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High oil prices. Natural disasters. Slumping economy. Pink slip epidemics. None of that appeared to bother shoppers as they stormed Web outlets on the day after Thanksgiving, the day that's become known as Black Friday. According to Patty Freeman Evans, a retail analyst with Jupiter Research in New ...

Providing evidence that the Internet is fast becoming the global bazaar many have long imagined -- one with the power to smash traditional barriers to commerce -- a new report says one of every six online Americans has sold something on the Web. The Pew Internet & American Life Project said abou...

TiVo, the personal digital recorder company whose value proposition has long included the ability to let users fast-forward through commercials, said today it was working with several advertising and media companies to make it possible for users to search for specific TV ads they actually want to se...

Traditional retailers pulled out all the stops to drive traffic and sales to brick-and-mortar stores on Black Friday. But online retailers have set their sights on what is expectantly known as Cyber Monday. Both days revolve around Thanksgiving and both days mean big bucks for retailers. The day aft...

A survey of certified fraud examiners says that the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) law -- passed in the wake of scandals at technology companies like MCI/Worldcom -- is an effective tool in fraud identification, though few believe it is actually changing the culture of business. The survey, conducted by Overs...

Not long ago, it sometimes took Web pages 30 seconds to load, thanks to slow, dial-up connections over-burdened servers and inexperienced Web design. Now, with high-speed connections and rapidly evolving technology, the days of slow-loading pages are gone. However, users might want to get used to wa...

Some 72 percent of the businesses evaluated by a Boston-based research firm scored poorly on their policies for re-using their customers' personal data for marketing purposes, but the researchers maintain that more companies are sensitive to privacy issues than ever before and are acting on that awa...

Hedge funds are investment vehicles that use alternative or non-traditional investment strategies to manage investors' money. These strategies are broad-ranged and include the use of short sales, arbitrage, leverage, or derivatives. Hedge funds have become popular investment vehicles over the last f...

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission took action against spyware this week by asking a U.S. District Court Judge to halt an operation that allegedly plagued users who clicked for free file-sharing software with performance-slowing, private-information-gathering software that also altered search results...

Long after they became fixtures in the hands of businesspeople and teenagers alike, mobile phones still hold a unique and unenviable position in the world of technology, a device that's loved and hated as intensely as any. Anyone who's ever been forced to listen to half a conversation held on a phon...

No doubt there will still be lines outside of malls and department stores early in the morning on Black Friday, long the unofficial kickoff of the holiday shopping season. But as the busiest stretch of the year for retailers gets under way, there are more signs that retailers themselves believe the ...

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and BitTorrent yesterday announced a collaborative effort to curb film piracy. BitTorrent Founder and CEO Bram Cohen's technology allows Web sites to make large content files available online. The MPAA was concerned that the technology is frequently u...

America Online officially launched an upgrade to its flagship messaging product, AOL Instant Messenger yesterday, and unveiled the AIM Triton upgrade as a desktop bundle of communications applications offering a range of other communications services in a single place. Analysts said the integrated p...

It is my belief that Benjamin Franklin, were he alive today, would throw off his visor and scream at the transition occurring currently from a print-society to a cyber one. It was only a hundred years ago, at the dawn of the print-society, where words, nicely arranged and neatly printed on newsprint...

The usage of ".US" domain extensions is sharply rising, with organizations switching to alternative top level domain extensions rather than ".com" to bolster their online brand with American audiences, according to Sedo.com, a leading online marketplace for the sale of domain names, based in Cambrid...