Articles by Keith Regan

Against a backdrop of solid earnings news from some bellwether tech companies, e-commerce software maker Commerce One reported sharply lower sales for the first quarter and said it will slash its workforce by another 30 percent. Commerce One said the latest round of layoffs will leave it with about 1,100 workers worldwide. Combined with a 50 perce...

More than 18 months after becoming a symbol of the sharp rise and spectacular fall of many pure-play e-commerce ventures, Furniture.com is poised to return from the dead. The site, which went dark during the peak of the dot-com shakeout after a pulled IPO and a bankruptcy filing, will relaunch this week under new ownership and with a new business ...

Bob Guccione isn't a happy man Forgive the publisher of Penthouse magazine for being grumpy, but he's reportedly been forced to put his Manhattan pad, said to be one of the largest private residences in the city, up for sale for $40 million. As if that isn't enough, he said that his world-class collection of (non-pornographic) art could be confisca...

Just two days after shaking up top-level management, AOL Time Warner on Thursday named a former radio executive to head up its interactive services unit, which includes flagship America Online. James de Castro, who brings experience in the radio industry and the online world, was named president of AOL Interactive Services and will report to chief...

Good news is hard to come by lately in Silicon Valley. It's out there. It's just a lot harder to find. And sometimes it requires an extra spin to make it clear that it is, in fact, good news. But if nothing else, the Valley has less traffic than it did a year ago. That's right: Officials in Santa Clara county commissioned a study and found that tr...

E*Trade said Wednesday that it will pay US$100 million in stock for privately held Tradescape. The move will nearly double the number of daily stock trades on E*Trade's network, making it the industry leader in that category. The deal contains incentives that could bring its total value to $280 million if Tradescape hits "aggressive" performance t...

More than 40 percent of all reported Internet fraud complaints stemmed from online auctions in 2001, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said in a report covering complaints received during the year. The FBI said 43 percent of the 49,711 complaints filed with the Internet Fraud Complaint Center, a partnership between the FBI and the Nat...

In one of the biggest e-commerce mergers of the year, online stock-trading site Ameritrade (Nasdaq: AMTD) said it would acquire privately held competitor Datek Online Holdings for nearly US$1.3 billion in stock. The merger catapults Ameritrade to the top of the online brokerage marketplace in terms of trading volume.

In the United States, Internet-based music swapping has already had its heyday. Sure, it's still going on, pushed underground by lawsuits and enforcement actions. But never again will it enjoy the kind of glamorous prominence it enjoyed just a short while ago, when Napster was the coolest thing since eight-track tapes On the other hand, music pirat...

The search engine wars are heating up, with Google joining Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) and MSN as leaders in the race for control of this important Web sector, according to a report released by Nielsen//NetRatings (Nasdaq: NTRT). In its February traffic data report issued Thursday, Nielsen//NetRatings said Yahoo! Search attracted more than 35 million vi...

The seeds of the trends now taking hold in e-commerce were planted in the industry's early days, long before the shakeout began, according to experts. But only now, as the dust settles, are those trends starting to point the way clearly toward the future of e-commerce. "What we have is the continuation of a lot of trends that began a while back," ...

The latest shot in the privacy regulation war has been fired, and it puts a whole new twist on the debate. Turns out that companies are collecting less data about shoppers than they used to, at least according to one group that opposes new privacy laws The idea of self-regulation has been the barrier that has successfully kept regulators at bay. An...

Just days after acknowledging that its existing Web hosting capabilities leave it vulnerable to outages, auction giant eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) has tapped a division of tech titan Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) to provide additional hosting services. Ebay spokesperson Kevin Pursglove told the E-Commerce Times that the Intel Online Services deal is part of a larg...

As e-commerce and security companies continue to search for the answer to consumers' privacy concerns, Visa has announced that the Web arm of retail giant Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) has signed up to use Visa's password-protection program. Walmart.com, which had a rocky Internet debut with several relaunches before finally gaining a foothold in late 2001...

E*Trade (NYSE: ET) on Monday announced it will partner with Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) to provide customers with streaming financial data and access to trading through Yahoo's instant messaging technology. E*Trade also noted that it will combine its launch of Yahoo! Messenger service with expanded access to trading tools for consumers.

Dot-com job cuts more than doubled in March compared with February, according to a new report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas. A total of 1,549 job cuts were announced in March, up 231 percent from the 670 tallied in February. Still, the damage was far less severe than a year ago, when more than 9,500 cuts were made in March.

In its youth, as it struggled for acceptance, e-commerce could count on the spirited support of a handful of influential stock analysts who were credited with -- and then blamed for -- creating the tech-stock bubble. One by one, however, those cheerleaders have put away their pom-poms. Now, as e-commerce matures and tries to prove it is an industr...

Savvy television viewers don't need calendars. If a doctor on ER is on death's door, if the last single Friends hook up, if Victoria's Secret models are jumping out of airplanes, it's probably sweeps month Sweeps month, of course, sets advertising rates for the year. So networks and affiliates go all out to air blockbuster shows, introduce cliffhan...

Economic realities forced e-commerce and the Internet to turn away from voracious growth and focus on long-term viability in 2001, creatinga slew of new challenges, according to a report released by Nielsen//NetRatings (Nasdaq: NTRT) "The Internet is just like any other product that goes from entry to evolution in its product cycle," T.S. Kelly, di...

News flash: E-commerce grew fast ... in the year 2000 This pithy bit of earth-shattering news came courtesy of the U.S. government. To be more precise, it came from the U.S. Census Bureau , which is under the auspices of the Economics and Statistics Administration, which in turn is a division of the Department of Commerce....