eBay will unveil sweeping changes on Wednesday to encourage more fixed-price sellers as part of a wider attempt to transform the business.
Although Google’s motto is "don’t be evil", the setting couldn’t more closely resemble a Bond villain’s lair. Amid rolling English countryside in the county of Hertfordshire, a country house hotel is playing host to the company’s Zeitgeist conference.
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/ 30 January 2007
Some technology boffins predict that the way we watch television will change irrevocably. Technology has already turned huge international industries upside down. When the peer-to-peer file sharing service Kazaa appeared, it sent music companies into a panic. Kazaa was followed by the internet phone service Skype, which quickly attracted millions of users and was sold to eBay for £1,3-billion.
Heads or tails? The editor-in-chief of the Silicon Valley bible Wired, and the man who has written the clearest explanation yet of the shift from the one-size-fits-all, mass-media world to a diverse, complex world of millions of niches, is keeping both options covered.
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/ 15 February 2005
Digital media company Napster last week unveiled a portable subscription service that it claimed would ”change the music industry forever” and allow it to compete more effectively in its increasingly bitter battle with Apple’s market-leading iTunes. Napster To Go will give the company a significant point of difference from Apple, allowing subscribers to rent songs from its catalogue of 1,3-million tracks.
Three years ago it took only one word to strike fear into the heart of even the most complacent and bloated record company executive — Napster. Now the music download service that threw the entire industry into a frenzied bout of cost-cutting and consternation is back, and this time it is legal. Owen Gibson meets the man launching a new spin on digital downloads.
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/ 4 November 2003
Strange days indeed at the Googleplex, the Silicon Valley home of half the assorted collection of self-styled geeks who make up Google’s 1 000-strong global workforce. For at least two years Internet pundits have been trying to second-guess when it would list. Users and company insiders fear that Google’s innovation will be sacrificed when the company goes public
Major record labels have realised that the only way to beat internet file-swapping is to make legal, pay-per-download sites more attractive. But is it too little, too late, asks Owen Gibson.