Articles by Keith Regan

Travelocity.com (Nasdaq: TVLY) said Wednesday that it brought in record revenue for the fourth quarter of 2000 and predicted that it would turn profitable by summer. The online travel site said that it brought in US$65.5 million in revenue during the quarter, more than double the same period a year earlier. Travelocity also cut its operating loss ...

Does anyone really still believe that we are one revolutionary invention away from nirvana? You would think so, given the hype that briefly accompanied the mysterious product known as "Ginger." It just doesn't work that way. The two inventions Ginger was set to rival -- the personal computer and the World Wide Web -- didn't do their world-changing ...

Aiming to broaden its array of offerings and tap new sources of revenue, Internet portal Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) on Tuesday launched a marketplace service targeting the business-to-business (B2B) market. Yahoo! Industry Marketplaces launched with three specific industry areas: electronics, software and hardware. Additional subject areas will be roll...

First, there was the thrill of living on the edge. Long before the e-commerce shakeout began, analysts warned of its arrival. And when the first collapses finally came, they carried with them all the excitement of a building demolition. For a while, each and every subsequent wipeout had our undivided attention. It was like one of those police-chas...

Napster unveiled its latest upgrade Thursday, complete with a link to CDNow -- the first commercial use for the controversial file-swapping service to date and the most visible sign of its new relationship with Bertelsmann AG. The appearance of a link to CDNow on the Napster page comes 10 weeks after Napster announced a strategic alliance with Ber...

Not so fast! What was supposed to be a slam dunk became a waiting game when the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) hesitated in approving the US$100 billion merger of America Online (AOL) and Time Warner Consent was expected to be a mere formality, but word has it that at least one commissioner is worried that AOL dominates the instant me...

Heidi Miller, hailed as a potential savior for Priceline.com (Nasdaq: PCLN) when the e-tailer hired her last year as chief financial officer, said Wednesday she has taken a job in the insurance industry. Miller -- whom Fortune magazine in 1999 called the second most powerful female executive in the U.S., behind Hewlett-Packard's Carly Fiorina -- b...

Shoppers spent US$878 million online in the week after Christmas, helping to push total sales during the holiday season to $10.7 billion, according to a study released Tuesday by Goldman Sachs and PC Data Online Sales for the last week in December increased 60 percent over the $542 million spent during the same period in 1999. The burst of spending...

Egghead.com now says that the credit card numbers that were in its system when it was hacked over the holidays were not stolen. The bad news is that it took Egghead more than two weeks to assure its customers of this fact. On a scale of 1 to 10, this customer service disaster has to rate at least a 9.

Internet-based home delivery service Kozmo.com joined the long list of e-commerce companies to announce layoffs Monday, announcing that it willcut 120 workers and cease services in two U.S. cities Kozmo immediately stopped its operations in San Diego, California and Houston, Texas.

More than 90 percent of online shoppers were satisfied with their holiday shopping experiences and more than two-thirds plan to buy online again soon, according to a report released Monday by the NPD Group. The NPD e-Visory shows that 57 percent of shoppers were "very" or "extremely" satisfied with their buying experiences during November and Dece...

eBay users are a vocal, attentive lot. If Meg Whitman sneezes, they rush to the message boards to issue a "Bless You" en masse. But mostly, they use their electronic soapboxes to vent. Recently, those message boards overflowed with vitriol regarding eBay's newly reinforced policies restricting contact between eBay auction sellers and buyers in non...

Mercata.com, the buy-by-group e-tail site that enjoyed the early backing of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, said Thursday it will cease operations. The announcement came one day after Bellevue, Washington-based Mercata withdrew a US$100 million initial public offering (IPO), citing market conditions.

Is there any truth to the rumor that DotComGuy changed his name again -- to ObviousGuy? The fact is that when he emerged from his self-imposed cyber-captivity, the world reacted with deafening silence, a big old yawn.

Hopefully, the major players in e-commerce have already made their most important resolutions -- No. 1 being to survive another year -- but I'd like to request one final promise No whining in 2001.

Last year, 210 Internet firms -- more than half of them e-commerce companies -- ceased operations, according to a report released Wednesday by merger and acquisitions tracking firm Webmergers.com. Webmergers said that 109 e-commerce firms folded their tents in 2000, along with more than 60 content sites. The rest of the failures were in the infras...

America Online said Tuesday that its members spent more than US$4.6 billion online during the holiday season and $20 billion for all of 2000. The latter figure is more than twice what was spent the year before "It's clearer than ever that online shopping is growing by leaps and bounds," said AOL president Bob Pittman. "We've posted another banner h...

Wall Street investment firm C.E. Unterberg Towbin decided last week to drop coverage of e-commerce stocks, claiming that the space wasn't making anybody any money. Some reports portrayed the move as a fitting way to end a year of very public struggles for the hearts and dollars of investors, which is a fittingly nonsensical way to look at the matt...

The early numbers themselves are reason to applaud, take a bow and celebrate: E-tail spending apparently doubled over last year's level. A 100 percent increase in anything is impressive, but what makes the numbers even more startling are the circumstances under which that increase happened. Because e-tailers were restrained during e-holiday 2000 i...

E-commerce packed a lot of history into the year 2000 -- not all of it good, by any means. Indeed, future generations may consider the long, steady decline of stock values and the concurrent shakeout as the story of the year. As we head into 2001, several year 2000 issues remain unresolved. Most of all, e-commerce companies will continue to be wat...