Articles by Keith Regan

Hewlett-Packard has announced a slew of new products, services and strategies in an effort to capture a greater share of computing business at the world's largest enterprises. The "Adaptive Enterprise Strategy" rollout coincides with the one-year anniversary of the still-controversial US$19 billion HP-Compaq merger. It includes software aimed at m...

A spike in Sun Microsystems shares has fueled long-simmering speculation that the once-mighty tech firm may be the target of an acquisition by a larger rival. After trading at US$70 late in 2000, Sun shares fell as low as $2.34 late last year and have traded below the $8 level for a full year. On Friday, however, the shares gained 12 percent to cl...

Federal and state law enforcement agencies say they have quietly begun a massive campaign to reduce rates of online auction fraud. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been working with attorneys general in 29 states to enforce existing fraud laws against auction scammers. Known as "Operation Bidder Beware," the effort already has resulted in 57 criminal and civil actions...

Tradition holds that one-year anniversary presents should be made of paper, but executives at Hewlett-Packard no doubt could have done without the papers presented just a couple of weeks before the anniversary of HP's huge US$19 billion merger with Compaq. In those papers, two separate research firms reported that the combined HP-Compaq had lost t...

At first, no one minded when U.S. tech firms started turning to India, Ireland and other countries for help with their IT workload. After all, at the time, U.S. technology workers were in the catbird seat, naming their own prices and drinking free Mountain Dew from the corporate fridge to their heart's content. What a difference a couple of years ...

Despite a lingering hangover for employment in the United States, Monster.com's parent company trimmed its fiscal losses in the first quarter and said it would have posted a profit if not for charges associated with restructuring. TMP Worldwide said it lost US$28 million in the quarter, much of that tied to the spin-off of its executive search win...

Optimism that venture funding had ended its three-year freefall late last year was replaced with a cold dose of reality in the first quarter as venture capitalists kept purse strings drawn tight, pushing funding levels to a five-year low. Nationwide, venture investors sunk US$3.8 billion into up-and-coming firms, down from $4.3 billion in the four...

Setting aside their natural competitive impulses, AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo have announced they will work together to fight the flood of unwanted commercial e-mail cluttering their customers' inboxes The trio of Internet heavy hitters, which have an estimated 200 million e-mail accounts among them, said their alliance is the first step in what will ...

Amazon.com has trimmed its fiscal losses, posted its first non-holiday quarter with more than US$1 billion in sales, and raised its revenue forecast for full-year 2003, providing further grist for investors who seem increasingly optimistic about long-battered Internet stocks. The company said it brought in $1.084 billion during the first three mon...

Adding another weapon to its technology arsenal in the ongoing search engine wars, Google has announced the acquisition of privately held Applied Semantics for an undisclosed sum. Santa Monica, California-based Applied Semantics builds software that allows ads to be targeted to match the content of a Web page. One of its longtime customers is Goog...

In the technology aquarium, they were the brightly colored, fancy fish that darted around and drew attention to themselves. The bigger fish swam by slowly, patiently waiting for the tank to be all theirs once again. Well, it just about is. The majority of the little fish did themselves in, swimming too fast or eating too much. Or they drew a bit t...

In another step toward a more open approach to how it sells its software, Microsoft has agreed to change its licensing agreement, bringing itself into compliance with earlier court rulings and making it easier and cheaper for other firms to make compatible products. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said Microsoft has agreed to final revisions ...

Gateway (NYSE: GTW) has announced that its transformation from a PC retailer to a more diversified company accelerated in the first quarter. The gap between the company and its major PC competitors widened, but sales of its specialty products and home electronics rose The company added to its string of quarterly losses, chalking up US$200 million i...

Last-minute panic drove millions of taxpayers onto the Web this year, driving traffic to several sites that process tax returns. And despite the massive spike in visitor numbers, top sites performed well, delivering pages in a timely fashion and staying available almost around the clock. "It appears everyone was very well prepared," said John Love...

Three of the best-known technology companies have posted fresh earnings reports, and while none contained blockbuster successes, most were about on par with expectations. Results from Apple, chipmaker AMD and Sun Microsystems mirrored earnings reports released by other companies earlier in the week. Taken together, the results paint a picture of a...

Once thought to be a monster waiting in the shadows, poised to bludgeon online commerce, Internet sales tax is proving to be more of a nuisance than a threat. Early this year, a half-dozen major multichannel retailers, including Toys "R" Us, Wal-Mart and Target, began collecting sales tax on online purchases. The transition came quietly, without m...

Providing a potential shot in the arm to the technology sector as earnings season heats up, IBM has reported a relatively strong first quarter, saying two major acquisitions and cost-cutting initiatives undertaken last year have begun to help boost revenue. The company posted net earnings of US$1.38 billion, missing per-share estimates by a penny....

Amid widespread reports that Apple Computer is mulling the purchase of Vivendi Universal's music business, Microsoft may be about to join the fray. Published reports say Vivendi has approached Microsoft as part of its effort to find a suitable buyer for the Universal music label. Late last week, Apple was rumored to be close to sealing a US$6 bill...

The latest effort to reduce unwanted commercial clutter in consumers' e-mail inboxes has reached the U.S. Senate, bolstered by strong support from several high-profile online companies Within hours of the filing of the bill, known as the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003, or CAN SPAM, AOL issued a statem...

The number of high-tech layoffs in the first quarter fell 45 percent compared with a year ago as stabilization in the telecommunications industry helped slow the pace of job cuts, according to a new report from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas (CGC). Chicago-based CGC tracked 61,032 layoffs during the first three months of 2003, well...