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Continuing the E-Commerce Times' exploration of travel-planning Web sites, I paddled over to Kayak this week, and after a few minutes of playing around with the site, I was inexplicably struck with the desire for ice cream. Specifically, Haagen Dazs' five simple ingredients ice cream. No doubt, you...

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison can be a wellspring of newsworthy comments. Little wonder, then, that for close to an hour on Tuesday, IT journalists were rapt as he ruminated on the subjects of the day in an interview with Sun Microsystems' Ed Zander at the Churchill Club in Silicon Valley. Ellison didn't...

Amazon has launched its own line of consumer electronics products, starting with audio video cables and blank DVD media. It plans to add more accessories and other items in the coming months. The company is leveraging its formidable brand name for this endeavor, positioning AmazonBasics products for...

It's back to the future for Palm, which is dropping Microsoft's Windows Mobile in favor of its own proprietary platform, webOS, unveiled earlier this year. Palm CEO John Rubinstein reportedly told investors in a conference call on Thursday that the company wants to dedicate all of its future develop...

For this week's installment in the E-Commerce Times' series on travel-planning Web sites, I took a spin around Orbitz, completing my tour of the top three aggregators. Thus far, my biggest complaint about travel sites in general has been overcrowded user interfaces that waste space with self promoti...

The federal government has launched Apps.Gov, an online app store for federal agencies and workers, in the hope of reducing the $75 billion a year it spends on IT. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra introduced the site Tuesday. The goal is for the federal government to leverage the efficiencies ...

The Department of Justice has asked Yahoo and Microsoft to supply it with more information about its proposed search advertising tie-up that the duo announced earlier this summer. Both companies have said they are cooperating with the inquiry. Indeed, they all but predicted this would happen when th...

My first impression of Expedia -- a site that I used to frequent but haven't visited in at least a year -- is that its design is refreshingly straightforward: a three-column layout relatively uncluttered with self-promotion. Not that it's completely devoid of such ads. (Note to Web designers: Most p...

Google has proposed modifying its proposed digital books deal with publishers and authors in an effort to tamp down growing opposition to the project. The changes would limit the number of out-of-print books it places online. Industry groups were given a venue to complain about the proposed agreemen...

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has temporarily stayed an injunction against the sale of Microsoft Word that had been set to go into effect next month. Microsoft will be able to continue selling copies of its ubiquitous word processing software -- at least until the appeal of the o...

Travel Web sites were among the first category of e-commerce ventures to actually make a buck a decade or so ago. It is astounding, therefore, that recent industry reports show a deep dissatisfaction among many users of these portals. In particular, Forrester Research recently reported on the failin...

Congress should enact strict controls on how online advertisers can monitor and track consumers' behavior, according to 10 privacy groups that formed a coalition to lobby for the cause. The group has sent letters to six members of the U.S. House of Representatives describing the extent to which pers...

IBM is rolling out a public desktop cloud offering that it claims is the first subscription service of its kind. IBM Smart Business Desktop on the IBM Cloud "enables end-users to have the same capabilities of the traditional desktop, but with a thin client and delivered from the data center," said A...

Intel has boosted its sales forecast for Q3, providing an injection of confidence to the tech sector, where it's viewed as an industry bellwether. Intel now expects revenue for the third quarter to be $9 billion, plus or minus $200 million, compared with the previous range of $8.5 billion, plus or m...

Do you have a video that has the potential to really go viral, like the wedding entrance dance or David after the dentist? Post it on YouTube -- not only for the notoriety, but also for the cold hard cash. Google is expanding its revenue-sharing YouTube Partnership program to include individual popu...

A coalition of firms that oppose a settlement reached last year between Google and some representatives of the publishing industry over its Google Books project is growing. New members now reportedly include a troika of Web giants: Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo. The coalition, called the "Open Book Al...

Microsoft has asked an appeals court to stay an injunction that Judge Leonard Davis of the U.S. District Court for Eastern Texas issued against the sale of Microsoft Word. The judge made the ruling after a jury found that Microsoft had infringed on a patent held by Toronto-based i4i. It is set to go...

Albert Gonzalez, 28, a hacker already in jail awaiting trial for what was deemed the largest identity theft in the U.S., has apparently topped himself. Along with two unnamed coconspirators, Gonzalez has been indicted by a federal grand jury in New Jersey for an identity theft that trumps the previo...

Bert Nordberg, a 14-year veteran of telecom system provider Ericsson, has been named president of Sony Ericsson, the firm's joint cellphone venture with the Japanese consumer electronics giant. He'll be succeeding Hideki "Dick" Komiyama, a Sony executive who has led Sony Ericsson since 2007 and is n...

It is surprising -- albeit perhaps inevitable -- that the Obama Administration, which so ably navigated the Internet and Web 2.0 technologies during its presidential campaign, has stumbled using those same tools now that it is in office. The White House has received a large number of complaints from...