Articles by Rob Conlin

Credit card giant Visa International has announced a pair of global e-commerce initiatives to offer tighter security measures for Internet consumers and reduce consumer-merchant online transaction disputes by as much as 50 percent According to the company, the first security initiative will reduce the risk of unauthorized credit card use, while the...

Seven of America's largest movie theater chains said Tuesday that their Internet movie ticketing venture, christened Fandango, will start up as a pilot program in the next few weeks before its full service launch later this summer "Fandango is an instantly recognizable and distinctive name that sets us apart in our industry and precisely conveys th...

Online women's network iVillage is in discussions with Internet retailer BabyGear.com to sell off its iBaby retail unit, according to Preston Bealle, CEO of BabyGear.com Bealle, who heads the New York-based e-tailer, told the E-Commerce Times that his company has been discussing buying iBaby from iVillage and he hopes to see a deal closed in the ne...

The 1,000-member Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) said Tuesday that new legislation to govern online privacy issues would "represent a giant step backwards." The Washington, D.C.-based organization said that industry self-regulation remains the clear-cut alternative to government legislation and called on the U.S. Federal Trade Co...

The battle for the European online auction market intensified Tuesday, as Britain's QXL (Nasdaq: QXLC) announced that it will acquire Germany's Ricardo.de AG in a stock deal valued at $1 billion (US$) The merger comes as dominant U.S. online auctioneer eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) continues its expansion across the continent, threatening QXL and Ricardo.de ...

Wit SoundView, the online investment banking subsidiary of the Wit Capital Group (Nasdaq: WITC), has agreed to buy online investment firm E*Offering in a stock deal valued at $328 million (US$) As part of the alliance agreement, E*Trade (Nasdaq: EGRP), E*Offering's parent company, said it will buy Wit SoundView's online retail brokerage business an...

Denizens of the Internet turned out in high style on San Francisco's Nob Hill Thursday night for the "Webby Awards 2000," a funny and fast ceremony -- thanks to the five-words-or-less speech limit -- honoring the best Web sites of the year The Webby Awards are the antithesis of the frayed jeans and T-shirt inhabited world of the Web. Some 3,000 "di...

Online consumer spending in Britain, Wales and Scotland will soar from $2.6 billion (US$) in 1999 to over $30 billion by 2005, according to Fletcher Research, the UK arm of Forrester Research (Nasdaq: FORR). The report, "UK Online Retail: From Minority to Mainstream," indicates that wireless devices and interactive TV will fuel the trend Online sal...

Despite an ongoing U.S. government antitrust probe into the online real estate sector, America Online (NYSE: AOL) and Internet home and real estate network Homestore.com (Nasdaq: HOMS) announced a five-year, $200 million (US$) deal today that expands Homestore.com's real estate listings and moving services across the entire AOL network The companie...

Internet-related trademark, patent and copyright litigation will increase significantly in years to come, according to a recent PricewaterhouseCoopers survey of U.S. intellectual property attorneys The report comes as a number of e-commerce companies, including Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com and Priceline.com, find themselves mired in battles over ...

Online auction portal Bidder's Edge announced Tuesday that it is canceling its pending sale to OpenSite after the online pricing solutions provider disclosed that it will be acquired by Siebel Systems, Inc. for $444 million (US$) Nick Godfrey, Bidder's Edge Director of Marketing, told the E-Commerce Times that, "Things have changed in such a way th...

E-commerce giant Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) and four other Internet sites that employ music sampling features were slapped with a patent infringement lawsuit Friday by Intouch Group, Inc., a San Francisco, California-based provider of in-store kiosks and Internet music sampling technology Joining Amazon in the U.S. District Court for the Northern Di...

The MIT Sloan School of Management's 2nd annual eBusiness Awards program gave the industry a chance to shine the spotlight on some huge successes Wednesday, in a year that has been marked by some equally stunning failures In a rite of spring that is establishing itself as the Internet equivalent of the Academy Awards, online auction site eBay, worl...

The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), a group representing 1,100 companies, claims in a report released Wednesday that the piracy of software products in online auctions has reached epidemic proportions and could well lead to legal action against some leading auction sites The SIIA found that 91 percent of online auctions of softw...

Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, long considered the embodiment of old world values and traditions, has embraced the Digital Revolution by turning a small dot-com investment into a sizable windfall In December, the Queen invested $157,000 (US$) in Getmapping.com, which is compiling a complete 60,000-image aerial map of the United Kingdom. After the co...

Faced with mounting pressure from regulators and online privacy advocacy groups, 26 Internet advertising, direct marketing and consulting companies announced today that they have formed a self-regulating organization called the Personalization Consortium Based in Wakefield, Massachusetts the organization will serve as an advocacy group for responsi...

Palo Alto, California-based financial services firm X.com announced Wednesday that it has received $100 million (US$) in financing from a variety of new and existing investors X.com, which offers free e-mail payment services integrated with banking and investment services, has attracted some $125 million in venture capital since last October.

Venture capital firm Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV) announced today that it has set a new watermark in the flood of venture capital money washing over Internet companies by closing a $1.6 billion (US$) fund The Palo Alto, California-based firm said that 100 institutional investors, 15 investment banks and over 150 leading Internet executives p...

After a pessimistic auditor's report sparked a wave of negative publicity and a broad stock sell-off, Internet music retailer CDNow (Nasdaq: CDNW) said today that it will implement a new operating plan to "significantly reduce" its cash burn rate The beleaguered company, whose troubles began after a planned merger with Columbia House went by the bo...

In an effort to streamline the Internet shopping experience for its customers, online drugstore PlanetRx.com (Nasdaq: PLRX) has unveiled a bar code scanner that will allow consumers to select and order items simply and efficiently The South San Francisco-based company said shoppers will be able to scan bar codes of products they have in their medic...