commerce

A small company called Kindle Lending Club plans to launch a beta site today or tomorrow that will let it profit from Amazon's e-book ecosystem.

The five-person start-up has a simple business model. First, connect people who are willing to lend the electronic books to those who want to borrow them. Second, when the borrowers discover that they didn't finish with Amazon's 14-day lending window, offer a link to buy the e-book and share a portion of the resulting revenue through Amazon's affiliate program.

It might not be enough to acquire Facebook, but site founder Catherine … Read more

STANFORD, Calif.--President Obama is planning to hand the U.S. Commerce Department authority over a forthcoming cybersecurity effort to create an Internet ID for Americans, a White House official said here today.

It's "the absolute perfect spot in the U.S. government" to centralize efforts toward creating an "identity ecosystem" for the Internet, White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt said.

That news, first reported by CNET, effectively pushes the department to the forefront of the issue, beating out other potential candidates, including the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security. The move … Read more

The late author Stieg Larsson can posthumously claim another victory: His "Millennium Trilogy" of thrillers topped both the print and e-book categories on Amazon this year. "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" was Amazon's best-selling Kindle e-book, and "The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest" was the online marketplace's top seller in printed books, according to a year-end list released Thursday.

Those two books also topped those categories when it came to the most appearances on Amazon users' wish lists, but perhaps because of their gory subject matter were not the … Read more

A financial news and research outlet called VCExperts posted an article today claiming that on December 17, daily-deals broker Groupon "filed a certificate to authorize a $950 million Series G round of preferred stock." The exact amount that the company raised in the monster funding round should be available next week (which means it could be quite a bit less), the report continued, adding that the company's valuation is likely $6.4 billion.

The dollar amount sounds like something out of Dr. Evil's machinations in the "Austin Powers" spoof film series, but Groupon isn'… Read more

The amount of money spent shopping online during the holiday season increased this year compared with last, say two recent reports, another sign of the Internet's continuing permeation of American life.

SpendingPulse, a report from MasterCard, pegged the year-over-year rise at 15.4 percent. The report, released this week and covering the period from October 31 to December 24, looks at sales in the MasterCard payment network and combines those figures with survey-derived estimates of non-credit-card purchases.

According to the report, apparel sales led the field among e-commerce categories, a sign, perhaps, that shoppers are becoming more comfortable with … Read more

The Commerce Department today edged toward endorsing new federal laws regulating companies' data collection practices and requiring that customers be notified of data breaches.

In an 88-page report (PDF), the department also suggested rewriting a 1986 privacy law to address "privacy protection in cloud computing and location-based services," but didn't offer any details. That broad approach is backed by tech companies including Google, Microsoft, AT&T, and eBay, but is likely to be opposed by the Justice Department.

All of these ideas have been advanced before, of course: California's data breach notification law took effect … Read more

The Internet finally seems to be as popular as TV, according to a study released yesterday by Forrester.

Based on a survey, the research firm's report found that people in the U.S. on average spend around 13 hours a week online, the same amount of time they spend watching TV.

As usual, the results vary by age. People ages 18 to 30 have been spending more time on the Internet than watching TV for awhile. But this marks the first Forrester study in which folks in the 32 to 44 group also are online more than they are … Read more

Lawyers representing independent filmmakers, including the studio that produced Oscar-winner "The Hurt Locker," might learn something from a document filed with the U.S. Department of Commerce today by music, television, and film industry trade groups.

The Commerce Department recently sent out a request for information, known as a "Notice of Information," on "copyright policy, creativity, and innovation in the Internet economy." What the Commerce Department intends to do with the information it obtains was unclear this afternoon, but it did receive a response from nine trade groups representing the entertainment sector. In that … Read more

After a New York Times magazine article exposed his bizarre business tactic of courting the worst customer feedback possible so that infuriated buyers would leave negative commentary online, boosting his Google search results, DecorMyEyes.com eyeglass proprietor Vitaly Borker has been arrested on charges of cyberstalking, making interstate threats, mail fraud, and wire fraud.

The original story about DecorMyEyes, published on November 26, detailed the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Borker's tactics of harassing, cheating, and bullying customers, sometimes under pseudonyms and often with threats of obscenity and violence, to the point that several of them contacted the police. He … Read more