Articles by Keith Regan

America Online (Nasdaq: AOL) said Wednesday it will launch a free portal aimed at helping millions of small businesses get online and use the Web for advertising, selling and gathering information Offered through AOL subsidiary Netscape, Netbusiness will be made available across a host of AOL-owned sites, including Netscape's Netcenter, AOL's WorkP...

Prediction: It won't be long before marketing consultants start telling startups eager to get into the public eye, "Do something really reckless, really stupid. Stupid enough to get yourselves sued." It'll be called "the Napster Strategy," and pretty soon, accounting software will be available to weigh its costs and benefits. "Sure, a slight miscal...

Underscoring the importance of services in the high-tech world, Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HWP) says it is in talks with PricewaterhouseCoopers to acquire that firm's professional consulting practice Although talks are not yet finalized, HP said in a statement that the purchase price would likely be in the $17 to $18 billion (US$) range and involve a c...

Popular culture is a peculiar thing. It's supposed to be a reflection of the current reality -- especially the latest fads and trends -- and yet it sometimes lags far behind. Logistics play a role -- it takes a year to publish a book, longer to make a movie. But we've all seen the ads for TV mini-series based on real-life scandals and tragedies that seem ready to air before the ink is dry on the newspaper reports...

In the latest example of the impact that embattled song-swapping forums such as Napster and MP3.com have had on the music industry, Warner Music Group announced Monday it will release 100 recordings in downloadable format before Christmas Warner, the fifth largest recording company in the U.S., is also the last of the major labels to unveil plans t...

Is 25 "old"? It depends. For cars, 25 years brings classic status. For all but the most carefree people, 25 means true adulthood. And for a high-technology super company like Microsoft? Well, surviving and thriving to age 25 is cause for celebration. Take a deep bow, Gates and company. You've earned it Microsoft passes the quarter-century mark unde...

CMGI Inc. (Nasdaq: CMGI), one of the first and largest incubators of e-commerce and Internet companies, said Thursday it will reorganize its assets in a bid to encourage each of its holdings to pursue profitability Battered by the high-technology stock sell-off that began in earnest in the spring, CMGI has seen its market capitalization cut dramati...

Peapod, Inc. (Nasdaq: PPOD) has announced that it will acquire fellow online grocer Streamline.com's Chicago and Washington, D.C. assets and operations, ending weeks of speculation about the fate of the struggling company Streamline (Nasdaq: SLNE) said just last month that an infusion of cash or strategic partnership would be necessary to keep it f...

With a decision due as soon as Wednesday in the copyright infringement case pitting Universal Music Group (UMG) against MP3.com (Nasdaq: MPPP), the record label is asking the judge hearing the case to "sting" the file-sharing company with a stiff monetary penalty On Tuesday, lawyers for Universal asked U.S. District Court Judge Jed S. Rakoff to awa...

It's a slightly chilling e-mail to receive. First, it comes from the legal department of Amazon.com, making it the Internet equivalent of a crisp envelope bearing a law firm's lengthy name. Second, it spells out a change in Amazon's privacy policy that, at first glance, appears to be bad news for consumers and company alike Surely, customers will r...

I'll be brief. Time is precious, after all, which is why everything moves so fast in the digital age. Why we moved from snail mail to e-mail to instant messaging. Instant. The word itself conveys an adrenalized fervor. But maybe it's time to give an old aphorism new meaning: speed kills We all know what can happen when the e-commerce world starts s...

Scour, Inc. has laid off all but a fraction of its workforce, saying pending lawsuits have scared away investors lined up to fund the file-sharing network In all, 52 of Scour's 70 employees have been laid off. Scour, which enables Internet users to search for and share music and video files, announced the layoffs in a statement released just before...

Despite growing consumer fears about online privacy, Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) will notify its 23 million customers that it has revised its policy to reflect the fact that customer information may be sold as an asset In a statement, CEO Jeff Bezos said the revision of the policy came about in part because Amazon is now the parent of many smaller co...

For a long time, we were told it was coming. Soon we would be gliding across the Internet at warp speed. We'd be downloading crisp video on demand, seamlessly streaming television and radio broadcasts. High-quality teleconferencing would make traveling to business meetings a thing of the past A broadband Internet would do that and so much more, the...

Ask a thousand people on the street to tell you the first person they think of when they hear the name "Madonna," and you're likely to get a pretty overwhelming response in favor of the bump-and-grind pop singer. At least that's the claim of her publicist But does that give Madonna the Singer the right to own the domain name "Madonna.com"? Not by a...

A dream team of high-tech heavyweights -- led by IBM, Hewlett-Packard, NEC and Intel -- is joining forces to find new ways for the Linux operating system to be used in high-powered corporate networks and on the Internet The companies announced the formation of the Open Source Development Lab Wednesday, and said it will be open for business before t...

Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC) suffered a setback in its bid to produce ever-speedier microprocessors Monday when it announced it would halt production of its fastest version to date of the Pentium III chip Intel confirmed that its 1.13 gigahertz (GHz) Pentium III chip, which was shipped July 31st, has a flaw that causes some applications to fail under...

It wasn't so long ago that e-mail belonged to a relatively small in-group who knew it as a fun, fast and cheap way to communicate. The technology made it possible to chat with co-workers while looking busy, to talk to people outside work without tying up the phones, and to communicate across time zones without waking anyone All that was possible be...

With American television unable to offset a massive time-zone gap, the upcoming Summer Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia is likely to draw more Internet users than any other event in the Web's history, according to lead technology sponsor IBM Big Blue, which initially said it would get more than 1 billion hits, now estimates that its site will rec...

In an ironic twist in the online privacy debate, TRUSTe, an organization that monitors Internet privacy issues, was caught violating its own privacy policy Thursday through the use of a third-party software program TRUSTe, a coalition of such online firms as America Online, Excite@Home and Microsoft, said it took steps to remove the offending progr...