Uncategorized

Most retailers experience a downturn in a weak economy. As consumers rein in spending, a downturn is usually not distributed equally among all retailers. The extent of the downturn depends on a number of factors, including geographic location of stores, product categories being sold and specific mar...

Consumers will get a break from having to wrestle with tough-to-open parcels this holiday season with the advent of "frustration-free" packaging from Amazon.com. The online retail giant will try to cut down on the sheer volume of packaging materials used to ship purchases from the site. The effort b...

The same credit problems that have hit many a home mortgage holder are also threatening to unplug troubled electronics big-box store Circuit City. The nation's second-largest seller of consumer electronics said Monday it will close 155 stores, lay off up to 17 percent of its 43,000-employee U.S. wor...

MySpace, MTV Networks and online ad platform Auditude are teaming up to try and squeeze money out of pirated video -- content distributed online without the permission of the rights holder. The trio's plan is to identify online pirated video clips, slap an ad overlay on top of them, and monetize the...

The old-school approach to order fulfillment doesn't fly for many Internet retailers. Warehousing, packing, shipping and return-order processing are labor-intensive and time-consuming. This has led to a growing trend among online sellers -- the use of Web technologies to automate order fulfillment.

There's little room for error if your company decides to make the transition from a provider of on-premise solutions to a service provider via cloud computing. If you don't take the time to develop reliable services that match the reliability of your on-premise offerings, your credibility will suffe...

On occasion, Google's Gmail service has gone dark, in some cases for hours at a time. Predictably, users of the free service flipped out and took to the Web to sound off. Google's response, up to now, has merely been to issue apologies and get the system up and running again. However, for users of i...

An online ad-sharing deal between Google and Yahoo may be on the verge of collapse. Talks between the two Internet search powerhouses and the U.S. Department of Justice reportedly have stalled, prompting Google and Yahoo to consider walking away from the proposed agreement. Despite the press reports...

Just one day after notifying an Internet registrar notorious for allowing massive spamming that it would terminate its registrar accreditation, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has given the registrar a temporary stay of execution. ICANN sent a letter to EstDomains on Tuesday,...

We are all painfully aware of what is happening on Wall Street. In fact, I think that it might take several years for the stock market to regain the value that it has lost in the past year -- approximately 35 percent. No doubt, there is plenty of blame to go around as to who is primarily responsible...

Ask most people what they like about working with small marketing firms and you'll hear answers such as "their personal approach" or "I'm not just a customer number to them" or "I get to work with the heavy hitters instead of some trainee just out of school." Yes, those are the things they say when ...

Netflix and TiVo announced Thursday the roll out of a streaming video service for subscribers. Set for availability in early December, the service appears to be the culmination of a deal the two companies originally announced in 2004. The TiVo-Netflix venture is the latest in a series of similar par...

Motorola announced a new round of layoffs as it reported a 15 percent decrease in revenue during the third quarter on Thursday. "Approximately 3,000 employees will be affected globally across all businesses and functions," said company spokesperson Maya Komadina. The company also said it will postpo...

Personalization -- the purported long-sought Holy Grail of Web content management -- just might have finally arrived via Web applications that make Web sites responsive in real-time to the unique needs of individual visitors. At the heart of recommendation and personalization technologies are active...

Struggling wireless phone maker Motorola will cut more jobs and focus on designing handheld devices that run Google's new open source Android operating system. The company will pare down the number of operating systems for which it currently creates mobile phones to just three: Android, Microsoft's ...