Articles by Chet Dembeck

This week 3Com Corp. -- the No. 2 maker of networking products -- shipped its new, Internet-connected handheld PalmPilot ahead of schedule This comes only a few weeks after Microsoft pumped $600 million into the publicly held Nextel, a digital phone company that has carved out a 3-million-strong niche in the business market. Its phones already offe...

Growing credit card fraud over the Internet will affect the future of e-commerce to the extent that some analysts say if it's not kept in check -- people will simply stop making purchases online Some Web merchants already say that more than half of the sales they make on software and digital music downloads are fraudulent -- especially in a world w...

One week after NBC merged its Internet properties, Xoom.com and Snap com., into a new company called NBC Internet, it announced Monday that Snap.com has joined forces with Seattle, Washington's RealNetworks, Inc., to form a "multimedia powerhouse." Under the alliance, Snap.com -- the 7th largest Internet portal -- will become the exclusive Intern...

A few days after Network Associates, Inc. -- the No. 1 maker of antivirus software -- pronounced the Galadriel virus a low risk, a class action suit was filed against the company in the United States District Court of California on behalf of stockholders Those affected by the suit are all stockholders who bought shares in Network Associates during ...

Not to be out done by IBM, Hewlett-Packard is promising to storm the e-commerce arena girded with a new Internet software code-named "Fremont" that can be downloaded for free -- the same way the Linux operating system is According to analysts, HP executives have said the new software is written in Java, the language written by Sun Microsystems, to ...

Cisco Systems, Inc. has signaled the worldwide high-tech community that Y2K might not be the menacing profit-killer that many gloom and doomers have been predicting The San Jose, California-based maker of network hardware also reported record earnings, a two for one stock split -- and announced a $39 million (US$) investment in a company that track...

Microsoft's telecom spending spree struck gold last week. Not from the $5 billion (US$) it invested in AT&T -- but from the $600 million it pumped into Nextel Communications Just when everybody thought the Reston, Virginia-based wireless phone company was about to merge with MCI WorldCom, Nextel broke off talks and instead allowed Microsoft to buy ...

The recent blockbuster deal AT&T made to buy MediaOne could have the unintended consequence of sparking an alliance between two of its biggest rivals -- plus energize a technology that's been slow to take off Both AOL and Bell Atlantic stand to lose a great deal of high-speed modem capacity if the $58 billion (US$) deal to make AT&T the largest U.S

The recent blockbuster deal AT&T made to buy MediaOne could have the unintended consequence of sparking an alliance between two of its biggest rivals -- plus energize a technology that's been slow to take off Both AOL and Bell Atlantic stand to lose a great deal of high-speed modem capacity if the $58 billion (US$) deal to make AT&T the largest U.S

Another software giant has stepped up to the plate hoping to knock in an e-commerce home run. But some analysts say even if it hits one out of the park -- it could be too little too late Waldorf, Germany-based SAP AG, the fourth-largest software firm in the world, fired off a string of dazzling announcements last week at an annual European conferen...

One day in the near future the world's largest Internet bank intends to partner with an online broker -- becoming a total financial-services-portal So said Deborah Newman, director of marketing for Arlington, Virginia-based Telebank, in an interview with the E-Commerce Times last week. But that's not all. "We plan to have a virtual insurance agency...

Intel Corp. plans to talk its way into the booming e-commerce business -- but it's finding others have the same idea. On May 6, the giant Santa Clara, California-based computer-chip maker pumped a cool $30 million (US$) into a joint venture with Lemout & Hauspie Speech Products NV, Europe's largest speech-recognition software maker. The partnershi...

While Microsoft Corp. continues to be preoccupied with its government antitrust battle, some say the Linux operating system is gaining the same momentum against the software titan that fictitious Rocky Balboa gained in his heavy weight bout against Apollo Creed Dell Computer Corp. announced April 26 that it plans to factory-install the new Red Hat ...

Flattening, realigning and disintegrating describes what some say the Internet is doing to the recording industry By illegally downloading and distributing copyrighted music as free MP3 files, tens of thousands of consumers are cutting deeply into e-commerce profits, and simultaneously threatening the very existence of the major labels. This news i...

In case you've been dreaming of a Window-less Internet2 -- it's time to wake up Microsoft Corp. announced on April 28th that it's already staking its claim on the next-generation Internet, by joining the Internet2 Coalition.

Knowing how to read a customer's mind, predicting his or her hot buttons and giving them what they want is good business for any e-commerce marketeer. But some say today's powerful customer-tracking tools invade the buyer's privacy, expose them to risk and reduce them to stereotypes The strong market for such "collaborative filtering" software was ...

Lately, what Intel top dogs have been telling any analyst willing to listen, should send a shiver up the T-1 line of any e-commerce startup carving out a niche Intel, the microprocessor maker that corners about 85 percent of its market, is saying that within two to three years about 90 percent of its $26 billion plus revenue will be coming -- not f...