E-Commerce

There has been a lot of hype about mobile payments, especially last year, with executives proclaiming adoption to be a rapidly growing trend. While we know that consumers are using their mobile devices to access information on the Internet, are they actually using them to shop? The idea of purcha...

Twitter is rolling out new ad-targeting capabilities that will allow marketers to identify and send messages to consumers based on their interests or likes. So, a consumer who has indicated an interest in gardening would be shown ads for gardening and outdoor-living products. There are two different...

Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers and Simon & Schuster have agreed to pay a total of more than $69 million to consumers to resolve antitrust claims of alleged unlawful conspiracy to fix the prices of electronic books. The three companies further agreed to change the way their e-books...

It has been clear for some time that consumers are using multiple devices to access the same content. Sometimes they will access a particular piece or type of content only from a mobile device -- say, a website optimized for mobile news while commuting to work on public transportation. Sometimes th...

Hardly a day goes by that one IT vendor or another fails to announce one "fastest/biggest/bestest" achievement or another, attempting to poke in the eye or drive straight into a ditch any and all previous claims. But it is ironic that while there is no shortage of ambition in the technology industry...

Best Buy has reached an agreement with its founder and former chairman, Richard Schulze, who owns a fifth of Best Buy's shares. The accord could help facilitate a potential $8.8 billion buyout of the retailer. As part of the agreement, Schulze will be granted access to certain due diligence informa...

There was rather an exact price offered and accepted for About.com. On Sunday The New York Times Company announced that it had sold the question and answer website to Barry Diller's InterActiveCorp for $300 million in cash. The site's early expertise in search engine optimization and revenues from c...

It is the end of an era. One of the last cases in which the Recording Industry Association of America sued an individual for illegal song sharing has reached the end of its road in a federal court in Massachusetts. There, the jury upheld a $675,000 damages award against Joel Tenenbaum following the ...

Real-time bidding will be a significant factor in fulfilling the promise of online digital advertising, which has been on the cusp of dramatic changes for many years. RTB, as defined by Parks Associates, describes the automated process of buying and selling online display advertising in real time, ...

Consumers are becoming increasingly accustomed to being able to consume online content at the time they want and on the device they want -- and that device now includes the television set, according to a new study by NPD. It found that while desktop PCs and laptops are still the primary source for v...

Facebook is integrating sponsored results into its search function as part of the social network's ongoing effort to increase advertising revenue. The ads appear when a user looks for a person, place, app or other item through Facebook's search bar. Advertisers can choose which search terms to targ...

Amazon.com is now listed number 206 in the Global 500 listing of corporations, a singularly amazing feat for a company that was created in July of 1994 by Jeff Bezos. From a business that started as an online retailer of books, because it could offer more books than the brick-and-mortar bookstores, ...

It's not enough to have just a website, or just social media profiles. Businesses need to have both, and the traffic needs to flow seamlessly between them. Numerica Credit Union was looking for a way to offer customers a useful tool on its Facebook page while driving traffic from Facebook to its sit...

Major changes may be in store for Hulu that will loosen up the exclusivity of content on the online video site and pour more ads into the mix, according to a confidential internal memo obtained by Variety. The document discusses the possibility that in September, Hulu owners Comcast, News Corp. and...

Shoppers and merchants hoping to buy and sell supernatural and occult items will have to head somewhere other than eBay starting Aug. 30, when the online auction site will enact a ban on selling such things as magic spells and potions. eBay updated its fall seller's guide this week. Among the newly...