E-Commerce

SpiralFrog.com, a free music download site that launched on Sept. 17, allows registered users to download more than 800,000 songs and videos. As long as downloaders keep renewing their free monthly site registration, they can continue to play the song and video files on their PC. Users can also copy...

Google and Microsoft squared off as usual Thursday, but this time instead of the competitive battlefield, they met on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers are weighing the question of whether Google's purchase of DoubleClick will create an unfair online advertising monopoly. Representatives of both compani...

Among all of the great business concepts of the last few decades, the franchise model is among those consistently at the very top. Over the next decade, the introduction of hundreds of fresh, locally nurtured franchise concepts emerging in the Mideast will set the stage for a revolution of nouveau c...

Consumers are beginning to embrace digital video recorders as they once did VCRs. A scant two years ago, only one American household in 13 had one of the gadgets. Now they're in one in five homes, according to the latest figures from the Leichtman Research Group, of Durham, N.H. What's more, by 2011...

After years of speculation and preparation, Amazon.com launched its digital music store Tuesday, debuting Amazon MP3 and promising a wide selection of music unfettered by DRM restrictions. The e-tail giant launched what it's calling a public beta of the download store with 2 million songs available ...

Having agreed to buy Slingbox maker Sling Media, Dish Network parent company EchoStar Communications now is considering splitting itself into two distinct companies. The Colorado-based satellite TV company wants to separate its consumer-based and wholesale businesses, a move it says will allow both ...

Google has formally asked the European Commission to review its acquisition of interactive advertising firm DoubleClick. The next few weeks will be critical, as regulators and lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic contemplate how -- or whether -- the merger should move forward. The EC on Monday i...

With all the games people play with Internet company names, it's quite possible that someday no one will be able to spell anything correctly ever again. Perhaps it's already happening. Ever wonder how many times gross misspellings like "Del.icio.us" or "Flickr" show up on eighth-grade spelling tests...

Forcing consumers to buy prepackaged tiers of bundled TV channels is a violation of trade and anti-trust laws, contends a lawsuit filed in the federal court against media companies and cable/satellite TV providers. The complaint, filed by Los Angeles lawyers Maxwell Blecher and David Kesselman on be...

E-mail greeting card scams popular during the summer months seem to have lost their luster for information highwaymen. "We've seen an awful lot of greeting card malware in the last couple of months, but scammers have moved on to new techniques, simply because there was so much of it about that it st...

NBC became the latest television network to plant a stake in its own piece of Internet video turf, saying it would make free downloads of first-run television shows available directly to viewers through its Web site. Known as NBC Direct, the offering has implications affecting various players in the...

It seems that businesses, whether they're small or global 2000 concerns, are buying more supplies using search at some point in the B2B procurement process. Some people begin and end a procurement journey with search. They actually buy the products through a strictly search-dependent process. Yet ma...

MySpace is tapping into its rich universe of content -- that is, its users' profiles -- to bulk up its advertising platform. The ubiquitous social networking Web site will be matching ads to people's profiles so that visitors to, say, a music aficionado's page will see adds for music Web sites. MySp...

Despite persistent rumors to the contrary, Time Warner has no plans to sell AOL, Chairman and CEO Richard Parsons said Tuesday. "We are focused right now on building the best third-party ad platform we can within AOL and at the same time increasing our own inventory," Parsons told analysts at a Gold...

Bidding to turn the widget phenomenon it helped nurture into a revenue producer and convince users and publishers to share ads with each other, Google announced Wednesday it would expand a test of highly interactive ads that run within the Web site plug-ins. Google Gadget Ads is being tested with a ...