E-Commerce

Search engine Blinkx unveiled a new search tool Tuesday that it said will deliver search results to users automatically, eliminating the need to stop another activity to begin a query. The search, known as Pico, is also being billed as the smallest search program available, taking up just 1MB of spa...

In a move to extend its reach, NBC Universal on Monday agreed to buy iVillage, a leading online destination for women, for approximately US$600 million in cash. NBC Universal, which runs the NBC television network and the Universal film studio, will pay $8.50 in cash for each share of iVillage's sto...

The U.S. Department of Justice confirmed this week it is investigating possible price fixing among the major recording labels for online music. The probe is similar to action taken by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who last month continued an investigation of digital download collusion and...

A judge has cleared the way for Toys 'R' Us to terminate its e-commerce partnership with Amazon.com, a 10-year dot-com era partnership the toy seller has been seeking to terminate for nearly two years. Toys 'R' Us sued Amazon in May of 2004, seeking to terminate an agreement struck in 2000 under whi...

The Board of Directors of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has given its final approval to a settlement that ends legal disputes with VeriSign and anoints that company as the operator of the lucrative dot-com registry through 2012. The deal is now being sent to the U.S. Comme...

A day after Google shares plummeted for the third time in about a month, wiping out around US$13 billion in market value in the process, investors and analysts turned their attention to evaluating the future of the search industry as a whole. Google shares lost some 7 percent on Tuesday after Chief ...

Google is attempting to make it easier for merchants that list items for sale on its Google Base service by allowing shoppers to make purchases using their Google Accounts. "For buyers, this feature will provide a convenient and secure way to purchase Google Base items by credit card. For sellers, t...

The Internet search player formerly known as AskJeeves has decided that the butler just didn't do it, announcing today that it will drop "Jeeves" from its name in a massive rebranding effort where it will become, simply, Ask.com. Ask.com said the butler became outdated when Internet searchers starte...

Auction giant eBay is hitting back at a British magazine's assertion that the site has become a hotbed for various types of fraud. Computing Which? magazine published a story calling on eBay to do more to protect users of the site from fraud, saying that by its count some 130 eBay-related fraud repo...

The U.S. Justice Department is arguing that Google's privacy concerns are not reason enough for it to withhold search records being sought by investigators, likely setting the stage for a court battle over the data. In a court filing made late Friday, the Bush administration said because individual ...

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. on Wednesday unveiled My Network TV, a stripped down, prime-time only network that will feed racy shows to the WB and UPN stations, which are set to merge. My Network TV will be heavily promoted on the MySpace Web site, the hugely popular youth-targeted social networking ...

Despite some chest beating by the entertainment industry Wednesday over the shutdown of one of the biggest index servers on the eDonkey network, a raid by Belgian and Swiss police seems to have had little impact on file-sharing traffic. "We have seen no effect on the eDonkey traffic levels," Andrew ...

U.S. advertisers have turned the practice of "product placement" into a lucrative market. This advertising phenomenon makes possible the insertion of an advertiser's product into a film, television program or video game. The estimated value of the total product-placement industry in 2005 -- when you...

Somewhere between no-frills Craigslist and intricate eBay lies the new e-commerce offering introduced by Santa Monica, Calif.-based TagWorld last week. TagWorld, a high-energy social networking space launched last November, is combining the new service of free online classifieds, which includes imag...

Online retailers and service providers improved their customer satisfaction ratings during 2005 and Web-based retailers continued to do a better job of making buyers happy than their off-line counterparts, according to a new report. The annual American Customer Satisfaction Index E-Commerce Report c...