UPS, eBay Grab Highest E-Business Honors

The MIT Sloan School of Management’s 2nd annual eBusiness Awards program gave the industry a chance to shine the spotlight on some huge successes Wednesday, in a year that has been marked by some equally stunning failures.

In a rite of spring that is establishing itself as the Internet equivalent of the Academy Awards, online auction site eBay, worldwide shipping company UPS and Internet health industry facilitator Healtheon/WebMD walked away with top honors. The ceremony was emceed by Lou Dobbs, the former CNN business news anchor who is now the CEO of Space.com.

eBay was awarded the Global Reach Award by the jury. The auction giant was praised for extending its reach across the globe with buyers and sellers from Austria to Zimbabwe conducting auction transactions at an unprecedented rate. Dell Computer Corp. was the first winner in the category last year.

Also selected as finalists for the Global Reach Award were Babylon.com, Monster.com, Nortel and Real Networks.

Clicks and Mortar

UPS, a dominant carrier in the e-commerce industry, won the Clicks and Mortar Award — a new category — for making the greatest advancement toward integrating physical and online businesses.

Other finalists for the Clicks and Mortar Award were Clicks’nMortar, Gateway, Lands’ End and Fitlinxx.

Healtheon/WebMD took home the Industry Transformation Award, which recognizes the company whose technology or business model most transformed an industry. Enron, Chemdex, BuildNet and QuickTake were the other finalists for the award.

Rookie of the Year

The highly coveted Rookie of the Year Award went to Handspring, an innovator in the handheld computing industry. Kozmo, MarketSoft, Mobshop and Openratings made the slate of finalists. Last year, Akamai Technologies took home the award.

Other award winners were TRUSTe, which snatched the Web Responsibility Award, Palm, Inc., which took the Disruptive Technology Award — in recognition of the technical innovation with the greatest potential to revolutionize eBusiness — and Japan’s NTTDoCoMo, winner of the International Power Play Award.

MIT’s Sloan School operates the Center for eBusiness. Students at the school developed the eBusiness Awards, which were sponsored this year by Dell, FleetBoston Financial, General Motors, the Industry Standard and the Scient Corporation.