E-Commerce

Pinterest on Thursday announced that it would begin experimenting with promoting certain pins from a select group of businesses. The announcement came via a blog post from CEO Ben Silbermann, who hastened to assure the site's users that this move would not be a descent into ad madness. "I know some ...

Sony on Thursday went on a media blitz in Tokyo, disclosing more details and outlining ambitious sales targets for its upcoming PlayStation 4. The gaming device is due to arrive on shelves in the United States Nov. 15, and Sony aims to sell 5 million PS4s by March 31, it reportedly said at the Tokyo...

Ambitious plans to improve federal information technology systems could easily founder on the shoals of deficient networks. Government agencies currently are striving to meet the challenges associated with initiatives in five major areas: cloud technology; Big Data management; cybersecurity requirem...

Netflix on Monday updated its "long-term view" of the industry to include a far wider range of competitive factors than it has ever had in the past. The company also adjusted its competitive focus accordingly, taking into account a number of players that it had previously ignored. In a nutshell, the...

Tumblr has teamed up with social analytics company DataSift to provide users with information about consumer engagement and sentiment. As of Monday, DataSift subscribers gained access to both historic and real-time data about what consumers were posting about their brands in Tumblr's 5.5 billion mon...

Almost all entertainment devices entering the home now have connectivity capabilities. These connected TV devices include smart TVs, gaming consoles, streaming video media devices such as a Roku or Apple TV, and Blu-ray players. Currently, more than 50 percent of U.S. broadband households have at le...

Video game sales showed their first increase in almost two years last month, NPD Group reported on Thursday. Gaming hardware sales weren't so fortunate -- they were down 40 percent compared with August 2012, according NPD's August report on sales in the physical retail sector of the video game indus...

Whatever happened to that venerable weekly magazine we all knew as Newsweek? The magazine was published in the United States from 1933 to Dec. 31, 2012. The cause of its demise was the continued and ever-growing encroachment of e-media into its readership base. Many of us saw this coming. In an art...

Dell on Wednesday revived its dormant "Venue" brand by unveiling a Windows 8.1 tablet that will run on Intel's new Bay Trail system on a chip. Featuring an 8-inch screen, the device was announced at the Intel Developer Forum being held in San Francisco this week. Few other details about the upcoming...

Twitter is acquiring mobile advertising exchange MoPub in order to support advertisers' efforts to optimize their ad buys. MoPub helps advertisers and publishers buy, manage and maximize performance of a variety of ads, especially those on mobile platforms. Twitter plans to invest in MoPub's core bu...

Facebook and Twitter both added embedded-post capabilities to their platforms last month, and now Google has brought similar functionality to Google+. Both embedded posts and an author-attribution feature were unveiled by Google earlier this week, in fact, giving individuals and businesses a way to ...

Facebook on Monday began rolling out new tools designed to help news organizations uncover the real-time conversations people are having across the social network. The company released two APIs to a handful of online publications. The Public Feed allows news organizations to integrate Facebook conve...

PayPal on Monday announced new technology that aims to make paying for goods as simple as walking into a store. Specifically, PayPal Beacon is a contactless payment system that uses Bluetooth Low Energy to connect with customer handsets to send offers and complete transactions. The mobile wallet-lik...

Hard on the heels of the recent announcement of Apple's iPhone trade-in program, Walmart on Tuesday announced a smartphone trade-in program of its own with up to $300 in-store credit for the old devices turned in. Specifically, consumers can get an immediate credit of between $50 and $300 for more...

The subscription model has already proven its mettle when it comes to music and movies, but this week Oyster unveiled a new service that applies the concept to books instead. Specifically, the startup on Thursday launched an invitation-only preview of an e-book rental service that's widely being des...