E-Commerce

Sprint last week announced it was celebrating the AT&T/DirecTV merger by extending a truly valuable offer to DirecTV customers. "The Sprint network is winning awards across the country for reliability and speed, and our customers have never been more satisfied," crowed Sprint spokesperson Kristi...

Amazon last week freed a selection of Android apps of the in-app payment requirements necessary to enjoy them to their fullest. The value of the goodies in the apps labeled "Actually Free" comes to more than $10,000, Amazon said. The Actually Free apps can be accessed via Underground, a new app avai...

Amazon reportedly has given the boot to dozens of engineers who worked on its ill-fated Fire Phone. The purged staffers worked at Lab126, Amazon's secretive Silicon Valley-based hardware development center. Amazon also scaled back or killed off several other Lab126 projects, including a large-screen...

Online advertising that pushes malicious software to consumers has increased 325 percent over the past year, Cyphort Labs has reported. Malvertising is adding to what is already a significant problem for online advertisers. Ad fraud will cost global advertisers more than $6 billion this year, accord...

Samsung on Friday kicked off the Samsung Ultimate Test Drive, a new promotion aimed at drawing iPhone users into its fold. For just one dollar Samsung will provide iPhone users with a Galaxy smartphone -- models available include the Galaxy S6 and S6 edge, as well as the S6 edge+ and Note 5 -- plus ...

Hackers on Tuesday dumped personal data of about 37 million members of the Ashley Madison website onto the Dark Web. The data was stolen last month in an attack on the site, which aims to hook up people who want to cheat on their spouses. Parent company "Avid Life Media has failed to take down Ashle...

CEO Jeff Bezo on Sunday refuted contentions that Amazon has a draconian workplace culture. "The NYT article prominently features anecdotes describing shockingly callous management practices, including people being treated without empathy while enduring family tragedies and serious health problems," ...

The process of "checking the fine print" always has been an important aspect of consumer behavior. For product manufacturers, providing important transaction information to consumers also has been a challenging part of business operations. Take the fine print of warranty information, for example.

About $21.8 billion in global ad revenues have been lost so far this year due to ad blockers, according to a report from Pagefair and Adobe. Consumers increasingly are opting for tools to shut down ads before they pop up. By next year, the U.S. alone should account for about $20 billion in blocked a...

The Internet of Things market has been struggling to get untangled, despite the hype regarding unprecedented business opportunities. GE's latest initiative to capitalize on those IoT opportunities might be the catalyst many corporate executives have been waiting for to advance their own goals. GE ha...

Twitter on Tuesday announced an API that will give business users instant and complete access to every historical public tweet. Based on tools developed by Gnip, which Twitter purchased last year, the API lets users search tweets back to March 2006, when the first one was posted. They can request co...

Earlier this week I planned to focus this column on saying farewell to Google+. Then Google suddenly announced something much bigger. It is splitting itself into several different companies under one master brand called "Alphabet." Splitting up is what Google has needed to do for several years. The ...

Google on Monday announced a restructuring that will make it a wholly owned subsidiary of a new umbrella company called "Alphabet." Product Chief Sundar Pichai will take over as CEO of Google, while Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergei Brin will be CEO and president, respectively, of Alphabet. Pi...

Viewability -- that is, a display or video ad's ability to be viewed effectively on a Web page -- is the most critical factor in any video or display ad campaign. However, a surprisingly large percentage of display and video ads lacked either visibility or longevity, the two most important pieces of...

Google last week asked French regulators to withdraw a demand to universally delist from search results links to information about French citizens who wish to be forgotten on the Internet. Any European can ask to have certain links about them removed from search results that appear in Europe, and Go...