E-Commerce

Well, Blockbuster has finally done it. After years of simply copying the Netflix business practices, it's definitely done something that Netflix is probably never going to do -- offer to buy Circuit City. I find Blockbuster's actions to be confusing and inconsistent. In their last quarterly call, Bl...

Subscribers to Microsoft's defunct MSN Music service will lose access to songs they purchased from the store in a few months. Microsoft informed MSN Music's customers via e-mail Tuesday that it plans to turn off the store's license servers, and that Aug. 31 will be the last day to move purchased mus...

Comcast has lied about how and why it blocks peer-to-peer Internet traffic, and may be lying in its promise to stop some of its practices by year end, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin said during a hearing held by a Senate committee on the future of the Internet. The FCC shoul...

Yahoo posted a healthy rise in profits for Q1, an increase fueled in large part by a $401 million gain in the initial public offering of China's Alibaba.com. Net income rose to $542.2 million -- or 37 cents per diluted share -- from 2007 Q1's $142.4 million, or 10 cents per diluted share. The compan...

Forget the bricks and mortar for a minute, and just dream of owning a universal domain name identity in cyberspace, along the likes of priceline.com, food.com, creditcards.com or cheapflights.com, as such identities are valued in the tens of millions and continue to double in price every year. The e...

The numbers are in, and user reviews of products have graduated from experiment to necessity. Consumers are relying on them to make buying decisions everywhere from consumer electronics to toys, and from food to beauty products. Moreover, shoppers aren't just checking the reviews to validate a purch...

Creating videos in-house means corporations have to either hire contractors who have their own equipment or sink thousands or millions of dollars into hiring trained staff and leasing or buying equipment. Then they have to spend days, if not weeks, editing the videos. Not any more: Veodia offers a l...

Since 2005, millions of citizens have been affected by reported and unreported data breaches at payment processors, banks and retailers -- but the nation was still stunned when news broke out about the TJX data breach. This has indeed been a larger problem than most recognize, with some 88 million c...

Brushing aside concerns about a drop in paid click rates and sliding past estimates, Google posted results Thursday showing not only that it remains king of the online advertising space but that it can continue to grow sales and profits in uncertain economic times. Revenue at the search giant rose 4...

A new fashion shopping site from Florida boutique La Ti Da is banking on personalized service to set it apart. Visitors to ShopLaTiDa.com, based in Boca Raton, are invited to complete an online profile including profession, style sense, body measurements, preferred designers and areas of shopping wh...

Web auction giant eBay posted strong first-quarter results Wednesday despite weaker-than-expected growth in buying activity in core markets such as the U.S. and the UK. eBay posted net income of $460 million, or 34 cents per share, up 22 percent from the $377 million it earned in the same quarter in...

When the former vice president of the United States gives a speech at a major technology conference in San Francisco, you'd expect to see a story about it the next day, or -- since it was a technology conference -- later on that same day. You'd see a run-of-the-mill story in the Chronicle or the Exa...

A firestorm of fury has erupted over behavioral tracking -- the tracking of consumers online by marketing companies and advertisers to serve them up with targeted advertisements when they're on the Web. Both consumer organizations and trade and industry groups have responded to the Federal Trade Com...

Another company is making a play at online video. Launched Wednesday, PluggedIn is the new kid on the block in a market of heavy hitters that includes MySpace Music, Yahoo Music, AOL Music, MTV.com and of course YouTube. PluggedIn, however, offers at least one thing those other sites do not have -- ...

eBay is killing off the part of its site that allows users to place bids on items up for sale at live auctions. The company will no longer offer eBay Live Auctions after Dec. 31. "This announcement will represent a significant change for the small number of partners, buyers and sellers involved with...