E-Commerce

Netflix and TiVo announced Thursday the roll out of a streaming video service for subscribers. Set for availability in early December, the service appears to be the culmination of a deal the two companies originally announced in 2004. The TiVo-Netflix venture is the latest in a series of similar par...

Personalization -- the purported long-sought Holy Grail of Web content management -- just might have finally arrived via Web applications that make Web sites responsive in real-time to the unique needs of individual visitors. At the heart of recommendation and personalization technologies are active...

Search engine giant Google has settled two copyright lawsuits over its Google Book Search program for $125 million. In two separate lawsuits, the New York City-based Author's Guild and McGraw-Hill sued Google in 2005, alleging it had violated copyright laws through its scanning and online distribu...

The job of the modern Web site is more important and more difficult than ever, especially when it comes to a multichannel sales strategy. Visitors arrive at your Web site through a variety of online channels: pay-per-click and organic search, e-mail offers and print ads. Once there, they need to ful...

The Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service has slammed the door on Google. The search engine giant was trying to buy a local online advertising company, Zao Begun, but FAS officials decided to block the deal. Google first announced its intent to acquire the Russian company, which is owned by Rambler M...

Caution: Just because your company has a payment card industry compliance certificate, don't assume your data is perfectly safe and secure. You can still suffer a breach. That's the lesson recently learned by retail clothing company Forever 21. Company officials posted a notice on their Web site las...

Netflix and Samsung announced a partnership Thursday that will bring the video rental service's streaming movies to the hardware maker's Web-connect Blu-ray disc players. Netflix subscribers can receive Blu-ray and DVD discs by mail with the added option of streaming movies and TV shows instantly fr...

The Internet has opened up information sharing in unprecedented and ever-expanding ways. This new world is great for creativity and communication, but it's also brought intellectual property rights into question. It's vital that online retailers understand intellectual property law so that they don'...

Microsoft has angered Chinese computer users with its latest antipiracy move. On Tuesday, during its Global Anti-Piracy Day, Microsoft turned Windows Genuine Advantage loose on the Chinese people. Other users worldwide are familiar with WGA, which famously labeled legitimate users as pirates and dis...

Just one day after saying it would slash its 15,000-employee workforce by 10 percent, struggling Internet giant Yahoo announced Wednesday that its profit dropped by a whopping 64 percent during the third quarter. It also announced that revenue would be lower than it had expected for the remainder of...

Online auctioneer and retailer eBay has banned the sale of ivory products on its Web site to help protect African and Asian elephants. The policy goes into effect in December, and eBay will begin enforcing it in January. The decision to ban ivory items outright from its site is eBay's second attempt...

Lala.com relaunched its services Tuesday, now billing itself as the first free fully licensed provider of instant, anywhere access to personal music catalogs as well as a full music library with tracks backed from major labels. Cooperating record companies include EMI Music, Sony BMG, Universal Musi...

As more and more consumers download smartphone applications, it's become increasingly vital for developers, phone makers and wireless carriers to have a deeper understanding of how customers interact with them. That's where a company like Flurry comes in. The San Francisco-based startup has develope...

Self-promotion: Some would say that lawyers excel at it, but when it comes to actual advertising and marketing, a lot of them can be a step or two behind other businesses. "In the 1960s, my dad -- who was a lawyer -- sent a note to a client telling him to call if he had any questions about a certain...

Research has shown that the three most important factors influencing whether a customer will purchase from a consumer Web site are security and privacy, ease of navigation and quality of content. Make privacy and security information prevalent on your site and in the purchasing flow -- including bot...