When Amazon.com agreed to buy Zappos last week for $847 million in cash and stock, most reports said that the online shoe and clothing store had over $1 billion in sales last year.
Last week, Costco quietly rolled out a new partnership with Web site Gazelle to encourage its legions of discount shoppers to trade in their old technology for credit they can spend on new gadgets.
The Costco customer program works pretty much like the one that startup Gazelle has offered to everyone for about a year.
Figuring out when Web sites have been blocked by governments is an imprecise science.
Take, for example, Wednesday, when some Chinese Internet users began reporting an inability to access Amazon.com, the U.S. Web site for the online retail giant. Yet Amazon spokesman Craig Berman said that “nothing happened.”
When Warren Buffett auctioned off lunch with himself for charity last month, the winning bidder remained anonymous.
It turns out that the person who spent $1,680,300 for lunch with the investment guru wasn’t a person at all: it was Canadian wealth-management firm Salida Capital.
Score one for Twitter in the legal battle over who is responsible for stopping social media imposters.
In May, St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa sued Twitter after someone created a bogus account in his name that featured his photo and what he called “derogatory and demeaning” remarks.
Even in a recession, lunch with Warren Buffett turns out to be a hot commodity.
The investment guru and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway has an annual ritual of auctioning a steak lunch with himself on eBay to raise money for San Francisco’s Glide Foundation. Last year’s winning auction tally of $2.1 million broke all previous records.
Shopping on cellphones–long a dream among e-commerce companies–is not yet a mass-market phenomenon. But some new tools could help change that picture.
EBay’s PayPal kicked off the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco Wednesday with a frightening presentation on the “arms race” between online fraudsters and online retailers and shoppers.
Online fraud is becoming so lucrative, said Katherine Hutchison, PayPal’s senior director of global risk management, that it has developed into an industry with specialized players that hire each other in areas such as harvesting credit card numbers and freight forwarding. “A single professional thief doesn’t have to have all of the skills needed to commit fraud,” she said.
Is the digital savior of the sagging magazine industry finally in sight?
On Wednesday, Fujitsu Frontech began selling the world’s first color e-paper e-book reader. Available on April 20 in Japan only, the gadget costs 99,970 yen, or more than $1,000.
Until now, e-books like the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader have been limited to black and white or shades of gray, making them OK for reading plain books and newspapers that like to use stipple drawings, but not great for colorful print media such as magazines.
Craigslist, the online classifieds juggernaut, has run afoul of authorities once again, over the ads in its adult section. On Thursday, the sheriff in Cook County, Ill., called the site the “largest source of prostitution in America” and filed a civil lawsuit to get Craigslist’s “erotic services” section shut down.
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