Articles by Keith Regan

Some dot-com failures seem to come out of the blue, with few public indications of struggle before the companies actually fail. But in other cases, the slow and painful descent unfolds under a hot spotlight as the whole world watches It is no accident that online grocer Streamline.com (NasdaqNM: SLNE) chose to make its severe money woes public -- U...

I once hoped -- without any good reason, really -- that the world of online retail would somehow distinguish itself in one small but significant way: I hoped it would obey the calendar. The Roman calendar. The one that has been completely folded, spindled, mutilated and ignored by real-world retailers Retailers who think that back-to-school shoppin...

Hoping to gain exposure for its wireless handheld device business, 3Com has announced that it will loan free Web appliances to fans at National Football League (NFL) games in San Francisco, California starting early next month 3Com said it will begin handing out "Web pads" to stadium-goers starting September 10th, the day of the first home game for...

Three months after hailing its proposal to offer UK Internet users a flat rate for unlimited Web access as the second great online revolution, AltaVista has shelved the proposal indefinitely AltaVista is casting blame for the failure of its unmetered service largely on British Telecom (BT), saying that the UK's dominant telecom firm did not offer t...

A strong majority of U.S. Internet users want a guarantee from Web sites that their private information will not be resold, and more than 90 percent favor punishment for executives responsible for privacy violations, according to a new study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project "Internet users want the Golden Rule of the Internet to be: 'D...

Web portal Lycos took a big step toward making the wireless Internet more accessible when it hooked up with Boston, Massachusetts-based Mobilee to develop a voice portal to the Net. The companies plan to unveil the talking portal before the end of the year Lycos isn't alone. In fact, the "Lycos Anywhere" strategy falls right in line with efforts at...

I don't believe in reincarnation. That's too bad, because I'd like to be around in a thousand years or so when a more highly evolved human race pokes through our dismal digital remains and concludes that we were clearly out of our minds Just as some of our contemporaries blame the decline of the Roman Empire on lead dinner plates, future anthropolo...

Responding to a judge's order to expedite the release of information related to Carnivore, its controversial e-mail snooping technology, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is preparing to hand over as many as 3,000 pages of documents to the Internet privacy watchdog group that has been among the system's most outspoken critics The Elect...

Industry giant IBM (NYSE: IBM) and e-commerce software company Kana Communications Inc. (Nasdaq: KANA) announced plans Wednesday to help companies that do business on the Internet improve their customer service The deal, which reportedly could be worth as much as $1 billion (US$) per year in revenue for the two companies, comes as evidence mounts t...

To the casual surfer, the Internet may seem like a limitless ocean, but to e-tail firms whose cash is swirling down the drain, it may seem more like a little fish tank that is fast losing its water. The situation is about to get a lot worse: The land sharks are coming Real-world discount giants Wal-Mart and Kmart appear hell-bent on getting their e...

According to a report released Tuesday by the Yankee Group, e-tailers consistently fall far short in customer service strategy because too many resources are expended trying to solve the technical riddles of online selling The Boston, Massachusetts-based research firm said that while multi-channel selling that balances on and offline strategies for...

Those cheers that erupted in Silicon Valley and all the other technology hotbeds last week were not over a stock market spike or stellar earnings reports. The roar of approval came from tech executives who were elated over Vice President Al Gore's bold choice of Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Connecticut) as his running mate in the presidential election ...

Well, it's official. The numbers finally prove what even the staunchest resister must have recognized all along: The Internet is no longer the last remaining bastion of maleness Women now lead men in Net use by a few tenths of a percentage point. Doesn't sound like much, but in terms of the psychological impact, it's a bombshell. So prepare, everyo...

For the first time in the Internet's history, there are more women than men online in the United States, according to a study released Wednesday "It's a Woman's World Wide Web," the report from Media Metrix (Nasdaq: MMXI) and Jupiter Communications (Nasdaq: JPTR), found that explosive growth in Internet usage among teenage girls and steady growth a...

Welcome back to reality, dot-coms. Word has it that you have stopped spending like it was going out of style. You are clinging to the remnants of your venture capital and the windfall you reaped from your IPO. Good thing. Just one question: Don't you think it's a bit late? According to the results of a new study from Pegasus Research International ...

A lawsuit filed by Ford Motor Company against e-commerce startup Model E was dismissed Monday, handing the custom-car ordering site a significant victory. The new company plans to use the recent media exposure to unveil more details about its "subscribe and drive" service On July 28th, Ford sued both Model E, based in Fremont, California, and its p...

"No one is buying this company's stock for this year or even next year," analyst Joseph Buttarazzi of Adams, Harkness & Hill said. "They're looking at 2002 or beyond." We were talking about a dot-com that is currently going through some serious struggles -- stock currently trading below $10 (US$) a share. But Buttarazzi's remark carries a suitcase ...

At midnight on Friday, Napster could very well take its last gasp -- but it has been a pretty impressive run for an upstart network built almost solely on killer technology and wildfire word of mouth The preliminary injunction issued by U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel earlier this week -- which for all practical purposes will shut down...

Horror writer Stephen King has a knack for making his readers lose sleep, but there is widespread speculation that his latest work has book publishers and retailers tossing and turning even more However, dire predictions of the end of publishing as we know it are probably premature. The experimental honor system sale of King's new novel, "The Plant...

To some e-commerce watchers, Bertelsmann AG has not been maintaining an appropriate demeanor for the fourth largest media company in the world, of late. As it voraciously scoops up book and magazine publishers all over the world, the German media giant is looking more and more like a spoiled kid trying to blow his inheritance in a single weekend Wi...