Articles by Keith Regan

Poor Yahoo. First, the company can't produce enough nonadvertising revenue to make analysts and investors happy. And now it appears the company is producing too much nonadvertising revenue So get out the crying towels for Yahoo, right? Not exactly. The company -- which is part portal, media company, services provider, holding company and search eng...

Some ethnic minorities are gaining ground in terms of online presence in the United States, though they still comprise just a fraction of overall Web traffic, according to a new study from Nielsen//NetRatings. According to NetRatings, the number of Hispanic Web surfers jumped from 6.7 million last year to 7.6 million this year, a 13 percent increa...

Robertson Stephens, an investment bank that helped take Webvan, eToys, Palm, eMachines, Buy.com and a score of other Internet and tech companies public in the dot-com heyday, will be closed after attempts to find a buyer failed. Boston, Massachusetts-based parent company FleetBoston Financial said the decision to close the San Francisco-based firm...

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. The Department of Canadian Heritage issued a statement Wednesday saying that Amazon's Canadian site is exempt from provisions of the Investment...

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 been a game-winning home run by all accounts.

Travel site Expedia has announced plans to buy a privately held business travel agency and use the acquisition as the core of an effort to enter the market for corporate travel Expedia did not disclose terms of its purchase of Seattle, Washington-based Metropolitan Travel, whose customer base includes Nordstrom and Starbucks, but it noted that the ...

It's a sign of the times. 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 be expected. But eBay's pur...

In a widely anticipated move, auction giant eBay has announced it will acquire online payment company PayPal in an all-stock deal valued at US$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 expect the buyout to be completed by year's end, pen...

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, shop for and ultimately buy goods -- measuring the im...

A long, long time ago, before Amazon.com modified its "Earth's Biggest Bookstore" slogan to encompass all the other merchandise on its virtual shelves, e-commerce took its first baby steps by selling books to the worlds hungry readers. Now, almost exactly seven years later, the latest and hottest news about e-commerce is all about -- books. Has e-...

Companies took a break from laying off workers from Internet-related jobs in June, with just 684 layoffs announced, according to a report from international outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. By comparison, dot-coms cut more than 2,000 jobs in May. But the respite might be just a temporary lull in the action, as corporate failures ins...

While WorldCom has been severely battered by revelations of improper accounting and accusations of fraud, the company has what it takes to survive the current crisis, according to a new report from research firm The Yankee Group. "Unlike other struggling telecommunications companies, WorldCom has assets, customers and a revenue stream, and will no...

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has filed a civil fraud suit against WorldCom over the company's US$4 billion misstatement of financial results during 2001 and the first quarter of 2002 After the SEC initially issued a statement saying that the commission is "actively investigating" WorldCom's financial statements, SEC Chairman Ha...

Every day, eBay looks more and more like the strongest swimmer in the dot-com pool Nowhere was that more evident than at its recent three-day smile-fest in Anaheim, California, where thousands of eBay devotees came to hear Meg Whitman and others detail the company's plans for world domination....

Priceline.com said it would not meet its own sales targets for the current quarter, pointing at the failure of an expected seasonal increase in airline ticket sales to materialize The name-your-price e-tailer said that second-quarter revenues would be about 5 percent below the company's previously stated range of US$320 million to $350 million....

Now, isn't this more like it? A real price war has broken out, albeit a limited one, with superpower Amazon and the more guerilla-style Buy.com squaring off over free shipping Both deals are good news for consumers. At Amazon, you have to buy half as much now -- only US$49 -- as the company used to require to get free shipping. At Buy.com, there's ...

A limited price war has broken out in the online bookselling arena as Buy.com, Amazon.comand BN.com vie for customers, offering steep discountsreminiscent of the earliest days of online commerce Buy.com has fired the latest volley,saying it will sell 1 million book titles at 10 percent below Amazon's prices....

Underscoring the notion that selling on eBay has become a full-time job for many millions of users, eBay has announced it willoffer a health insurance plan to some of the more active members of its community. The news came over the weekend at eBay Live, a three-day gathering of eBay employees and community members in Anaheim, California.

PayPal has announced it will shift its credit card processing to Wells Fargo, making the financial giant the third company in the past year to handle PayPal's credit card transactions. The move may help PayPal strengthen its ties to credit card companies, which have been somewhat rocky in the past. In fact, PayPal said recently that it risked losi...

Ask online marketing experts whether it is possible to build a brand strictly by using the Web; most of them will say it is. And almost all of them will move quickly to qualify their answer "I think it is possible, but I'm not sure it's the most effective way to build a brand," David Rosenblatt, president of online marketing firm DoubleClick, told ...