E-Commerce

Best Buy has announced it will acquire troubled online music store Napster for $121 million. The deal includes $67 million of cash on Napster's balance sheet and values the Los Angeles-based Internet music store at roughly twice its Sept. 12 closing stock price. "It's an interesting move and looks d...

Imagine going to Amazon.com, finding the book you want and being asked for your phone number and told to wait for a call from your local bookstore with the price of the book. Sounds ridiculous, right? You want the price in the moment, while you're online, while you're still anonymous. But that's exa...

Jeremy Jaynes -- said to be one of the world's most prolific spammers -- had his nine-year jail sentence vacated after the Virginia state Supreme Court ruled that the law under which he was prosecuted violated the First Amendment. It did not adequately differentiate between commercial and noncommerc...

Search engine giant Yahoo is moving ahead with plans to open up its home page and e-mail services to third-party content. The move comes at a difficult time for the beleaguered company -- earlier this year, Yahoo spurned an acquisition attempt by Internet rival Microsoft, triggering vitriolic infigh...

Bill and Jerry are back, and the dynamic duo's second Microsoft ad is already bringing as much divided opinion as its much-analyzed predecessor. The spot, which first appeared on YouTube Thursday night, shows Seinfeld and Gates staying with "average family" in an effort to reconnect with the common ...

Kate Moloney-Egnatios' intuition led her to Intuit. She followed the signs in her career pointing to Verisign and paid her dues at PayPal. But she says her latest tech startup is even more of a winning business idea than tax preparation software and online payment/authentication systems, and the aud...

The issue of compliance is forever on the minds of IT executives, and even more so in the last 10 years, due to increased audit activities by software vendors, complex licensing rules and the management of multiple vendors. Non-compliance with a software vendor's licensing can create uncomfortably l...

Internet retail giant Amazon.com is muscling into the wine industry. The company plans to start selling wine from California's Napa Valley and other wine-producing regions in the U.S. later this year. Although Amazon has not confirmed the news, the Napa Valley Vintners Association has been holding w...

AOL is getting a major facelift. Having fallen far behind competitors such as Google, Yahoo and, to a lesser extent, Microsoft's MSN, AOL -- a division of media giant Time Warner -- has launched a host of new services and content initiatives in a bid to close the gap in the online advertising game.

Frankly speaking, it's time to stop the second-guessing and open-heartedly accept that it's Google's turn now. The next decade clearly belongs to Google, so it's best not to resist and go with the flow. As a company, it's amazing how Google started, what it's done and where it's now headed. There ha...

Online auction site eBay grew up on the receipts of smaller-scale sellers. Now, as the San Jose, Calif.-based company reaches out to larger, big-volume dealers, some of those original core customers are drifting away. Some sellers have moved on to competitors such as Amazon.com, said Charles King, p...

Google and NBC Universal have inked a multiyear agreement under which Google will distribute ads through its Google TV Ads service for placement on some NBC cable channels. Sci Fi, Oxygen, MSNBC, CNBC, Sleuth and Chiller are among the channels covered by the deal, which will go into effect later thi...

Things are changing at eBay. eBay says it is evolving to adapt to changes in the larger market, but it's not clear how the auction giant will fare against an emerging army of specialized competitors, and it's far from clear whether sellers will warm to its new internal price structure. Changing the ...

The Association of National Advertisers wants the proposed Google-Yahoo advertising partnership blocked. The trade group -- which represents 400 companies that collectively spend over $100 billion in marketing communications and advertising annually -- has sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Jus...

It's only fitting that Jerry Seinfeld's first Microsoft ad is -- well, about nothing. The 90-second spot, which debuted during Thursday night's NFL game, shows Seinfeld and Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates meeting in a shopping mall shoe store. Seinfeld casually saunters in, munching on a churro, and g...