Articles by Keith Regan

The anticipated online holiday shopping surge has yet to begin, according to a study released Monday by Nielsen//NetRatings (Nasdaq: NTRT), with top sites showing little or no growth in traffic during the first week in November The report, "Holiday E-Commerce Index," shows that key e-tail sites saw modest growth in traffic from the last week in Oct...

If you think it's a bad time to be a stuck-in-the-mud dot-com, imagine holding the bag for about 70 of them That's the situation that high-tech incubators Internet Capital Group (ICG) and CMGI find themselves in right now. But they best not look to me for pity.

Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) said Thursday it had reached an agreement to buy Kimo, the top Chinese-language portal in Taiwan, for approximately $146 million (US$) in stock Yahoo! said it will combine Kimo with two year-old Yahoo! Taiwan to target Asia's fourth-largest Internet market and create a base for future expansion into mainland China.

eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) cut 15 percent of the workforce at its high-end Butterfields auction house on Wednesday The San Jose, California auction giant said the move is aimed at bringing the real-world auction house, which specializes in rare items such as celebrity memorabilia and historic firearms, closer to profitability.

Put furniture on the list. The list, that is, of items that people absolutely, positively and unequivocally do not want to buy online. That is the message, plain and simple, behind the collapse of Furniture.com The list has been fuzzy so far. A few items have been penciled in or listed with question marks alongside. Groceries? Maybe. Gasoline. Well...

If you're waiting to exhale until the U.S. government swoops in and saves the populace from the troubling Digital Divide problem, you'd better reconsider After all, the right answers rarely come from government, and certainly won't in this case. Government subsidies, tax breaks and block grants for poorer consumers are not the way to cure the probl...

America Online (NYSE: AOL) said Thursday it has reached an agreement with General Motors (GM) and Daimler-Chrysler to provide discounted Internet and interactive TV service to the automakers' 300,000 employees The agreement gives AOL access to thousands of new customers for both its main online service and its fledgling AOLTV offerings. It also str...

Jack Welch has plenty of reasons to be confident. After all, he built General Electric into one of the world's largest companies, turning an appliance-maker into a defense giant and broadcasting powerhouse in the process. And the soon-to-retire Welch has written an impressive swan song for himself: a merger with Honeywell worth $45 billion (US$) So...

Listen.com said Wednesday it will buy the assets of bankrupt Scour, Inc., further accelerating the warming of relations between the major record labels and the file-sharing community San Francisco, California-based Listen.com, which distributes digital music and runs an Internet radio service, has the financial backing of all five major record labe...

Hoping to crack the lucrative Asian e-commerce market, Amazon.com launched a Japanese-language site Wednesday focused on its core business of selling books The Seattle, Washington-based e-tail giant said Japan already represents Amazon's largest export market, with nearly 200,000 Japanese customers ordering $34 million (US$) in products each year f...

Why they held it back so long is a mystery, but finally, Barnesandnoble.com and Barnes & Noble, Inc. have brought out the secret artillery they've had since this whole Internet thing began The online bookseller and its offline affiliate have decided to mesh their operations completely, becoming a formidable force in what has arguably become the big...

Barnesandnoble.com (Nasdaq: BNBN) met analysts' expectations for earnings on Monday and said recent investments have positioned the online bookseller for a record-breaking holiday season The company said sales grew 58 percent over the year-earlier period to $74.1 million (US$) from $47 million in 1999. Still, B&N.com lost $36.9 million, or 25 cents...

E-commerce means different things to different people, whether it's a household name like Amazon or an obscure business-to-business hub where chemicals are sold But for everyone, e-commerce should represent a sector with the potential to generate long-term economic growth. The rapid pace of technological change all but ensures that e-commerce in it...

AltaVista won its bid to have an international cybersquatter evicted from 43 domain names Monday after a United Nations panel ruled in favor of the embattled Web portal The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), based in Geneva, Switzerland, found in favor of AltaVista two months after issuing a similar ruling on behalf of Yahoo!, which f...

You've heard it a million times. In fact, it might be the word that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer say most often in public. The word, of course, is "innovation." Innovation is what gave Microsoft its absolute dominance in the operating system market, the company has said over and over in defending their company against antitrust claims. Innovation h...

Six months after being rescued from the brink of bankruptcy, online grocer Peapod, Inc. (Nasdaq: PPOD) continues to see increasing financial losses, reporting Wednesday that it fell well short of earnings estimates for the third quarter Chicago-based Peapod said it lost $9.8 million (US$), or 55 cents per share, missing Wall Street estimates for th...

Until recently, it was rare to see dot-com chief executive officers lose their jobs or even leave voluntarily. But these are different times -- much different -- and suddenly the heads of Internet chiefs are rolling with regularity Sometimes, the executives make it seem as if they are nobly falling on the same sword they used to lop off a percentag...

It's not hard to understand why the folks at eBay think they've got the makings of a television show on their hands, as was announced last week. Reality is in, after all, as the "Survivor" craze attests to. People have a fascination about other people, how they act under the glare of the cameras And then there's the "Antiques Roadshow" phenomenon, ...

Auction giant eBay continues to turn out solid growth and profit numbers, announcing third quarter earnings Thursday showing revenues nearly twice what they were a year ago eBay earned $19.1 million (US$) or 7 cents per share for the three months ending September 30th. A total of $1.4 billion in goods was sold on the site during the quarter, and re...

As if the e-commerce sector weren't worried enough about the prospect of e-commerce taxes, along came Active Research on Wednesday to say that most Americans would cut back online spending if they had to pay taxes The news quickly wiped away any optimism that sprung up after Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-Connecticut), the Democratic candidate for vic...