E-Commerce

ICANN, the Internet naming authority, is up against the wall. It may simply drop its greatest revolutionary idea of offering a brand new type of designer domain name to accommodate the cyberrealities of the widely expanded Internet of tomorrow. This new proposed platform would surely revolutionize m...

Google said Monday that it plans to build an e-book service to make electronic editions of mainstream titles available to consumers -- whether they own a specialized e-book reader or not. The service should roll out by the end of the year, Google spokesperson Gabriel Stricker told the E-Commerce Tim...

Fresh off its attempt to sideswipe Apple with its "Laptop Hunters" ad campaign, Microsoft is apparently now gunning for Google with its upcoming search engine, Bing. Announcing Bing on Thursday, Microsoft promised a worldwide launch by June 3 and pointed readers to a Web site where the service would...

Time Warner is officially releasing AOL from its parentage. A year after announcing its intention to separate from the struggling unit, Time Warner said Thursday the time had come. The company, which owns 95 percent of AOL, will buy out the 5 percent stake that Google owns -- and has already said it...

There are more signs that the unveiling of Microsoft's revamped Live Search -- codenamed "Kumo" during its development phase -- is at hand. It's been widely speculated that Steve Ballmer will introduce it this week at the Wall Street Journal's D: All Things Digital conference. Rumors about the launc...

When he tried to log on to Nokia's new Ovi app store Tuesday, ABI Research senior analyst Jeff Orr found a lot of blank screens. "They either got off to a wild success because everybody's trying it, or more likely, there are some bugs along the way," Orr said. The Finnish mobile phone giant made it ...

After weeks of striking a conciliatory and cooperative tone, Craigslist is going on the offensive in the controversy over its erotic services section. Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster filed a complaint in a federal court in South Carolina, seeking declaratory relief and a restraining order against the ...

After a couple of weeks of discussion and speculation in the media-obsessed blogosphere, Google CEO Eric Schmidt has finally gone on the record and admitted that his company has considered buying a newspaper but decided against the idea. In a wide-ranging Thursday interview with the online Financial...

Napster's choice of a headphone-wearing cat for its logo has turned out to be quite appropriate. The grand-tabby of all digital music services enters its second decade apparently intent on using up every one of a feline's nine lives, with the latest reincarnation coming Monday in the form of a new b...

Scribd.com, the online document-sharing site, plunged into the world of e-commerce Monday with a store designed to help both established publishers and independent authors make sales. The Scribd Store allows content creators to set prices and digital rights for their works and follows closely on arr...

Amazon has opened another front in its push to establish the Kindle as the dominant e-reader in the market. The company is allowing bloggers to offer their posts in a subscription format via the Kindle store. The program is currently in beta. Bloggers can sign up for an account right now, however, b...

Everyone talks about building an online community that drives "viral" marketing -- but how exactly do you accomplish that? Viral marketing is not about setting up a forum and hoping people will come. It's not about launching the 3,009th Facebook application that will sink quickly into obscurity. It'...

Overnight, things suddenly changed. The overexposure of a slew of corporate credibility and governance crises is thumping the global populace into sheer panic -- like Richter scales gone wild -- while shattering thousands of mega corporate name brands worldwide. The good and sober companies of the...

In an abrupt about face, Craigslist has announced it will take down its "erotic services" ad category. In its place will be a new adult services section that will be screened by Craigslist staff before publication, according to a statement made by Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who...

One would think that the cost of doing business on the Web is so small that it would be almost negligible, but that's not the case with many e-tailers, which is why many of them fail. It's also why Prashant Nedungadi decided to launch IMshopping, an online company that's trying to emulate offline cu...