E-Commerce

Intel is rumored to be considering entering the pay-television service market. The chipmaker reportedly has reached out to media companies and cable channels as part of its research. The service would be based on a Web-connected set-top box that could offer both streaming TV and video-on-demand prog...

Yahoo filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Facebook on Monday, ensnaring the social network heavyweight in a legal entanglement weeks before it's scheduled to go public. The suit regards 10 patents related to instant messaging, advertising systems, privacy settings and methods for customizing...

OK, it's time to officially close the book on the 2011 holiday retail season and to shift our attention forward to 2012. For me personally, what makes it difficult to stop looking back are the new trends that emerged that will forever change holiday shopping: Mobile made its mark, with 11 percent of...

There is no question that Google is the dominant player in the search engine arena, and a new survey released Friday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 83 percent of U.S. search engine users rated Google as their preferred search engine, despite concerns about the company's d...

Pandora reported a 62 percent increase year-over-year in active users for its fiscal fourth-quarter, which ended Jan. 31, along with a 74 percent increase in advertising revenue and a 99 percent rise in listening hours. However, those gains were accompanied by increases in royalty payments the onlin...

Netflix is reportedly in talks with cable TV providers to bundle its services with cable packages. Although the streaming online media provider wouldn't confirm a Tuesday report quoting insiders, a Netflix spokesperson did not deny talks are ongoing with cable operators. "What's revolutionary is evo...

Google tore down the silos around its app, music, movie and ebook stores Tuesday and melded them into a single outlet called "Google Play." The move emulates Apple's highly successful iTunes model. "Apple has set the standard with the iTunes store where you can get books and music and apps all in on...

Yelp had an excellent first day as a publicly traded company. It opened on the New York Stock Exchange Friday at $22.01 per unit -- up 47 percent from its IPO price of $15. By the end of the day, shares were trading at $24.58. The first-hour pop was surprising, even for enthusiastic advocates of the...

The Internet has become the world's largest shopping mall, and the market is continuing to grow. Q4 2011 U.S. retail ecommerce sales were up 14 percent compared with 2010, reaching nearly $50 billion for the quarter, ComScore recently reported. Total U.S. e-commerce sales are projected to reach $2...

Facebook introduced a slew of new ad initiatives at its marketing conference, fMC, held in New York on Wednesday. Most had been leaked to industry publications prior to this first-ever event. Timeline for Pages, for example, was expected. Also expected was a mobile ad play -- Facebook had admitted i...

Facebook introduced a long-expected development on Wednesday: Timeline for Pages -- that is, Timeline for brands. It is similar in look and feel and function to the feature that was pushed out to user profiles last fall. However, the implications of Timeline for Pages are much greater for brands, bo...

Twitter launched an expansion of its mobile advertising system Tuesday, putting promoted tweets into the timelines of users accessing the service from mobile applications. Users accessing Twitter from iPhone and Android apps have been able to search out promoted trends and tweets before, and promote...

Google on Tuesday rebuffed a request by a European Union privacy body to delay implementation of changes in the search giant's privacy policies set to take effect on March 1. "[W]e have notified over 350 million authenticated Google users and provided highly visible notifications on our homepage and...

Yahoo is pressuring Facebook to pay licensing fees on several patents covering a variety of website functions like advertising, website personalization, social networking and messaging. Yahoo has a responsibility to its shareholders, employees and other stakeholders to protect its intellectual prope...

Leave it to a comic strip, published 18 months ago, to allude to what has become a radical change in how technology is being adopted in the consumer world. Still, very few have recognized how this aspect would fundamentally transform enterprise software. When an ecosystem includes a marketplace or ...