E-Commerce

The world of online business communication has introduced two industry-changing elements for small business: more customers and more competitors. Circa 1999, you were ahead of the competition by simply having a Web site to preview your service or products. By 2004, Web transactions were the norm, an...

Yahoo disappointed shareholders with its second quarter earnings report, posting declining profits that missed Wall Street's expectations. Its quarterly net income fell to $131 million, or 9 cents per share, from $161 million, or 11 cents per share, a year ago. Excluding certain charges, Yahoo reali...

Digital billboards and digital signage networks in retail are driving the rapid expansion of outdoor/out-of-home advertising, rivaling the Internet as the fastest-growing advertising medium. What's fueling this growth? The ability to reach the elusive consumers while they are out of home, and especi...

The company that pioneered the concept of skipping past television commercials is now introducing a new kind of TV-based advertising. TiVo has joined forces with Amazon to create an interactive system that will let viewers buy products featured on TV shows -- right from their remotes. TiVo Product P...

Money talks. So it's important for voters to know how candidates get their money, who gives it to them, and what they do with it. This information used to be buried in obscure volumes and government reports, but digital databases have changed all that. Anyone with a Web connection and the desire to...

eBay turned in more than respectable earnings for its second quarter: a 22 percent rise in profits for a net income of $460 million, or 43 cents a share. Yet the online auctioneer's stock value dropped following the news, in part because of its disappointing guidance for the third quarter. After the...

During the recent Hollywood writers' strike, Joss Whedon found the cure for all his sudden downtime. The man who gave us "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Firefly" created a genre-busting musical about a mad doctor with a bad case of evil-mastermind-wannabe inferiority complex. And the only place to f...

Among other things, the top percentile of the global brand name identities also affect what's pulling the strings of the world's stock exchanges, and when they sneeze, a shiver triggers throughout the globe, altering the wealth of national economies. The fact that markets shoot up or down when custo...

Online poker is becoming more and more popular in Germany. As a result, the country's strict legal restrictions on gambling are under pressure, and Germany may soon have to open its protected markets to private online poker providers. Currently, private online poker operations violate the new German...

In the case of Tiffany vs. eBay, a U.S. district judge has presented the e-commerce giant with the best gift it could get in this litigious, digital age: a victory in a four-year-old trademark protection lawsuit. Judge Richard Sullivan of New York found that eBay's process of vetting suspected count...

Things are looking rocky for Yahoo after the latest round in its back-and-forth battle with Microsoft. The war of words took an ugly turn when Yahoo announced over the weekend that it had received and rejected a new Microsoft offer for a search-only purchase. Now, Microsoft is telling its side of th...

The Web continues to play a central role in affecting radical, disruptive change in the music industry as musicians latch on to the latest Web 2.0 tools and bypass traditional producers and distributors. High Street music and video chains -- all the rage not that long ago -- seem to be closing outl...

The punches are starting to fly fast as Yahoo and Carl Icahn duke it out over the company's future. Yahoo shot down a new offer by Microsoft over the weekend to buy the search portion of its business and leave the remaining pieces under Icahn's control. Now, Icahn and the current board of directors ...

Small and medium-sized businesses are demanding the same level of quality and functionality for their IT Web infrastructure as larger enterprise IT organizations. Many SMB organizations are implementing their own application delivery optimization solutions; however, others prefer to outsource their...

The Red Queen in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass lives in a very curious world where, as she explains to Alice, "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." That sentence sums up the world of e-commerce with uncanny accuracy: No matter how hard we work to knock items o...