E-Commerce

A new bill introduced by a Democratic Senator from Arkansas aimed at taxing online porn sites -- at a 25 percent rate -- is raising Constitutional concerns among legal scholars. The bill is called the Internet Safety and Child Protection Act of 2005 (S 1507), and has been referred to the Senate Fin...

Following the footsteps of rivals and possibly laying the groundwork for new marketing channels, Google has added RSS and Atom content feeds to its news search product -- which has been in beta form for the better part of two years. Google added RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and Atom feed links to...

As a provider of office furniture to enterprises of all sizes, Haworth, a company with US$1.4 billion in sales to businesses around the world, knew it could benefit by improving its use of e-commerce technology in order to gain efficiency through automation. After all, many of Haworth's customers, f...

A rumored deal whereby Yahoo would purchase a US$1 billion stake in Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba is highlighting the efforts by U.S. companies, also including eBay and Google, to get deeper into the Chinese market. This difficult endeavor includes issues of resistance to foreign investment and...

E*Trade Financial today announced its second acquisition in as many days, scooping up an investment advisory firm in a deal that augments its much larger, US$700 million buy of Harrisdirect. E*Trade did not disclose the purchase price it will pay for Boston-area-based Kobren Insight Management, a re...

Two advertisers have filed a lawsuit against Google, saying the search giant did not live up to its promise to cap the amount of charges advertisers could incur in any given day. The suit was filed in the Superior Court of California in Santa Clara County and seeks class action status, which would e...

Another sign that e-commerce has come of age appeared yesterday as JupiterResearch predicted online advertising would reach US$18.9 billion by 2010 -- almost double last year's gross of $9.6 billion. Much of that revenue growth will be stoked by search engine advertising, which garnered 40 percent o...

Seeking to keep pace with rivals in a rapidly consolidating industry, E*Trade Financial will buy Harrisdirect for US$700 million in cash. E*Trade said the purchase of Harrisdirect, an online-only brokerage owned by the BMO Financial Group -- parent company of the Bank of Montreal -- would be "highly...

Real Simple Syndication (RSS) -- the technology used to create feeds of information directly to a user from Web sites and blogs -- is in its nascent stages of development, but it's one marketers should be taking a hard look at as a future vehicle for their wares. Marketers who shun RSS now might rea...

The months of rumor and speculation about Amazon.com joining the digital music download business appear to be reaching a fever pitch and observers say it's only a matter of time before Amazon's music service debuts and makes a run at market leader Apple. Amazon could not be reached for comment on th...

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decided today that telephone companies that offer high-speed Internet access do not have to share their wire lines with other DSL providers. By classifying DSL as a information service, the FCC freed telecoms from federal telecommunications regulations. Th...

Bidding to capture a piece of a potentially lucrative vertical area of search, Yahoo has launched a test of an audio search engine that gives users the ability to comb through some 50 million audio files, from audio blogs and other spoken word programs to downloadable songs and albums. The Yahoo Aud...

Yahoo has launched a self-service ad-placement network that is designed to offer small publishers, including bloggers, access to revenue from contextually relevant advertising, a service already offered by rival Google. Yahoo said the beta version of the expanded Yahoo Publisher Network is aimed at ...

Casinos in Nevada might become the first to explore a new area of the Internet gambling frontier, enabling users to gamble on mobile devices while they're in and around casinos. A recently passed law makes Nevada the first state in the U.S. to allow the use of hand-held devices for gambling at casin...

Dogpile.com, the most heavily visited meta-search engine on the Web, has said it would add Microsoft's relatively new MSN Search tool to the array of engines it uses and also said that contrary to popular belief, different search engines provide vastly different results. The addition of MSN Search m...