Articles by Keith Regan

In the age of streaming stock quotes, after-hours trading and 24-hour financial news coverage, many Wall Street analysts have become stars. From Merrill Lynch's Henry Blodget to Anthony Noto of Goldman Sachs, stock analysts have become household names and financial power brokers.

Facing little prospect of turning a profit with a standalone Web business anytime soon, NBC said Monday it would buy out and absorb NBCi (Nasdaq: NBCI) after less than two years of independent operations for the portal. The US$138 million deal reflects the woes of the overall Internet portal industry, which has been hit hardest by the slumping mar...

The leaders of the Internet world are rushing into the abyss, coming up with new ways to charge users for their once-free services every day. The latest entrant in the pay-to-play derby is Yahoo!, which will offer "premium" financial information for a monthly fee It's a tempting strategy to follow. Who can pass up multiple revenue streams, however ...

A month after announcing that its customers' credit card information was exposed to hack attacks, Bibliofind.com said Thursday that it will move its operations to the site of its parent company, Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN). Bibliofind informed customers and merchants this week that it will take up residence in Amazon's Marketplace and zShops areas b...

Amid a slew of new partnerships and product announcements in the digital music field, Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) said Thursday it has formed an alliance with Duet, a subscription-based music service being developed by two of the world's largest record labels. Yahoo said it will initially market Duet as a streaming-music channel and later offer digital ...

Just over a year ago, investors were pushing each other out of the way to place "buy" orders for soaring tech stocks. Today, the crowds are forming instead at lawyers' offices From Amazon.com to Priceline, Oracle to PlanetRx.com, a host of once high-flying technology companies has been hit by lawsuits from angry investors....

Online travel sites are facing fast-rising competition from the airlines themselves and must move quickly to guard their turf, according to a report released Wednesday by Jupiter Media Metrix. Jupiter said that in recent months, airline sites have gained more visitors and captured a larger portion of the advertising being spent on travel sites. Tr...

I'm all for grass-roots efforts to boost awareness of the greatness of the Web, but "Back the Net Day"? Why not just call it "Back Away from the Net Day"? Nothing is more repulsive than desperation, and this effort makes it sound as if the Internet is sticking its hand up one last time before going under for good.

A single act of "economic mass victimization" is likely to hit a broad spectrum of e-commerce customers in the next two years, according to a report released Friday by Gartner Stamford, Connecticut-based Gartner said that the theft will occur in small amounts over a widespread base and go undetected by law enforcement, due to a lack of adequate pre...

Somehow, eBay is trying to put a fairness spin on news that it is going to offer sellers the option of buying banner ads on the site. But it hard to imagine how this plan could do anything other than tilt the playing field in favor of professional, high-volume sellers and away from the hobbyists who have been eBay's bread-and-butter from Day One.

PlanetRx.com said Thursday that its board of directors approved a plan to liquidate all of thee-tailer's assets, in an attempt to regain some cash for its shareholders Holders of PlanetRx stock will vote on the plan -- which marks the abandonment of previous intentions to enter the US$14 billion a year specialty drugmarket -- at a company meeting s...

Here's a twist: shareholders complaining that a dot-com is being over-valued. That's right. Over-valued. In 2001. After the Nasdaq debacle and the shakeout and all the rest. The complaints being lodged at office supplies retailer Staples over its dot-com division have already spawned lawsuits and seem to be leading to a nasty battle erupting at th...

Looking to give their small business e-commerce services a boost, America Online (NYSE: AOL) and PurchasePro (Nasdaq: PPRO) unveiled 10 new services Wednesday through a host of strategic partners. The deals, aimed at beefing up the offerings that AOL extends to small and medium businesses through its Netscape Netbusiness division, include alliance...

Call it the spillover effect. That's what happens when lame customer service online starts to impact how shoppers feel about a retailer's brick-and-mortar stores. Spillover effect might be the best reason ever for retailers to do a better job answering questions and resolving complaints online.

Ever-changing e-tailer Kozmo said Monday it will abandon a US$150 million plan to install video drop-off boxes in hundreds of Starbucks (Nasdaq: SBUX) coffee shops across the United States. Kozmo spokesperson Stephanie Cohen Glass told the E-Commerce Times that the five-year agreement, announced in February 2000, had been based on Kozmo's aggressi...

One week after cutting 40 percent of its workforce, Homes.com filed for bankruptcy protection Friday The bankruptcy filing came almost a year to the day after Homes.com garnered US$38.5 million in funding from some of the best-known venture capitalists in Silicon Valley.

When it comes to the Web, groceries are one thing, and not a verypromising one at that. But what about prepared foods? It's possible that your corner pizza store could be quietly writing an e-commerce success story In fact, hundreds of pizza shops are using the Web effectively. Some are going it alone, but many are using a Chicago, Illinois-based f...

Already reeling from the plummet in online advertising revenue, the major Internet portals are busy answering another question posed by their Web merchant partners: Are portals still able to turn Web surfers into Web shoppers? A study released this month by Consumer Reports Online found that portals are no longer efficiently transforming Internet ...

Financier Carl Icahn said Thursday he is ready to put up US$400 million to help his discount travel Web site Lowestfare.com buy or build its own airline "The business and last minute leisure traveler has been forced by the major airlines to pay inordinately high prices," said Icahn, chairman of Lowestfare. "There has never been a greater opportunit...

Internet retailers using strategic pricing for the Web are more likely to attain long-term success, according to a study released Wednesday by McKinsey & Company. "Improved pricing represents a large and as-yet untapped opportunity for pure plays and for traditional offline companies that have ventured onto the Internet," said McKinsey analyst Wal...