Nothing evokes the holiday retail season more than shoppers lined up outside of department stores at 4:59 a.m., the day after Thanksgiving, waiting to snap up the hottest deals.

The Internet has its own, albeit less visual, start to the holiday season: Cyber Monday. It marks the day folks return to the office after Thanksgiving, replete [...]

Posted in Internet Marketing No Comments »

Almost anywhere else, Reid Hoffman would be considered a major success. As an early executive of PayPal, he was in the money when the company was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. These days, he runs a new startup company of his own while investing in others.But when greater fortunes are made—as happened [...]

Posted in General No Comments »

Buoyed by the growth of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, the wiki model of shared writing and editing is spreading into surprising new realms, from accounting, real estate and academic research to cake design and even intelligence gathering.

“Wikis are finally becoming mainstream,” said Newton technology pioneer Dan Bricklin, who plans to release WikiCalc, a next-generation spreadsheet [...]

Posted in General No Comments »

Microsoft Corp. is making a “big bold bet” on Web services, which it sees as the most important technological development of the next decade, Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said on Tuesday.

But the software company, whose online division is losing money while rivals like Google (Charts) Inc. thrive, has a unique vision of how these new [...]

Posted in Internet Marketing No Comments »

Now that AOL has moved to a free, ad-supported model, it wants to evolve its portal into something more useful to Web surfers, Jonathan Miller, chairman and chief executive of AOL, said Wednesday.That’s why the company bought privately held Relegence, a provider of real-time information to the financial services industry, he said in a session [...]

Posted in General No Comments »

Nearly half of the nation’s small businesses don’t have a marketing plan, according to a recent Internet survey.Owners cited in the survey, released last week by 10stepmarketing, a Santee, Calif.-based market consulting firm, said they were either too busy running their business to write a marketing plan or didn’t know how.

“In my experience, many small [...]

Posted in General No Comments »

MySpace has some claws and they want to sink them into YouTube. The
question is, can the place for friends “broadcast itself” to a higher
number of visitors than YouTube?

Since “most of their traffic comes from us,” MySpace’s COO said of
YouTube in September, “we ought to be able to match them if not exceed
them” with MySpace’s own [...]

Posted in Internet Marketing No Comments »

Seattle wireless startups continue to gobble up venture capital dollars.

The latest to attract funds include Pelago and Ontela, both of which raised multimillion- dollar rounds from some deep- pocketed and well- known venture capital firms.

Pelago, a stealthy startup formed earlier this year by former Amazon.com Senior Vice President Jeff Holden and former Amazon.com engineer Darren [...]

Posted in General No Comments »

Web search leader Google Inc.’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, sees a future where mobile phones are free to consumers who accept watching targeted forms of advertising.Schmidt said Saturday that as mobile phones become more like handheld computers and consumers spend as much as eight to 10 hours a day talking, texting and using the Web [...]

Posted in General No Comments »

Google Inc., owner of the most-used Internet search engine, is talking to media companies about licensing their video content in anticipation of its purchase of YouTube Inc.

“We’ve visited with as many as of the media companies as we can,” Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt said Tuesday at a conference in San Francisco. “We’ve talked [...]

Posted in General No Comments »