E-Commerce

The business of providing small businesses with e-commerce hosting and support solutions is growing fast. The large-enterprise market is crowded, and competition is fierce. That has led an increasing number of e-commerce platform providers to enter the SMB end, where they are looking to establish fo...

In what could be a major shift in the social networking landscape, Yahoo has reportedly held talks to purchase Facebook, which trails rival MySpace.com in terms of total users, but has found traction among the college-age demographic with a more restrictive membership approach. A report in the Wall ...

If you are running serious business applications on the Web, downtime or Web site slowness equals lost dollars. This is true either directly, by missed sales if you are running an e-commerce store, or indirectly, through lost customer trust if you are providing a Web-based solution to clients. When...

A proposed treaty that would expand the rights of broadcasters over what they deliver to consumers cleared a significant hurdle last week at a meeting of an international copyright panel. The panel -- the Standing Committee on Copyrights and Related Rights of the World Intellectual Property Organiza...

Internet stocks dropped Tuesday after Yahoo said its third-quarter financial results would lean toward the low end of its earlier guidance, sparking concerns that the Web advertising boom may be cooling and that the portal is seeing the first signs of an economic slowdown. Relatively slow ad sales i...

AOL and Intel on Monday launched a Web-based video service meant to combine AOL's extensive video library with Intel's hardware expertise in a bid to accelerate the adoption of Internet-based video-on-demand. The joint venture combined the recently revamped AOL Video channel with the Intel Viiv line...

Want to be your own boss? Got an itch to try your hand at e-commerce but don't consider yourself a techie? Maybe you've got an eye for style, the next big fad, or just useful products. Or perhaps you have the pulse of a particular space, as well as the sales and marketing savvy to put an idea to ...

Likely seeing better opportunities to leverage the News Corp. brand across multiple channels, Rupert Murdoch is reportedly in talks with partner Liberty Media on a deal that would give him full control of News Corp. Murdoch and Liberty have traded proposals to have Liberty exchange its stake in News...

The chances that major social networking sites will face a potentially massive copyright infringement suit from at least one major record label grew this week, with talks among the various parties reportedly breaking down. YouTube and MySpace have been on notice about copyright issues for some time...

The top 10 fastest growing Web sites in August with back-to-school online advertising campaigns were announced Tuesday by Internet media and marketing research firm Nielsen//NetRatings. Topping the list was eBags.com, which showed month-to-month growth of 118 percent, from a unique audience of 582,0...

Yahoo said Wednesday it had reached a multi-year deal to have its search tools distributed on PCs made by Taiwan-based Acer. Yahoo is hoping the move will help its search engine and other online tools reach users long before they even log onto the Web. Acer is the fourth-largest maker of PCs in the...

Sears and Intel crowned a list of top performing Web sites released Monday by the Customer Respect Group, an international research and consulting firm that focuses on how corporations treat their online customers. The annual report, now in its fifth year, analyzed the Web sites of all Fortune 100 c...

Web analytics have become a critical part of every company's Web presence, but many businesses are often surprised by how time consuming traffic-crunching programs can be. That surprise can be most often pegged to two reasons, according to a report released Wednesday by Forrester Research. "Site own...

Today's businesses are operating in real time as the demand for instant access to information and services grows. While the need to meet "instant gratification" status continues to rise across all industry sectors, today's online retailer is taking advantage of key technologies to build a closer rel...

When a searcher types a word into Google or Yahoo, organic and paid results populate the return screen. Because competition for top rankings in search results is steadily increasing, business-to-business marketers are challenged to develop ever more sophisticated search strategies. FedEx, for instan...