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Fearing a monopoly by cable broadband companies and a resultant loss of freedom of speech, civil liberties groups said they will fight federal measures that would let cable Internet providers retain control of their networks and bar competing ISPs from using their lines. "No one is saying they ca...

A Canadian government agency has cleared Amazon.com to sell books through its newly launched Canadian Web site, saying the e-tailer is not subject to a law that regulates foreign investment in booksellers. But rival booksellers, including Canadian online competitor Indigo Books and Music and the ...

Yahoo! has reported second-quarter earnings of $225.8 million and net income of $21.4 million, outdoing year-ago figures, while online advertising revenue still accounted for the bulk of the company's income. Giga Information Group analyst Andrew Bartels told the E-Commerce Times that a reboundin...

Before last spring, Major League Baseball's Internet efforts were as far-flung and varied as the league's 30 teams. And by and large, they struck out with Web surfers. But since relaunching MLB.com in April 2001 and bringing all of the teams' home pages under one roof, baseball's Web efforts have...

Ask Jeeves has joined forces with 24/7 Real Media's search engine marketing division to launch a paid inclusion service called Index Express. The service will match search queries from users "to the highly relevant deep content on an advertiser's Web site," according to Doug Wagner, president of ...

One of the latest trends in notebook computers represents a 180-degree turn from what manufacturers have been trying to do for years, which is to make devices ever smaller. Now, some laptop makers are betting that bigger notebooks will attract a certain segment of the market. And these new behemo...

Travel company Expedia has announced it will buy a privately held business travel agency and will use the acquisition as the core of an effort to enter the corporate travel market. Expedia did not disclose terms of its purchase of Metropolitan Travel, but it noted that the 20-year-old firm did $15...

In the afterglow of eBay's PayPal acquisition announcement, although the deal has few detractors, questions are being raised. They're somewhat tough questions, focusing on who, why and, perhaps most importantly, when. In the world after Enron, HomeStore, Tyco, Xerox and WorldCom, cynicism is to b...

When VeriSign launched in 1995, it touted itself as being the "only company focused 100 percent on digital authentication products and services." But since 2000, the company has ventured into several new markets. Recent earnings reports seem to indicate that VeriSign could be spread too thin, but...

On the heels of eBay's $1.5 billion PayPal acquisition, Microsoft is making its own play to compete in the online payment space. The software giant has announced a partnership that will allow banks to authenticate Visa and MasterCard credit cards with a shopper's Microsoft Passport username and p...

Multichannel retailing is on the rise in the U.S. and Europe, according to a new study published by Gartner. Of the 375 companies surveyed between September and December of last year, roughly 75 percent said that they currently have a multichannel retailing strategy (MRS) or are planning to imple...

XML (extensible markup language), with its potential for helping companies find common ground on which to exchange and interpret data between disparate systems, has started to change the face of e-commerce. For example, for enterprises to get the most out of order-management applications, a key f...

Hewlett-Packard has officially launched a portfolio of Intel Itanium 2-based systems, products and services. The worldwide rollout comes after nearly seven years of collaboration among HP, Intel and Microsoft. However, Forrester analyst Carl Howe told the E-Commerce Times, "The problem is that no...

In a widely anticipated move, auction giant eBay has announced it will acquire online payment company PayPal in an all-stock deal valued at $1.5 billion. EBay said it will phase out its own Billpoint system, long a disappointment to the auction site, after the PayPal deal closes. The companies ex...

At first, traffic counts were all that mattered to e-commerce. The number of people visiting a site was the single best gauge of a site's success in a new industry. But times have changed. As e-commerce has grown more complex -- becoming one of several channels through which consumers research, s...