E-Commerce

Driven by technology, access to content is TiVo's primary need. To a large degree, however, access to content is precisely what traditional TV and cable broadcasters, as well as film studios, still control. This crucial point has long been recognized, as well as debated, by TiVo management. The co...

With the tech industry still abuzz over the announcement that Bill Gates will step back from the day-to-day operations of Microsoft, the software giant Tuesday acknowledged the immediate departure of one of its top marketing executives. Martin Taylor, 36, regarded as a key advisor to CEO Steve Ballm...

With floor space at large retailers at a premium these days, you'd think the allure of reducing all the aisles occupied by DVD movies to the footprint of a kiosk would be compelling, but that's not the case. According to a studio executive who agreed to talk to the E-Commerce Times on terms of anony...

Hoping to give advertisers greater control over their online campaigns and to match competitors, Google said Friday it had introduced a time scheduling feature to its AdWords platform. Ad scheduling, also known as dayparting, enables advertisers to choose precise times when they want their ads to ru...

Amazon.com, daring to tread on ground where some of the most spectacular dot-com burnouts took place, has begun selling groceries through its sprawling e-tail site. Without formally announcing the move, Amazon added a beta version of a "grocery" category, bringing to 34 the number of different produ...

Netscape, the browser company whose rise and fall helped define the first decade of the World Wide Web, is being revamped yet again by parent company AOL, which hopes to fashion it into a news site that leverages some of the hottest trends in today's Web -- social-networking, tagging and blogging. A...

Even with a steady stream of database breaches that lead to potential identity theft making headlines nearly every day, e-commerce continues to grow steadily, with many consumers increasingly sanguine about turning over sensitive information such as their credit card numbers to online merchants. St...

Microsoft, Google and Yahoo are the most likely alternatives News Corp. is considering for providing its popular MySpace social networking site with search functionality. MySpace already offers a Web search feature. This April, it was included for the first time in comScore's search engine rankings,...

In the first major pass at realizing e-commerce gains from its US$2.6 billion purchase of peer-to-peer communications firm Skype, eBay said it would begin to offer sellers on its auction platform the ability to let buyers contact them using the Internet text and voice chat technology. eBay is target...

As the utilization of search marketing grows, the perspective from which you view its impact on your organization must also grow. Search engine marketing can no longer be viewed in a silo where its only measure of success is direct response metrics. Whether you like it or not, you must realize that ...

The converging Internet world may be about to see its latest head-to-head battle between Google and eBay, with reports suggesting Google is just days from launching a feature meant to rival the PayPal online payment system. RBC analyst Jordan Rohan predicted Google will launch a program called GBuy ...

A Michigan teenager who tricked her parents into getting her a passport and flew to the Middle East to meet someone she met through her MySpace.com page is back at home, with her misadventure stirring renewed debate about the safety of social networking sites that target a young audience. Katherine ...

Cable television consumers across the nation are halfway to their goal of getting lower prices and better service, thanks to the passage of a cable reform bill in the U.S. House of Representatives. The COPE Act will make it easier for new companies to enter the cable market and compete for consumers...

eBay is launching its own contextual ad tool called eBay AdContext in order to build out its third party distribution network -- and shift away from a too heavy reliance on Google. Like similar applications launched by Overture and Google, AdContext is, at bottom, designed to entice online distribut...

Many commercial Web sites fail to pass even basic tests for usefulness and usability largely because their architects use faulty reasoning to justify defective decisions. That's one of the conclusions in a report released by Forrester Research, of Cambridge, Mass. "Designers and stakeholders use fal...