E-Commerce

I was once in the middle of an anchor dispute. Consultant-led mediation helped, but the best advice came from an older, wiser anchor who told me to keep smiling, be patient and wait for my coanchor to implode. Of course, all this was before the rise of computer hacking, spyware and keylogging device...

A recent advertising campaign has eBay exhorting consumers to "Shop Victoriously," and, it's true, winning an online auction can be fun. My recent score -- vintage hand carders to process wool for spinning, won for a mere $15 -- was a hoot. I got solid tools for an obscure craft at less than one-thi...

Search engine giant Google is setting up a new venture capital arm and has hired William Maris, a 33-year-old former entrepreneur, to help coordinate the venture fund, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. Google is the latest in a long line of large companies across several sectors to c...

For the last few years, it's been easier to sack New England quarterback Tom Brady than to get the National Football League thinking about a more progressive Internet strategy. "They've been very dictatorial about the amount of [video highlight] content you can put on your Web site," Gartner Digital...

You just launched a new interactive ad campaign and corresponding landing page. You discussed the page design with your team. You know your customers. You've built out the landing page to meet their expectations and be consistent with the campaign. All done, right? Businesses undercut the potential...

First Amazon transformed itself from simple online bookseller to general e-tailer. Then it spread into the world of Web services and distributed computing. Now the online giant is entering the alternative payments game. Amazon's two new payment services announced this week, Checkout by Amazon and Am...

Year-over-year profits at Tokyo-based consumer electronics giant Sony fell 47 percent to $326 million during the first quarter, and company officials predict a further decrease in profits later in the year. Several factors contributed to the massive drop in Sony profits: lower-than-expected earnings...

The idea was simple: Build a large catalog of consumer items and make it accessible in a structured format, unlike what already exists in wide-open search engines like Google. Give users tools similar to what they get on financial Web sites. Give a unique online business experience to both the buyer...

The two giants of satellite radio are about to become one. The FCC has approved the merger of XM and Sirius, ending a year-and-a-half struggle to finalize the deal. The move will give the newly combined company unprecedented power in the world of satellite communications; however, it will come wit...

If you told Rhett Frandsen 10 years ago he'd end up being a professional widget-maker, he probably would have called you crazy. "Back then, widgets were only something you read about in your economics book," Frandsen laughed. "Until Apple coined the phrase, everybody had sort of agreed upon the fact...

Although Yahoo Music Unlimited subscribers have known since February that their music service would end in September, they may have been surprised to learn this week they would need to back up any purchased tracks on an audio CD by September 30 if they wanted to keep them. Failure to do so could lea...

Microsoft is forging ahead with plan B, now that its proposed merger with Yahoo is all but dead. It is expanding its relationship with Facebook to broaden exposure of its Windows Live Search as well as increase its own search ad business. This latter goal, of course, had been the point behind the fa...

Sony announced Thursday that the new iteration of its Reader digital book will be able to read electronic books published in the .epub file format, a file type gaining acceptance among major trade book publishers, many of whom have committed to begin publishing forthcoming e-books in the format. Beg...

British parents who don't know what their kids are downloading on the family computer may want to start paying more attention, thanks to a new antipiracy agreement among the six largest Internet service providers in the United Kingdom. The U.S. music industry will no doubt track developments in the ...

As though in defiance of current economic trends, Amazon delivered Q2 earnings that gave investors little to complain about. Net income increased 102 percent to $158 million, or 37 cents a share, compared with net income of $78 million, or 19 cents per share, in the year-ago quarter. Net sales, or r...