E-Commerce

Semiconductor company Marvell recently launched its Kinoma Create construction kit for consumer electronics on Indiegogo. Should a $6.5 billion company turn to crowdfunding to raise money? Are large companies drying up a source of funding that otherwise would be available to startups? Is that morall...

There is no question that one of the hottest topics in the tech industry is the rapidly evolving world of the Internet of Things. The seemingly infinite variety of use cases for capturing data from a widening array of connected devices and objects is inspiring the imaginations of corporate decision ...

Amazon on Monday dropped the price of its 32-gigabyte Fire Phone to a mere 99 cents from its original $199, with a two-year contract. The 64-gigabyte version now sells for $99, down from its launch price of $299. The offer is available exclusively for AT&T's network and includes a free year of P...

Twitter on Monday began testing a new Buy button with a small percentage of its users in the U.S. -- one of the first steps in a larger initiative to build purchase functionality into the service. A small group of brands, including Burberry, Home Depot, Keith Urban, the Nature Conservatory and Sound...

It is a given that a marketing campaign must include a social media element -- especially when a brand is rolling out a new product. What is less certain is on which channel the brand should focus its time and resources. An answer was provided last week by Aol Platforms, which released the results o...

More than 99 percent of the 800,000 or so comments on Net neutrality the FCC released last month were in favor of an open Internet, according to the Sunlight Foundation's analysis of the comments. At least 60 percent of the comments, or more than 484,000, were form letters written by organized campa...

Google on Thursday introduced Project Wing, a drone-based delivery project it has been working on quietly for the past two years. Members of the Google[x] team - aka "Moonshots" -- recently held field tests of the technology in Australia. They were able use drones to deliver a first aid kit, candy b...

Uber is attempting to polish its image with a defense of its driver recruitment tactics following publication this week of accounts of sabotage, dirty tricks and generally ruthless behavior toward Lyft and other competitors in the ride-sharing space. "We want to make sure everyone has access to Ube...

Twitter this week announced that its analytics tool, first made available to advertisers, Twitter Card users and verified users, now can be used by everyone. Twitter's analytics tool lets users click on any tweet to see how people engage with it in real time. They can compare their tweet activity mo...

American Airlines this week withdrew its flight content from Orbitz Worldwide's websites, which include Orbitz.com, ebookers.com and CheapTickets.com. The companies are locked in a booking fee dispute. The issue is also a brewing source of discontent between the airlines and Orbitz's competitors, su...

Clickbaiting may soon come to an end on Facebook, which has launched an effort to eradicate it. Posts with clickbait headlines get higher placement in News Feeds -- but 80 percent of the time, users prefer headlines that help them decide whether they want to read a full article before having to clic...

Amazon appears to be readying an advertising platform to compete with Google's AdWords. It reportedly has started talking up its new Amazon Sponsored Links platform with potential partners and is anticipating a launch later this year. Ads from the new platform would replace those from Google curre...

Amazon has announced an agreement to acquire Twitch Interactive, a real-time video platform for gamers. Prior to the disclosure, rumors had been building that it was on track to snatch Twitch from Google, which reportedly had been very close to buying it. The pending acquisition was rumored to be fo...

Can an automated Google feature that ostensibly helps users with a search be a basis for libel? Courts in Germany, Italy and Hong Kong have had to field that question. Google's position is that there is no human intervention, and that its algorithm is based merely on what others have searched for, o...

Twitter has reported success with its BotMaker spam-prevention system. Because Twitter operates in real time, BotMaker is designed to work fast to eliminate spammers. Its main goals are to bar spam accounts from being created, to reduce the time they spend on Twitter if they do show up, and to reduc...