E-Commerce

Nokia on Friday announced that it will purchase San Francisco-based mobile analytics firm Motally. The Finnish mobile phone giant did not disclose what it's paying for Motally, but it said the transaction is scheduled to close in the third quarter. The purchase is aimed at helping Nokia, which is lo...

Cable premium channel HBO has all but come right out to say it intends to compete head-to-head with online streaming video service Netflix. Remaining exclusive has a value of its own, according to HBO co-president Eric Kessler, and it can command a hefty price tag when consumers want the content bad...

Search engine optimization is the least expensive method of getting visitors to a website, Ralph Wilson, founder and editor-in-chief of Web Marketing Today, told the audience at the SES Conference and Expo in San Francisco Tuesday. In a presentation on SEO basics, Wilson outlined tips on how to get ...

While financial cybercrime against card-not-present retailers has many forms, "friendly fraud" has emerged as a particularly painful thorn in the side of e-commerce merchants. Defined as a situation in which a customer disputes a legitimate credit card transaction, falsely claiming fraud or non-del...

There was a time, early this decade, when every day saw a new technology company make an initial public offering. Talk of stock options and vesting schedules was common coffee break fare. Lately, the flow of capital for startups is much more like a trickle, and IPOs are sparse. Still, some partnersh...

Young folk under 30 may not remember this, but years ago "plug and play" referred to hardware installation for computers. As the information revolution penetrated American households, consumers demanded setup procedures that did not require an advanced degree in computer science. Today, this process...

After a few days of absorbing the criticism of its joint proposal with Verizon, Google -- a company that was once counted as a stalwart in the push for Net neutrality -- is defending itself. In a nutshell, the plan calls for excluding the mobile Internet from most of the consumer protections that wo...

Sellout. Unprincipled. Evil. These aren't the sort of adjectives Google executives are used to hearing applied to their little startup, now a $150 billion company that has grown from a simple search engine into a dominating corporate powerhouse that even has its own foreign policy challenges. Howeve...

Google's expansion into advertising outside the virtual world received a boost Wednesday when it landed a new client: DirecTV. The deal with the satellite TV provider will add another 18.7 million households to Google TV Ads' reach, bringing the total number of households reached by the service to 3...

The Internet traffic management plan from Google and Verizon may be just a new proposal at this point, but in the short time since its introduction, it's proven to be nothing if not controversial. Though the plan does include consumer protections against discrimination by Internet service providers,...

The online sales channel continues to grow each day, touching every corner of the globe and nearly every type of merchant or marketplace. A fundamental component to the success of this channel is the payment system -- but choosing the right one may seem like a daunting task. One of the first questi...

Netflix said Tuesday that it has reached a deal with a movie-studio owned pay-tv and streaming service that will make recent theatrical releases available to its customers 90 days after they begin to appear on premium cable and on-demand channels. Neither Netflix nor Epix, the pay-tv and streaming s...

On Monday Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg proposed a far-reaching plan designed to address all the concerns the varying stakeholders have with Net neutrality. Twenty-four hours later, it is clear that at least some of those stakeholders -- particularly advocates for Net neutr...

Conflicting reports are circulating about whether Google and Verizon -- once bitter enemies on the subject of Net neutrality -- have come to an agreement on how network operators should manage Web traffic. Several publications have reported that the two firms are close to negotiating an agreement un...

Research In Motion held an unusual meeting in New York City on Tuesday. What was unusual was that it held the meeting. This is very unlike RIM. It introduced a new device called the "BlackBerry Torch 9800" and a new operating system. This is RIM's next-generation device, which has both a touchscreen...