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As I watch the world economy spiraling downward, I thank my lucky stars that I happen to work in one of the few industries that is expected to grow despite the downturn. Nonetheless, online retailers are going to face slower growth than we were all predicting even a few weeks ago, and the industry is being forced to completely reevaluate budgets and priorities. Suddenly the five big initiatives you had planned for 2009 are going to get cut down to two or three, and you'll be forced to make some hard and lasting choices about where to invest...

Chief marketing officers (CMOs) are given the unenviable, almost contradictory, task of catching marketing lightning in a bottle on a consistent basis. The problem is that turbulent economic conditions, like the ones we've experience recently, have historically stymied marketing innovation and forced CMOs to focus their budget on "tried-and-true" tactics rather than experimental ones...

There have been some alternative solutions. Hulu.com, for example, publishes video clips from popular television shows via network television partnerships. Those clips, in turn, can be published in end-user blogs, which encourages everyday Internet Joes to use Hulu clips instead of their own -- often poorly copied -- versions.

For me, the most telling collision of the past few weeks -- the one that serves as the best example of the old vs. new media/bias vs. objectivity paradigm that's now all the rage -- was the Oct. 23 WFTV-Orlando satellite interview with Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden. Anchor Barbara West's questions hit hard -- like body blows -- on ACORN's voter registration efforts, Joe the Plumber, "spreading the wealth," Marxism, Biden's recent comment about a Barack Obama administration being "tested" during its first six months in office...

Something for the Average Joe Mozilla did not forget about its users. The new beta offers users a peek at a new tab-switching functionality that gives a preview of the tab before you switch to it by hitting the CTRL and Tab buttons....

Primavera staff will join the newly created business unit, led by Primavera's CEO Joel Koppelman as senior vice president and general manager. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to be complete by the second half of this year. Until the deal closes, the two companies will continue to operate separately.

"Our experience with other incentive-based programs demonstrated that there is an opportunity to increase user loyalty in the search space," Microsoft spokesperson Joel Steinfeld -- who declined to answer any specific questions about the initiative -- told the E-Commerce Times.

"It's not a propitious time to be overextending yourself in credit card debt, for sure, because no one knows just how much more serious the crisis will get," Joe Ridout, a spokesperson for Consumer Action, told the E-Commerce Times. "At the same time, for someone not in a position to pay off their balance month to month, [BillShrink] is a good tool for finding a low-interest rate card."

Developed as a result of surveys conducted throughout its customer base of some 700,000 small and medium-sized businesses worldwide, "HP AI in a Box" will enable SMBs to "bridge over to new infrastructure, help them unlock cost advantages and realize efficiencies," Joe Leung, worldwide program manager for HP Proliant Business Advantage, told TechNewsWorld...

"The activities of the CNCI are so secretive that it functions as anunderground agency. Even Senator [Joe] Lieberman, after hounding theadministration for an explanation, only received an official letterthat was heavily redacted, indicating that the CNCI is a super topsecret agency that operates on a need-to-know basis," Peterson said...

A day before Americans bowed their heads to remember the victims of Sept. 11, YouTube bowed to pressure concerning online terrorist propaganda from Sen. Joe Lieberman and decided it will no longer allow videos that encourage or teach people to hurt other people "While it might...

Joel Falconerattakes a lookat six Web-based CRM applications: Salesforce.com, Highrise, Oracle OnDemand, SugarCRM, PipelineDeals and Zoho CRM. It's a good read -- especially for small businesses that are novices to the CRM market -- because he doesn't pull his punches. On Hig...

Rolling out a similar platform makes sense for Microsoft, Joel Comm, a principal with InfoMedia, a developer for the iPhone platform, told the E-Commerce Times "I can't believe it has taken them this long, actually. Windows has been a major mobile platform for years," Comm sai...

On Aug. 1, four members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce [Representatives John David Dingell (D-Mich.), Joe Barton (R-Texas), Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.)] ordered 33 cable and Internet companies (e.g., AT&T, Google, Microsoft, Comcast and Cox Communications), to provide details about their privacy standards for behavioral marketing. The responses were received the week of Aug. 11. They varied from companies who stated they are not currently using behavorial marketing techniques (e.g., AT&T) to others who provided more detail behind their use of deep-packet inspection technologies...

Puppy uses Joe's Window Manager (JWM). More traditional Linux distros use a less compact desktop interface such as GNOME or KDE. By comparison, JWM is much simpler with fewer user options. It is configured with a clock, sound, a battery level indicator for laptops, a memory indicator and a CPU utilization graph...

The Chinese government continues to generate negative headlines in the run-up to Friday's opening ceremonies of the Olympic Summer Games. Beijing is refusing to grant a visa for Olympic gold medalist and Darfur activist Joey Cheek. For Yahoo, Microsoft and Google, the criticism revolves around various past incidents. Their cooperation with the Communist government has resulted in dissidents being thrown in jail, as well as restrictions on Web access and search engines...

Firing up a brand-new PC is a magic moment that can never be recaptured. The flawless performance, the lightning-fast speeds, the uncluttered desktop -- they're a thing of beauty. In time, though, just about all PC users will have to cope with their share of problems, from sluggish download speeds to out-and-out system failures ...

We've all done it. The holiday season was crazy, the busiest ever. We missed feature lockdown by a mile, cramming in every last bit just as things began to seriously ramp up. The servers went down on Black Friday. A database crash prevented us from processing returns for four agonizing days. Somehow we managed to survive, adding more chewing gum and baling wire to an e-commerce system than has been stuck to the underside of a third grade desk.

Last week, Steve had a big problem: People were becoming too focused on his health, and he needed to turn that focus off. His people tried to do this at the analyst conference by trying to get the analysts and reporters excited about unannounced products, but that didn't work. So Steve himself stepped in and contacted reporter Joe Nocera. You should read what resulted...

The Red Queen in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass lives in a very curious world where, as she explains to Alice, "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." I think that sentence sums up the world of e-commerce with uncanny accuracy: No matter how hard we work to knock items off the priority list, there are always new ones popping right up to take their place.