E-Commerce

Yahoo said Thursday it had agreed to buy Bix.com, a site that enables users to create online contests that others can judge as the portal bids to bolster its lineup of social networking offerings. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Yahoo said that Bix.com founder and CEO Mike Speise...

Two private equity firms have agreed to buy Clear Channel Communications for US$18.7 billion, ending weeks of speculation about the sprawling radio network's fate, including rumors of interest from Google. Clear Channel said Thursday it would be acquired by Thomas H. Lee Partners and Bain Capital Pa...

Online securities trading was a big fad a few years ago, but some of the major players disappeared from the scene after the dot-com fallout. However, many do-it-from-home traders cannot resist the Internet's speed and convenience, and there are still plenty of firms to accommodate them. Although som...

The Internet has completely reshaped customer relationships. The transformation began with the dot-com boom, which spawned a new type of company whose entire business model was predicated on Web acceptance and usage. These companies -- Yahoo, Amazon, eBay and Google -- took advantage of the Web in a...

Even the current upbeat forecasts for continued strong growth in the Internet advertising sector underestimate its true potential because they fail to account for the impact of Web-based video ads, mobile Web ads and social networking opportunities, Yahoo CEO Terry Semel said Tuesday. Semel said mos...

Bidding to stake a claim in the move toward IPTV, TiVo Tuesday launched a series of upgrades meant to enable its digital video recorder to be used as a central control panel from which viewers can receive and manage cable and broadband Internet video. TiVo said its broadband strategy is meant to "pu...

The power of music to bridge national boundaries and cultural divides has long been recognized, but perhaps has never been as starkly clear as it is today. One need only look at the phenomenal growth of MTV channels in countries around the world during the past decade. The commercialization and spre...

Marketers call them "the influentials," and in a world where word-of-mouth marketing is king, they're royalty. However, they may not be as monolithic a class as hucksters believe them to be, according to a report from JupiterResearch. The "classic" influential is an early adopter with a drive to get...

Businesses that have been advertising online for some time may well have the sensation of being the early arrivers in an increasingly crowded room. As more ad dollars flow online, marketers are increasingly bumping into one another, elbowing for space and bidding up search keywords and other prime ...

In its fifth acquisition of 2006, AOL on Wednesday said it has purchased a financial news and information search technology company. The Relegence Corporation will now join the AOL family. The Internet division of Time Warner closed the deal to buy out the privately-held Relegence on Monday. Financi...

Yahoo has begun testing a program to deliver graphics-laden, banner-style ads to mobile devices, as it bids to advance the still fledgling market for mobile advertising. PepsiCo is among the first advertisers to sign up. The advertising will fit in the smaller screens of handhelds; in some cases, th...

Investments in alternative energy continue to grow at their highest rates since the OPEC crisis of the 1970s. Around the world, the persistence of much higher fossil fuel prices, heightened power demands -- particularly in the fast-developing economies of China and India -- national employment trend...

Yahoo is preparing to do for food what it has done for finance, sports, news, pets and a myriad of other subjects: Build it a Web-based portal. The food category has been underserved by Yahoo thus far, Deanna Brown, general manager of Yahoo Lifestyles, told the E-Commerce Times. "We are targeting a ...

Online retail innovation and a cutting-edge customer experience are no longer the sole domain of a few retail pure-plays and multi-channel pioneers with hundreds of millions of dollars to invest. With recent forecasts from Forrester Research predicting that U.S. online retail revenues will top the ...

In a bid to spread its influence to the offline world, Google this week will launch a test of a print-based advertising program. Some 100 of its existing advertisers have been invited to participate in the test, which Google bills as an "alpha version" of Google Print Ads. Google would choose where ...