Beth Cox

Despite an economy that can be described as snail-paced at best, online auction giant eBay raised its guidance for 2002 while reporting first-quarter earnings of 18 cents a share, beating Wall Street’s estimates by a full 2 cents. Revenues for the San Jose, Calif.-based company came in at $245.1 million, up from $154 million in […]

Hoping that American early adopters will be as nuts about mobile gaming as they are in Japan, Sega.com Inc. is launching a new mobile division aimed at bringing Sega gaming to cellular phone and PDA users in North America. Sega said that in Japan, the company already has more than 2.5 million subscribers to wireless […]

An Amazon.com it’s not, but PC Mall must be doing something right since it appears to have some longevity in the New Economy version of “Survivor.” Now the direct marketer is launching a government and education subsidiary to focus specifically on sales in those sectors. The Torrance, Calif.-based company said it believes it is particularly […]

Ratifying its high-flying stock price, online payments service PayPal Inc. posted its first ever profit, bringing its earnings in at 2 cents a share on a fully diluted (GAAP) basis for the first quarter of 2002. The company , which went public just last February, said that strong payment volume growth drove first quarter revenues […]

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which launched its first public working draft of P3P 1.0 way back in 1998, has made it an official recommendation. The move represents cross-industry agreement on an XML-based language for expressing Web site privacy policies. Declaring P3P a W3C Recommendation indicates that it is a stable document, contributes to […]

Online real estate play Homestore.com Inc., trying to battle back after suffering staggering losses in an accounting fiasco, has renegotiated the terms of its deal with a national Realtor’s group to save itself a little money. Westlake Village, Calif.-based Homestore , through its RealSelect subsidiary, operates REALTOR.com, the official Web site of the National Association […]

Amazon.com first pooh-poohed complaints from the Author’s Guild about used book sales on the e-tail site, but now the company is taking them seriously enough to warrant a response from the boss. Seattle-based Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos has responded by defending the company’s practice of allowing the sale of used books — and oh-by-the way […]

Zapped by the Internet recession, Furniture.com zonked out for a long snooze on a comfy sofa, but now the failed online retailer has reupholstered the business plan and new ownership is planning a come-back with a relaunch set for Wednesday. The “Coming Soon” place-holder Web site says that the new Furniture.com will be partnered with […]

Trying to figure out what’s going on with online tax filing this year is a taxing job in and of itself. There are bunches of stats floating around out there, and we’ve all learned by now that one company’s statistics can be another company’s accounting errors. Can you say “pro forma”? In any case, the […]

Thirty-nine-year-old Cirrus Logic executive Matthew R. Perry was named president and CEO of chipmaker Transmeta Corp. , succeeding Murray A. Goldman as chief executive officer and Hugh Barnes as president. Goldman and Barnes, 64 and 56 respectively, remain on the board, with Goldman as chairman. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker, which has seen its stock […]

Online retail giant Amazon.com, which got its start selling books, is defending itself from the wrath of the Author’s Guild, which is again complaining that the site is selling used copies of current books. The complaint is not new. The guild, which calls itself the nation’s largest society of published authors, griped about the sales […]

San Francisco-based Visa U.S.A. is launching what it calls the “next generation” of B2B payment services – Visa Commerce, a cardless electronic payment and information management program. The service is aimed at letting businesses reduce their use of expensive paper checks and would apparently compete with companies such as CheckFree Corp. and others, as well […]