Articles by Michael Mahoney

Idealab!, the dot-com incubator behind eToys, CarsDirect and Petsmart.com, said Wednesday that it is moving some of its Silicon Valley functions to the company's Pasadena, California headquarters. The move may result in a number of job cuts over the next few months "Wherever possible, Idealab! Silicon Valley's 33 employees will be given theopportun...

Perhaps the tone for eToys' imminent farewell from e-commerce was set in February, when the online retailer specifically warned investors that its own stock was "worthless." Forget about defiant last words. Forget about "if only" or "should have" disclaimers....

Southwest Airlines confirmed Monday that it has stopped offering its flights through online travel company Travelocity (Nasdaq: TVLY) -- the second jolt to Travelocity's operations in less than a week On March 1st, Northwest Airlines and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines stopped paying commissions on Internet ticket sales in the United States and Canada.

There's only one directive that seems to hold true across the e-commerce landscape these days: to survive, literally, at all costs. While some e-tailers are desperately seeking new revenue sources and better grossmargins to stave off hostile investors, others are completelyreinventing themselves, morphing their business models into entirely newent...

As the dot-com shakeout nears the one-year mark, many companies might have a bad case of the E-Commerce Blues Some analysts say that overspendingand over-expansion, at the expense of monitoring cash flow andfocusing on profitability, have doomed many e-tailers before they really everbegan....

Royal Ahold, the parent company of online grocer Peapod, has infused the struggling e-tailer with an additional US$30 million in financing, Peapod announced Wednesday. The new funding increases Ahold's original $20 millioncredit facility with Peapod to $50 million, Peapod said, leaving the e-tailer with more than $60 million in cash resources to r...

For the first time in eight months, the dot-com layoff trend appears to beslowing, falling 9 percent in February, according to a report released Tuesday by the job placement firmof Challenger, Gray and Christmas Over the past three months, nearly 35,000 Internet workers have been let go -- 12 percent more layoffs than occurred in the preceding 12 m...

According to published reports, Internet service provider Microsoft Networkis considering charging users access fees for select content provided via its UK Web portal within the next year The plan is yet another signal that portal accessfees on sites such as MSN and Yahoo! are just around the corner, as those companies try to defuse the ongoing slu...

Layoffs. Consolidations. Tumbling stock prices. When will the madness end? According to industry analysts, the dot-com shakeout is going to get much worse before it gets better -- and it won't be getting better anytime soon. More shutdowns and layoffs lie in wait for the online world....

Internet auctioneer eBay will be looking for more than the usual exposure when it combines with its real world auction arm, Butterfields, to auction a series of five nude Marilyn Monroe photographs online in March Not only will the results of the auction go a long way toward determiningthe viability of auctioning high-ticket items online, it will m...

Illustrating the extent of evolution that online business is facing, a report released Wednesday by IDC found that the number of private corporate Web portals might eventually surpass the number accessible by the public via the Internet "There are only so many portals that are going to make it in the consumer domain and the shakeout is going to con...

Raising questions about the Internet's ability to sell tickets to major international events, technical problems on the official site of soccer's 2002 World Cup have left fans in the co-host countries of Japan and Korea unable to order tickets online for the championship of the world's most popular sport The monetary stakes are high: nearly 3 milli...

Amid labor strife at well-known e-tailers Amazon.com and Webvan, another target of unionization in the dot-com world, consumer electronics site Etown, announced this week that it was laying off its entire staff of around 100 employees and closing down its Web site operations. The news only adds to the number of industry observers asking this ques...

Brick-and-click sellers dominated the online holiday season in the UK,according to a new study released this week by Nielsen//NetRatings. "Clicks-and-mortar retailers were able to start their holiday preparationsand marketing earlier and with higher visibility than their pure-playcompetitors," said David Day,director of analytics for ACNielsen eRa...

U.S. lawmakers are considering the launch of a federally funded e-commerce pilot program designed to helpsmall and mid-sized manufacturers take their businesses online. The Electronic Commerce Enhancement Act, if passed, willrequire the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to establish anadvisory panel to do an "immediate needs" a...

When you examine the state of e-commerce today, one thing is abundantly clear: traditional brick-and-mortars are making the greatest inroads online. So what's to stop Amazon.com, the Internet's most recognized brand, from reversing this trend and leveraging its name to open brick-and-mortar stores of its own?...

Nominations for the Oscars -- the film industry's most glamorous honor -- are big business. According to box office tracking firm Exhibitor Relations, "Shakespeare in Love" had taken in a total of US$36.2 million before the Academy Award nominations came out in February 1999. After news of its 13 nominations came out, the film went on to gross an ...

The news this week that MVP.com isclosing its site and selling the remaining assets to rival Sportsline.com came as no surprise to those familiar with the rash ofconsolidations sweeping through the online sporting goods arena. Industry observers watched Global Sports, which operates Web sites for companies including Kmart-backed BlueLight.com and ...

Take a look around Dot-Com Island. There isn't an e-tail site still alive that hasn't been affected by the recent shakeout to some degree. However, some of the Web merchants are more likely to survive than others The defining characteristics of those companies vary slightly, but one thing they all have in common is the potential to provide a return...

E-commerce is being beaten up with bad press again. First it wasbabies being sold over the Net, then brokerages being warned for their questionableonline business practices. Throw in the latest round of dot-com layoffs and the currentassault on Net advertising, and the e-business is undergoing a genuine public relationsnightmare....