted.

In a series of moves that could initiate a flood of legal activity, Motorola, Inc. (NYSE: MOT) has filed lawsuits against five individuals who it says have been illegally selling the company's Radio Service Software (RSS) on the eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) online auction site.

Name-your-price Internet service Priceline.com (Nasdaq: PCLN) announced Tuesday that it will make use of a large chunk of a $190 million (US$) purchase of its stock by two influential industry leaders to finance the expansion of WebHouse Club, the privately-held grocery and gasoline Internet service...

Random House, the largest English language publishing house in the world, announced Monday that it plans to jump on the e-publishing bandwagon with two e-book initiatives. The first, a new imprint called AtRandom, will publish new nonfiction and fiction as e-books. The second will offer digitized ve...

A handful of Web sites are giving U.S. citizens the opportunity to participate in national political party conventions without having to travel to Philadelphia or Los Angeles.

To the chagrin of the recording industry, a U.S. appellate court has allowed controversial music swapping site Napster, Inc. to remain online until its appeal of the landmark shutdown ruling against it is heard.

Name-your-price e-tailer Priceline.com (Nasdaq: PCLN) announced its fourth international venture Monday, saying it will bring its service to Japan through an alliance with Japanese Internet investor Softbank Corp.