Articles by Keith Regan

Investors are lining up to buy Google shares already. There's only one problem: The company hasn't had an IPO yet and, for that matter, hasn't said it's even close to going public. That kind of restlessness is refreshingly retro, but it's also dangerously reminiscent. The same kind of enthusiasm, which some might even call exuberance (and still ot...

A federal jury in Norfolk, Virginia, has found that eBay and its subsidiary Half.com willfully violated patented technology and has ordered the auction giant to pay US$35 million in damages. The jury found in favor of MercExchange LLC, which claimed eBay had infringed on patents that firm held for technology enabling some of eBays fixed price and ...

AOL Time Warner executives may be mulling the possibility of spinning off the company's America Online unit, reviving a discussion that had been considered dead. According to published reports, former chairman Steve Case, who led America Online from its founding to its landmark takeover of Time Warner in 2000, has expressed interest in examining the option.

Amazon.com has announced it will use Microsoft's Windows Media 9 Series products to boost its ability to stream music samples to customers from its family of e-tail sites, including its own site, CDnow.com, VirginMega.com and Borders.com Amazon vice president Curtis Kopf said the upgrade is aimed at ensuring customers have "the best possible online...

Imagine this: You're driving along, say, five miles an hour above the posted speed, when you see flashing blue lights in your rearview mirror. You stop, and as you hand your license and registration to the police officer, you notice a bank robbery occurring across the street. You dutifully try to call the crime to the attention of the officer, onl...

Hewlett-Packard turned in an impressive second quarter, beating targets for revenue and profits, but said it will continue aggressively cutting costs in the wake of its merger with Compaq by laying off another 3,500 workers by the end of this year. HP said revenue totaled US$18 billion in the quarter ended April 30th, up from $17.9 billion in the ...

In an effort to boost corporate IT spending by tapping a previously underserved segment of the market, IBM has rolled out an e-mail offering geared toward so-called deskless workers Big Blue's product, which was developed by the company's Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Lotus unit and can cost as little as US$1 per user per month, hit the market exa...

In a potential blow to the growth and profit strategies of some key Internet companies, a new study says broadband adoption soared in the United States last year but will be unable to sustain rapid growth going forward The Pew Internet & American Life Project said the number of U.S. residents with high-speed at-home connections grew 50 percent in t...

Computer maker Dell continued its strong recent performance, recording a 31 percent increase in profitability powered by sales growth in certain product lines and in overseas markets. Dell said revenue rose 18 percent for the three months ending April in its first quarter to US$9.5 billion, clearing the way for income growth of 31 percent to $598 ...

It has now been more than a year since Hewlett-Packard and Compaq merged. It's been nearly two years since the idea of the deal was made public. Neither time frame is particularly long in the grand scheme of things, but for impatient observers, it's a lifetime. People want to know right now whether the merger was worth it. Was Carly Fiorina right?...

After a short run as a buzz phrase during the dot-com surge, business-to-business (B2B) exchanges have fallen below most people's radar screens. In recent years, in fact, B2B sites and online trading hubs have most often found themselves in the headlines for the wrong reasons, such as when Enron's energy-trading site became the focus of attention.

Governments and private enterprises, particularly outside the United States, are stepping up efforts to find alternatives to computer networks that rely on Microsoft products, according to a report from Gartner The research firm said several issues, ranging from changing licensing agreements to a series of high-profile security problems with Micros...

Gartner has confirmed what many high-tech firms already believed, releasing a report that labels 2002 the "most difficult year" on record for the worldwide information technology services industry. The market for IT services actually shrunk compared with 2001, falling 0.6 percent to US$536 billion, Gartner said. It marked the first year the IT ind...

Rapidly expanding search engine Google has launched a blitz of overseas initiatives, establishing local news search services in Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia Google co-founder Larry Page said the country-specific news sites willintegrate a "global perspective" with increased coverage of local news, enabling Web surfers to "track topics o...

Just a few years ago, getting an e-business off the ground was as easy as drawing up a business plan and finding the venture capital to fund it. Those days, to put it mildly, are over. But this does not mean businesses that rely on the Web are no longer sprouting. Some are funded with personal savings, cash infusions from colleges or loans from a ...

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) plans to review whether Microsoft violated a consent agreement with the agency over the privacy of its Passport online password system, following the revelation of a flaw that could have compromised millions of consumers' private data. Microsoft on Thursday said it had fixed the problem, in which a system designe...

Nearly 31 million U.S. Internet users aged 18 and older have downloaded music in the past month -- but nearly three-quarters of those people also have purchased music either online or in music stores in the past three months, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. That finding supports a long-held argument by supporters of file-swapping that even free ...

It's time to end the mystery. That blur in the sky over Silicon Valley last week wasn't a bird or a plane. It wasn't a UFO either. It was the president of the United States. He streaked across the sky, fresh from declaring victory over Iraq on an aircraft carrier out in the Pacific. In essence, he went from one friendly environment -- for some str...

E-commerce has come a long way from the days when shoppers would abandon purchases in droves rather than wait several minutes for tortoise-slow secure transaction pages to be processed Thanks to millions of dollars in investments on the merchant end and widespread upgrades to broadband connections by consumers, e-commerce has begun to move at a fas...

Cisco Systems sounded a familiar refrain in reporting its quarterly results, saying profits were up but sales declined as demand for its networking gear remained soft, forcing the company to scale back its efforts to develop next-generation products. Cisco said net income for the quarter ended April 26th was US$987 million, a penny per share bette...