Kelly Black

I’m starting to give up hope whether the Recording Industry Association of America will ever “get it.” Ahead of Napster’s opening arguments slated for early next month in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, the RIAA has stepped up its tattletale efforts to start policing the dangerous criminal element living on college […]

If you thought Half.com’s marketing stunt to rename the town of Halfway, Oregon to the more cyber-hip Half.com was a jaw-dropper, then get a load of this possibility. Five hours north of San Francisco, there’s a tiny little town named Samoa. With just 300 residents living in 98 quaint, pastel homes built nearly a century […]

Dotcomfailures.com and F#$&edCompany.com, a pair of irreverent Web sites devoted to documenting the growing list of dot-com failures, have both announced plans to pull the plug on operations. Ironic is the first adjective that springs to mind. But to be fair, both sites did a pretty crackerjack job at keeping tabs on the Internet boneyard. […]

Two more e-tailers are joining forces, hoping together to survive the dot-com carnage besieging the online retail sector. Following’s Wednesday’s market close, barnesandnoble.com announced plans to purchase Fatbrain.com for $64 million, or $4.25 per share. While the number two Net bookseller will likely never gain enough market share to displace numero uno Amazon.com , barnesandnoble.com […]

LIFETIME Entertainment Services announced plans to grab a 4.6% interest in Women.com in exchange for running $10 million worth of television ads on its Lifetime Television network, the largest women’s cable network on the planet. With roughly 47 million WOMN shares outstanding, my fingers and toes’ math puts a little over 2 million shares valued […]

I remember well when the nascent industry of e-consultants first began parading through the IPO pipeline. Thousands of graybeard Web designers, around since the earliest days of the Net, suddenly commanded respect in the new issues market while investors hoisted the group on their shoulders, minting millionaires of them all. Pioneering companies like Organic had […]

It’s no secret how I feel about the World Intellectual Property Organization’s shameless arbitration authority. Early results from a bevy of domain dispute resolutions point to signs of a slippery slope getting worse by the minute. Making an already bad situation worse is WIPO’s obvious favoritism toward big business over the “little guy.” It’s fostering […]

Showing once again that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, SafetyTips.com agreed to purchase the scant assets of failed crime news Web site APBNews.com for nearly half the price it offered to shell out just weeks earlier. The suitor initially put a deal on the table to purchase APBNews for […]

Analytical research firm Kamikaze Communications predicts that by 2005, half of all consumers will be begging for a little scratch and sniff action with their online content, creating a multi-billion dollar industry for digital scent technology. Okay, I actually just made that up. But yesterday, Oakland-based DigiScents did announce plans to acquire its Israel-based rival […]

Lights, camera – that’s a wrap! That about describes the scene for Pop.com, the so-called entertainment Web portal that never managed to get off the ground, despite being backed by Paul Allen and Hollywood heavies that included the DreamWorks dynamic duo of Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg. The failed venture is largely a result of […]

The slope on UK-based Freeserve’s six-month stock chart looks picture perfect – if you plan to ski down it. But if you’re an investor caught in the avalanche of negative sentiment heaped on this new economy issue, it’s looking like a cold winter this year. While the FTSE 100 index returned to its high for […]

America Online announced its land-grab of voice recognition portal Quack.com for an undisclosed wad of stock. The deal is a smaller part of the Web access giant’s broader strategy to imbed its proprietary platform onto everything from desktops to mobile phones, key to maintaining its dominant position as the planet’s largest on-ramp to the information […]