E-Commerce

A new streaming video startup, ZillionTV, has entered the crowded digital television sector. The Sunnyvale, Calif., startup, which is backed by Warner Bros., Sony Pictures, NBC Universal, Disney, Fox, Visa, Sierra Ventures, Concept Ventures and Blu-ray chip maker Sigma Design, expects to launch its ...

Facebook has revamped its online classifieds page. Its new look and feel is -- surprise, surprise -- very reminiscent of a Web 2.0-style community, with features that allow for more conversation and networking. Facebook previously had a classifieds page, Facebook Marketplace, which it launched about...

Roughly 50 million households in Western Europe have adopted broadband services over the past three years. Regulatory reforms in the UK and France in particular have helped boost penetration by creating strongly competitive markets. As a result, a large and growing number of households can now view...

Amazon has backed off from the brewing legal controversy surrounding the text-to-speech function in its Kindle 2 electronic book reader. The feature allows users to hear the text of a book read aloud, although not in the dramatic -- or even conversational -- style of typical audio books. The Kindle ...

The management organizational chart at Yahoo suddenly has fewer brackets on it, and the lines from those brackets now lead toward one name: New CEO Carol Bartz, who Thursday announced the first steps in realigning the company's executive structure. As many analysts and tech bloggers expected, Bartz'...

On paper, the affiliate market appears to be among the most lucrative marketing channels. At its core, it is a revenue-sharing model among a network of Web sites or partners that receive a cut of the sales of any products that they promote. In reality, though, using an affiliate network to drive sal...

Follow a mail carrier around sometime; provided you don't get arrested for stalking a civil service worker, you'll likely notice a proliferation of bright-red Netflix envelopes containing the latest DVDs being shoved into mailboxes. But a statement by a company executive in New York Wednesday may si...

In a time of economic crisis, there tends to be an increase in the number of people that turn to criminal activity. Although petty crime is usually one area that shows a significant upswing, an additional form of criminal activity on the rise is fraud. Before you can stop fraud, you need to know how...

Yahoo is fine-tuning its online advertising platform with the launch of three new targeting tools: Search Retargeting, which targets display advertising based on user search activities; Enhanced Retargeting, which delivers display ads across the Yahoo network based on user activity on an advertiser'...

It can be argued that Yahoo doesn't need to engage in a lot of executive housecleaning and downsizing during a reorganization expected this week from new CEO Carol Bartz. The turmoil at Sunnyvale over the last year has achieved that goal for her. "They've already had a pretty significant exodus of t...

Beleaguered Internet search portal Yahoo has launched a new type of online ad that incorporates traditional search results with images and video. Here's an example: Go to Yahoo, type in the keyword "pedigree," and a sponsored search result for Pedigree dog food will come up accompanied by a video ad...

The federal judge overseeing a lawsuit against Microsoft over marketing claims for its Vista operating system has reversed an earlier decision to certify the suit as a class action designation. She also denied Microsoft's motion for summary judgment. U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman allowed the ca...

We have now arrived right in the middle of that second half of the hyper-accelerated phase, where Western brands start to fall like dominoes. In the U.S. alone, hundreds of its world-class brands are being erased. From monster banking to mega manufacturing, some 73,000 stores alone will be closed in...

The year-long U.S. recession hasn't brought spending on advertising to a screeching halt, but it has forced a shift in the way advertisers engage their audiences. With marketing budgets shrinking by the day, advertisers are turning to the Internet as an alternative to more traditional media such as ...

Liberty Media has thrown struggling Sirius XM Radio a lifeline that will keep it from falling into bankruptcy. The owner of satellite television service DirecTV has loaned Sirius $530 million, which it will use to pay off $171.6 million in debt that came due Tuesday. The remainder of the funds will ...