E-Commerce

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission reportedly is changing a proposal for regulating Internet traffic in response to a wave of dissension against the idea. Chairman Tom Wheeler had proposed a new "Net neutrality" plan that would allow Internet service providers to negotiate with ...

Google last week acquired restaurant website builder Appetas, a move that could strengthen its relationships with small businesses and ratchet up competition with Yelp, which currently dominates the restaurant review scene. Appetas helps restaurants increase their online presence by building out pro...

Aiming in part to counteract losses sustained on its Wii U gaming device, Nintendo reportedly is setting its sights on emerging markets and planning a brand-new console and games with those markets in mind. Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata last week cited higher entertainment budgets among many emerging na...

Netflix is hiking subscription fees for new users of its streaming video service effective immediately, while current members will have a grace period before they must start paying the increased rates. Subscribers in the U.S. and Canada will fork over an extra dollar a month, with the fee jumping to...

More than 100 companies in the tech industry have come together to battle a proposal by the Federal Communications Commission that they say could irreparably harm the open Internet. Firms including Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Google, Kickstarter, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Netflix, Twitter, and Yahoo signed a...

Small businesses have been an elusive market for sellers of online advertising. That's because the value proposition of those ads is a tough sell. Facebook hopes to reduce some of the resistance in the small business community to advertising online with a series of summer boot camps, dubbed "Faceboo...

The market is waiting with bated breath to see the exact size of Alibaba's IPO, but investors in Yahoo, which owns about 23 percent of Alibaba's stock, don't seem impressed. Yahoo's shares closed Wednesday at $34.07, down 6.6 percent. Yahoo's stake is worth about $26 billion based on the fair value ...

Internet companies are showing no signs of slowing down when it comes to innovation, specifically in the area of physical retail. Smartphones and tablets are the new darlings of e-commerce companies, and they now are being used to provide immersive and entertaining shopping experiences. Many of the...

Six major ISPs providing residential broadband services are refusing to augment their networks unless content providers pay more, according to Level3. Five of them are in the United States and the last in Europe. While Level3 has not named them, it has repeatedly mentioned writing to AT&T about ...

Google on Monday announced it is rolling out a new feature for Google Now that aims to blend the brick-and-mortar and online retail worlds. Available now for Android phones, the feature notifies users when they're physically near a store that might have a recently searched-for item available. For in...

Amazon is now allowing consumers to add items to their shopping cart simply by sending a reply on Twitter. Users who connect their accounts on the two services can add a product they see in a Twitter link to their Amazon shopping cart simply by replying to the tweet with the hashtag #AmazonCart -- o...

The White House last week released a review of Big Data and privacy written by counselor John Podesta. The report stems from President Obama's January request to define for the administration what is new about the technologies in this space, how Big Data affects public policy, and how consumer priva...

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Bitcoin Club plans to distribute $100 worth of bitcoin to each of its 4,528 incoming undergraduates this fall, in an attempt to create an ecosystem for digital currencies at the institution. Club founder and president Dan Elitzer and sophomore Jeremy Rubin...

Amazon on Tuesday opened the doors to its Wearable Technology store, a website that sells products in the emerging market. Brands hawking their wares include Samsung, Jawbone and GoPro as well as newcomers like Narrative and Bionym. The site is divided into product categories including martwatches, ...

Pinterest last week announced Guided Search, a new search engine for navigating its particular type of content -- user-provided pins, which now number around 30 billion, and an array of around 750 million boards. Guided Search is designed to help users discover pins they were not necessarily looking...