Articles by Keith Regan

Once-dominant modem maker U.S. Robotics has agreed to be acquired by a private equity firm that indicated it would make its deep pockets available for expansion and other purchases to help the company find growth again as Internet access technologies continue to evolve Platinum Equity did not disclose the price it would pay for the privately held U...

Amazon.com has agreed to pay US$40 million to settle a year-old patent infringement lawsuit just days before the case was set to go to trial Amazon will make the one-time payment to Soverain Software of Chicago. In exchange, Soverain agreed to drop all claims that Amazon violated five of its "core e-commerce technology" patents covering things such...

Yahoo has said it will invest US$1 billion in China-based e-commerce company Alibaba.com, targeting a market exploding with growth and ripe with new opportunities The terms of the deal, which Yahoo billed as a long-term strategic partnership, call for Alibaba to take over Yahoo China and for Yahoo to invest another $1 billion in cash. In exchange, ...

Following the footsteps of rivals and possibly laying the groundwork for new marketing channels, Google has added RSS and Atom content feeds to its news search product -- which has been in beta form for the better part of two years Google added RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and Atom feed links to the left side of the pages that appear when a user...

As a provider of office furniture to enterprises of all sizes, Haworth, a company with US$1.4 billion in sales to businesses around the world, knew it could benefit by improving its use of e-commerce technology in order to gain efficiency through automation After all, many of Haworth's customers, for whom the Holland, Mich.-based company designs, b...

E*Trade Financial today announced its second acquisition in as many days, scooping up an investment advisory firm in a deal that augments its much larger, US$700 million buy of Harrisdirect E*Trade did not disclose the purchase price it will pay for Boston-area-based Kobren Insight Management, a registered investment advisor that handles some $1 bi...

Two advertisers have filed a lawsuit against Google, saying the search giant did not live up to its promise to cap the amount of charges advertisers could incur in any given day The suit was filed in the Superior Court of California in Santa Clara County and seeks class action status, which would enable all other AdWords customers -- potentially hu...

Seeking to keep pace with rivals in a rapidly consolidating industry, E*Trade Financial will buy Harrisdirect for US$700 million in cash E*Trade said the purchase of Harrisdirect, an online-only brokerage owned by the BMO Financial Group -- parent company of the Bank of Montreal -- would be "highly accretive" to its earnings going forward, worth as...

Shares of Cisco Systems and Nokia were both trading higher today after reports that Cisco was weighing a move to take over all or part of the mobile equipment maker in a bid to boost its ability to provide both fixed wire-line and wireless services to its stable of enterprise customers Neither company would comment on the reports, which originated ...

The months of rumor and speculation about Amazon.com joining the digital music download business appear to be reaching a fever pitch and observers say it's only a matter of time before Amazon's music service debuts and makes a run at market leader Apple Amazon could not be reached for comment on the newest reports that it has such a service in the ...

In a move that might be a timely boost to its ability to compete head-on with Yahoo and MSN and others as a one-stop portal, America Online has said it bought online data storage and backup firm Xdrive for an undisclosed sum AOL said that with privately held Xdrive on board, it would be able to boost its ability to offer free and paid storage to us...

Bidding to capture a piece of a potentially lucrative vertical area of search, Yahoo has launched a test of an audio search engine that gives users the ability to comb through some 50 million audio files, from audio blogs and other spoken word programs to downloadable songs and albums The Yahoo Audio Search function draws from Yahoo's own network o...

Yahoo has launched a self-service ad-placement network that is designed to offer small publishers, including bloggers, access to revenue from contextually relevant advertising, a service already offered by rival Google Yahoo said the beta version of the expanded Yahoo Publisher Network is aimed at small- and medium-sized Web sites and is currently ...

Casinos in Nevada might become the first to explore a new area of the Internet gambling frontier, enabling users to gamble on mobile devices while they're in and around casinos A recently passed law makes Nevada the first state in the U.S. to allow the use of hand-held devices for gambling at casinos and resorts. Gov. Kenny Guinn has signed the leg...

Dogpile.com, the most heavily visited meta-search engine on the Web, has said it would add Microsoft's relatively new MSN Search tool to the array of engines it uses and also said that contrary to popular belief, different search engines provide vastly different results The addition of MSN Search means ...

Seeking to lay claim to a technology that could help create a syndication network for advertising that would be distributed the way blogs and other newsfeeds are now, Google has applied for a patent for its RSS advertising feed RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a widely used technology that enables content to be fed automatically to various Web...

Ask Jeeves launched a new paid listings program today, putting an automated, self-service auction system in place that mimics what search leaders Yahoo and Google offer to advertisers The company said the Ask Jeeves Sponsored Listings system would make it easier for advertisers to buy, manage and optimize their paid search listings campaigns. Analy...

Eying expanding opportunities in the corporate mobile data realm, Sybase said today it had agreed to buy a software company that makes middleware for enterprises Sybase said it would pay about US$71.3 million in cash to acquire Extended Systems, an 11-year-old company whose main product, known as OneBridge, helps enterprise applications work with m...

Two reports on the state of the wireless industry indicate strong growth is continuing apace, with handset shipments riding a wave of sales in countries with emerging economies and U.S. mobile carrier subscription rates and mobile data usage continuing to expand The reports from Strategy Analytics highlight the continued success of some wireless ha...

In a snapshot of how competitive the battle has become to capture users' digital photography endeavors -- and the dollars that could follow -- Shutterfly has said it would begin offering its members free Web pages where they can store and share their images Shutterfly Collections, as the service is known, enables users to create their own Web addre...