Articles by Keith Regan

Further fueling the bitter conflict between record labels and such file-swapping operations as Napster, Jupiter Communications, Inc. has released a report showing that people who use the file-sharing networks spend more money on music Users of Napster are 45 percent more likely to have increased their music spending than non-users, Jupiter found in...

No one will admit to liking spam -- the canned pseudo-meat or the unsolicited e-mail that bears its name. But despite the current efforts of governments in North America and Europe to get it back into the can, spam is destined to be, and should be, a fact of Internet life -- just like junk mail is in the real world Spam legislation is quickly movin...

In an attempt to extend its dominance of the video rental market to cyberspace, Blockbuster, Inc. has inked a deal with utility firm Enron to offer videos for rent over the Internet Blockbuster, which is a subsidiary of entertainment company Viacom, Inc., said the service could be up and running in test markets by the end of this year. An expansion...

With an eye toward becoming one of the first online travel services to show a profit, Travelocity.com (Nasdaq: TVLY) reported a stronger-than-expected second quarter Wednesday and declared that it expects to turn a profit by the end of 2001 The Fort Worth, Texas-based company said it lost $4.2 million (US$) or 26 cents per share during the second q...

Even the checkout line tabloids would have trouble making this news sound surprising: A company that pays people to surf the Web is laying off workers. On the surface, it seems that if anything is shocking about this revelation, it's that it did not come sooner The company, AllAdvantage.com, is sticking by its guns, saying that the 10 percent staff...

In an apparent effort to keep pace with other portals that offer e-commerce storefronts to small businesses, NBC Internet (Nasdaq: NBCI) said Tuesday it will partner with Bigstep.com to assist companies in building Web sites, developing catalogs and accepting credit cards The move, designed to help small businesses "get into the e-business fast lan...

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) on Sunday formally voted to expand the number of top level domains (TLDs) on the Internet and invite potential registrars to submit plans for additional Web suffixes that could be in operation by early next year The resolution -- which was passed unanimously by ICANN's 19-member board ...

A friend of mine -- who is very good at finding the dark side of every bright picture -- firmly believes that in the midst of the United States' longest run of peacetime prosperity, we are faced with the sad truth that customer service is dead In their haste to meet rapidly increasing customer demand, companies are producing lower quality stuff. An...

Lloyd's of London has demonstrated a knack for attracting attention to itself ever since it got its start insuring ships carrying tea back to England. By underwriting the creative hands of artists, the delicate fingers of piano players, Betty Grable's gams or Jennifer Lopez' derriere -- often for astonishing amounts of money -- Lloyd's has become a household name...

A worldwide coalition of big-name retailers led by Target and Best Buy has tapped the alliance of IBM, i2 and Ariba to run the WorldWide Retail Exchange (WWRE), a business-to-business (B2B) Web site that is slated for launch later this year The coalition says it expects the online exchange to facilitate and simplify trading between retailers and ov...

E-commerce consultants are loudly proclaiming the importance of customer service, while customers themselves are demonstrating -- via their wallets -- that they simply will not accept bad service. And yet, e-tailer reaction has been slow A new study that places an updated monetary figure on the losses caused by poor customer service reveals that th...

Online coupon distributor Coolsavings, Inc. (Nasdaq: CSAV) cleared two patent infringement lawsuits off its plate Monday when it reached a settlement with rival Planet U The settlement resolved both a 1998 lawsuit filed by the Chicago, Illinois-based Coolsavings and a counterclaim filed by Planet U earlier this year. Although details were not discl...

After a crazy couple of months -- during which a bevy of big name dot-coms had their survivor torches extinguished for good -- things seemed to have quieted down a bit. Maybe the long days of summer invited languishing, and seaside vacations temporarily soothed investor jitters However, the calm was suddenly vanquished when analyst Ravi Suria of Le...

The battle between Napster and the recording industry is still a David versus Goliath proposition. But with a steady diet of venture capital flowing into Napster and its cousins, David is laying on some serious muscle -- and getting harder to cheer for every day This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that venture capital (VC) firms are beginni...

Joining Microsoft and IBM who have made similar moves, America Online is betting that speech-recognition will soon become a key component of e-commerce transactions According to reports, AOL has invested $5 million (US$) to buy a one percent share in the privately held SpeechWorks International, an innovative Boston, Massachusetts-based company tha...

For sale: Customer list of failed retail dot-com. Includes thousands of one-time customers from Christmas of 1999. Value to a rival dot-com striving for all-important market share: Considerable. Real cost in terms of lost faith among consumers in the privacy and security of e-commerce: Immeasurable. Price: Negotiable ...

The purchase of RocketCash by free ISP NetZero last week is the latest evidence that e-commerce players are keen on capturing today's teenage Internet users and locking them up as tomorrow's customers And why not? Teens are free of the technology phobia that has kept others away from e-commerce. For them, life before the World Wide Web is not even ...

This year alone, U.S. firms will pay $20 billion (US$) to consultants for design and construction of e-commerce Web sites, even though -- according to Forrester Research -- none of the big-name e-commerce integrators can actually deliver the type of across-the-board expertise needed to get an e-tailer up and running These findings may be surprising...

Not long ago, U.S. Vice President Al Gore took some serious ribbing for suggesting he played a major role in developing the World Wide Web. Now some of the same type of ridicule should be aimed at British Telecom for its pursuit of hyperlink patent royalties British Telecommunications plc (BT) has rung up the folks at America Online, Microsoft, Ear...

Recently, when the U.S. Congress passed a bill giving digital signatures the same legal weight as old-fashioned pen-and-ink signatures, the concept of a paperless world once again reared its intriguing head After all, the likes of Palm and Handspring are mustering every bit of energy possible to relieve the average person of their paper organizer, ...