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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...
Spammers, perhaps the most hated denizens of the Internet, are under siege as the U.S. Congress and courts step up the pressure to reduce junk e-mail volume. Private companies are taking action, too: On Monday, AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo forged an alliance to fight spam Moreover, AOL announced on April 15th that it was filing lawsuits against five in...
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 ...
On the road to launching a new e-business Web site, all companies budget for obvious costs -- planning, designing, registering and hosting the site -- but if you are not careful, hidden expenses could overwhelm you on the journey. Would-be e-commerce site owners can avoid a lot of surprises by doing just a little bit of homework. Of course, resear...
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...
As Microsoft ramps up its Windows Server 2003 launch, enterprises large and small are trying to decide whether to upgrade to the new platform. Analysts interviewed for part 1 of this article agreed that, on the whole, Microsoft's latest server OS is solid, stable and offers useful new features. However, as Gartner analyst Tom Bittman noted, enterp...
It would be nice, though ultimately very silly, to think that the world's computing facilities could be secured by locking down the technology and ignoring the human factors. But that is what Microsoft and Intel seem to believe, with a chip encryption technology in development at Intel called LaGrande, and a forthcoming suite of security software and hardware from Microsoft dubbed Palladium.
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...
After much waiting and ample fanfare, Microsoft finally is launching its Windows Server 2003 platform. Although the company declined to comment, its Web site bills the new operating system as "a highly productive infrastructure that helps make your network a strategic asset for your organization." To put it less verbosely, Yankee Group senior analy...
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 ...
Even as AOL faces intense scrutiny surrounding an ongoing SEC investigation into possible revenue misstatements, the company is moving ahead with marketing initiatives designed to appeal to its members and partner retailers. One such event, a one-day sale April 16th that highlighted some of the ISP's retail partners, resulted in at least a tenfold traffic spike for most of the 32 sites involved, AOL said, and a healthy clickthrough rate from AOL's promotional jump page.
When it comes to choosing a database, size matters -- not so much the size of the database, but the size of the company. Whereas mid-size to large companies generally select a complex database and then task administrators and developers with building applications around it, small businesses usually take a different tack, focusing on simplicity and ease of use, because they often do not have an administrator on staff...
It used to be you couldn't coax Apple Computer into breathing a word about enterprise-class computing. When you mentioned selling to the suits, Macintosh marketing folks would get fidgety and flip to the next PowerPoint slide. This was surprisingly true during the tenure of Gil Amelio, whose idea of enterprise strategy was the truly strange marriage of Macintosh and IBM's AIX for Apple hardware. Under Amelio, Apple was sometimes insanely weird.
This week brought the latest piece of evidence that Intel, despite ruling the PC microprocessor race, cannot be all things to all parts of the chip business. The company is closing its custom chip manufacturing division, which for the last 18 months has produced application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) -- specially designed circuits used in networking equipment and other non-PC computing devices. IBM, Intel's archrival in the chip business, is the leader in this area, reaping about US$2.7 billion in revenue last year.
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...
Some believe eBay is the perfect e-commerce machine, with lean operating costs, swift strategy implementation and boundless growth opportunities. Yet, how large can the company become before it meets the playground law of "the bigger they come, the harder they fall"? After all, the auction giant has set the pace for a host of imitators and wannabes...
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...
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