E-Commerce

With the kaching of ringtone sales still ringing in their ears, music companies are preparing the next wave of mobile music services, with customized snippets of songs providing alerts for a range of phone functions. Ringtone revenues are expected to begin leveling off this year, and labels are prep...

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of eBay in a longstanding patent dispute with MercExchange. In particular, the Court reversed the appeals court's interpretation regarding the granting of an injunction in a patent infringement suit. For well over a hundred years, patentees, in additi...

The U.S. Justice Department said it will not pursue complaints raised by Google over Microsoft's decision to build search functionality into the new version of its Internet Explorer browser, a feature that could provide a boost to Microsoft's MSN Search. Antitrust regulators said they had looked int...

In a move to take a slice of iTunes' e-commerce pie, News Corp.'s Fox Entertainment Group and Burger King Holdings have joined forces to bring hit television programming to MySpace.com members. The move marks MySpace's entry into the e-commerce arena as the social networking site seeks to monetize o...

More and more mortgage shoppers are going online to find loans, but when it's time to seal the deal, most prefer to take their business offline, according to a study scheduled to be released Tuesday by Forrester Research and Compete Inc., both based in Boston. Over the past two years, consumers rese...

If retail marketers are going to capture the loyalty of the next generation of spenders, they're going to have to get hip to the new Web, according to a report from Forrester Research. "The 73 million people under the age of 18 in the U.S. represent one thing to marketers and sellers: the next gener...

Debate has swirled recently around the practice of allowing movie lovers to download films from the Internet, burn them onto a DVD, and watch them in the comfort of their own living rooms. Now a controversial segment of the film industry is set to pave the way for more conservative studios that may ...

The U.S. Supreme Court has ordered a lower court review of the eBay and MercExchange case, a decision that could have far-reaching impacts for small firms that hold technology patents -- and larger companies that often find themselves locked in patent litigation. The high court's unanimous decision...

The music industry isn't what it used to be. The rapid advent of new digital audio technologies has created a wealth of options and opportunities -- as well as panic, consternation and sometimes radical change -- for recording companies, broadcasters and musicians, not to mention the listening audie...

You may have thought there was a television channel for everything and everybody, but DirecTV is the first to launch a channel for viewers too young to complain about the programming. Some child experts, though, are complaining that the viewers are too young to watch television in the first place. A...

Microsoft has strategies in place to deal with the twin competitive threats of Linux and Google, CEO Steve Ballmer said Thursday, with the software company using innovation, tenacity and time to gain on its rivals. Ballmer said Microsoft planned to use "sheer tenacity" to wrest market share in the o...

A group of executives from Internet companies such as Lycos and Yahoo Shopping have launched a tightly focused local shopping search engine they say will help shoppers pinpoint retailers whether they want to buy online or off. Yokel.com features both a national site and a local site focused on the B...

Anyone who believes that the recent political maneuvers to keep the net neutrality issue out of the legislative agenda this year have been successful is sadly mistaken, promise backers of the concept. After a recent defeat, the Democrats have introduced a new bill that seeks to ban phone and cable c...

In a move that speaks to online video's momentum, TiVo and Internet TV startup Brightcove on Wednesday announced a deal that will allow TiVo subscribers to receive Brightcove's broadband video programming. About 400,000 TiVo subscribers who have their set-top boxes connected to the Internet with a b...

Buyers winning name brand merchandise on an auction site for a great price may not get the real deal -- and that can be a big deal in terms of costs to the companies, the auction sites and the duped consumers. Anyone buying products with brand names like Microsoft, Gucci, Nike, Canon, Nokia, Louis V...