Beth Cox

Have you seen that near-magical self-balancing scooter? It’s called the Segway Human Transporter (HT) and the Postal Service in Tampa, Fla., is testing them for use by letter carriers. Now, the first units have been sold to private individuals, on Amazon.com. Three limited-edition electric-powered personal transportation devices, made by Segway LLC in Manchester, N.H., were […]

Chicago-based online auction operation uBid Inc. notched a coup as Hewlett Packard selected the company for the launch of ChooseHP, a co-branded, fixed-price shopping site for members of affinity groups allied with HP. uBid, a unit of Andover, Mass.-based CMGI Inc. , said that the new e-commerce site offers a full range of HP personal […]

Online travel operation Expedia Inc., scrambling to work deals with the airlines in the wake of copy-cat decisions across the industry to scale back or eliminate commissions paid for ticket sales, signed another one, this time with Continental Airlines Inc. Bellevue, Wash.-based Expedia , which signed a marketing deal with Delta Air Lines on March […]

Chief Financial Officer Andrew Hyde has quietly departed online CRM company Salesforce.com Inc., the second top exec to leave the privately held, San Francisco-based ASP operation in five months. John Dillon, the firm’s president and CEO of two years and the former head of Hyperion Solutions, departed last November. Company co-founder and chairman Marc Benioff […]

eBay Inc. has signed a deal with Monterey, Calif.-based Altura International that will open up mail order and online catalog businesses to users of the auction site via CatalogCity.com. Altura said that it will list the catalogers’ products on San Jose, Calif.-based eBay’s Web site and will bring winning bidders to complete their transactions on […]

Dell Computer Corp. signed an expanded computer system components deal with Royal Philips Electronics that could be worth up to $5 billion for the Dutch company over the life of the five-year agreement. The arrangement calls for Philips to provide conventional and flat-panel monitors, storage devices, connectivity solutions, and other components to Dell for use […]

Embattled online real estate play Homestore found a little silver lining in one of its clouds when a federal judge in Connecticut ruled that the company’s planned sale of ConsumerInfo.com, an online consumer credit unit, can go through. Westlake Village, Calif.-based Homestore, plagued by accounting scandals, said earlier this month that it would sell its […]

eBay may be an online auction giant, but apparently the government thinks it’s not enough of a giant to warrant serious monopoly concerns as Justice Department antitrust officials have closed an investigation of the San Jose, Calif.-based company. No action was taken, eBay said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company […]

In what appears to be a tit-for-tat kind of move, online travel agencies Expedia Inc. and Travelocity.com apparently have decided to penalize United Airlines for its recent decision to eliminate per-ticket sales commissions. Travelocity reportedly added a $10 fee to all United fares and Expedia was said to have put United’s routes at the bottom […]

Online privacy and security guru Richard Smith, who operates the Computer Bytes Man site, has issued a warning about potential security problems in Microsoft Outlook 2002. One of the most serious involves Windows Media Player (WMP). In an e-mail to SecurityFocus Corp.’s Bugtraq database administrators, Smith said that WMP “reintroduces the ability to automatically execute […]

In the travel business, size matters, which explains why Expedia Inc. may have rushed to finish up a deal with Delta Air Lines, which last week decided to eliminate base commissions paid to many travel agents in the United States and Canada. Bellevue, Wash.-based travel site Expedia signed what it called “a long-term enhanced marketing […]

It was billed as a shopper’s dream, but the real winners at Yahoo!’s so-called “Biggest Sale in Internet History” were the participating retailers, some of whom saw sales volume increase as much as 500 percent, according to the Web portal. Yahoo! said the three-day sales event last week produced a 25 percent boost in gross […]