Newest Articles For Top News

Business Leadership Know-How
By Steven Charles - Sun Jan 21, 2007 10:23:52 AM ET
There's something seriously wrong with the way we think about business leadership. We spend so much time debating the exact set of personality traits our leaders should have that we miss the most important thing: the know-how of running a business. What difference does it make if a leader can rile ...

Thinking Big and Small
By Steven Charles - Sun Jan 21, 2007 10:15:30 AM ET
Have you known people who can see the big picture, but have no clue about the details of a situation? Or people who get so lost in the details that they fail to see the locomotive coming down the tracks? Successful leaders learn to think at a range of altitudes. Kay Krill, CEO of retailer Ann Taylor, ...

Chocolate benefits found in heart study
By John Henry X - Tue Nov 14, 2006 11:08:01 PM ET
WASHINGTON -- They were so addicted, they just could not give up their favorite daily snack -- not even in the interest of science. But chocolate lovers who flunked out of a Johns Hopkins University study on aspirin and heart disease helped researchers stumble on an explanation of why a little chocolate ...

Congress debating tougher Internet gambling bill
By John Henry Xu - Tue Jul 11, 2006 12:25:53 PM ET
Congress may deliver a blow to gamblers who prefer going online to going to Las Vegas. The House is debating a bill that would clarify existing law by spelling out that Internet gambling is illegal. The legislation would forbid credit cards and other forms of payment from being used to settle online ...

Have an idea for a startup
By John Henry X - Thu Feb 2, 2006 5:20:00 PM ET

Have an idea for a startup that could challenge an industry leader? There's never been a better time to come late to the race.

Hackers Attack U.K. Student's Web Site
By John Henry X - Wed Jan 18, 2006 9:20:54 PM ET
LONDON - A Web site that earned an enterprising British student $1 million suffered a crippling attack by ransom-seeking hackers. Alex Tew, 21, said Wednesday that his Million Dollar Homepage was targeted after he publicized how it had helped him raise money for his university studies. Tew had ...

Web sites judged in a blink
By John Henry X - Tue Jan 17, 2006 6:56:26 PM ET
TORONTO, Ontario -- Internet users can give Web sites a thumbs up or thumbs down in less than the blink of an eye, according to a study by Canadian researchers. In just a brief one-twentieth of a second -- less than half the time it takes to blink -- people make aesthetic judgments that influence ...

Chicago's Legendary news service shuts down
By John Henry X - Mon Jan 2, 2006 7:02:14 PM ET
CHICAGO - The journalistic descendants of novelist Kurt Vonnegut and Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Seymour Hersh gathered at one of Chicago's venerable watering holes on New Year's Eve to mourn the loss of another storied institution. City News, a just-the-facts wire service that covered Chicago's ...

'Internet-illiterate parent' fights downloading lawsuit
By John Henry X - Sun Jan 1, 2006 9:28:33 PM ET
WHITE PLAINS, New York -- It was Easter Sunday, and Patricia Santangelo was in church with her kids when she says the music recording industry peeked into her computer and decided to take her to court. Santangelo says she has never downloaded a single song on her computer, but the industry didn't ...

Student cashes in with $million Web idea
By John Henry X - Sat Dec 31, 2005 10:10:23 AM ET
LONDON, England -- If you have an envious streak, you probably shouldn't read this. Because chances are, Alex Tew, a 21-year-old student from a small town in England, is cleverer than you. And he is proving it by earning a cool million dollars in four months on the Internet. Selling porn? Dealing ...

Can Microsoft catch Google and Yahoo?
By John Henry X - Fri Dec 23, 2005 3:24:28 PM ET
So for Microsoft and its MSN Internet unit, playing third fiddle to Google and Yahoo! in Internet search is an uncomfortable position to be in, especially for a company accustomed to domination. And now that AOL has spurned a deal to use MSN's search technology in favor of expanding its relationship ...

Blogging for Dollars
By John Henry X - Thu Dec 15, 2005 8:22:07 PM ET
Umbria's service is warp-speed quick. It usually takes less than a minute for the spider to crawl through those 20 million blogs. That's followed by a few additional minutes spent running linguistic algorithms on any relevant blog entries. Then out spits an "Umbria Buzz Report" that tells clients how ...

Customer surveys on the cheap
By John Henry X - Thu Dec 15, 2005 8:17:30 PM ET
NEW YORK - Want to find out what your customers are thinking for less than what a Madison Avenue consultant spends in a year on his lattes? Consider the case of Konstantin Guericke, the co-founder of LinkedIn, an online network that professionals can use to find new clients or pick up leads on jobs. ...

Purchase of "social media" company Del.icio.us
By John Henry X - Sat Dec 10, 2005 11:54:10 PM ET
NEW YORK - Joshua Schachter is surrounded by lawyers and his phone is ringing off the hook. He just sold his two-year-old company, Del.icio.us, to Yahoo!Friday for an undisclosed sum (estimated to be in the range of $15 million to $30 million). "All I want is to go home and sleep right now," says ...

Yahoo to gobble up Del.icio.us
By John Henry X - Sat Dec 10, 2005 1:36:18 PM ET
Yahoo Inc., the world's largest Internet media site, had agreed to acquire Del.icio.us, a popular Web site that helps users share links to their favorite Web sites, the site's founder said Friday. Del.icio.us site allows sharing of favorite Web pages. This is the second buy of site with user-contributed ...

The 70 percent solution
By John Henry X - Tue Nov 29, 2005 2:32:47 PM ET
Before he arrived at Google in 2001 to serve as adult supervision for Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt was little known outside SiliconValley. With his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and research stints at Bell Labs and Xerox's famed Palo Alto Research Center, he had ...

Tips for Marketing Success
By John Henry X - Tue Nov 29, 2005 2:03:42 PM ET
Make a point of practicing three to five marketing activities every day, and you'll soon develop a successful marketing habit. Part of the marketing mindset suggests that you should be thinking about marketing all the time. Not just quarterly, not just monthly, not just weekly, but every single ...

Dangerous Chemicals in Foods
By John Henry X - Wed Nov 9, 2005 11:20:38 AM ET
For thousands of years, man ate only fresh food; fruits, vegetables, grains, and meat went straight from the wilderness or the field to our plates. Today, a majority of foods found on supermarket shelves in North America are loaded with potentially harmful chemical additives, preservatives, and other ...

PluggedIn: "Mashups" find potholes and sex offenders
By John Henry X - Fri Aug 26, 2005 9:23:31 PM ET
WASHINGTON - As Mark and Aaron Olsen combed the Utah mountains for a missing Boy Scout last June, they worried that he might have been abducted by a sex offender, following a spate of similar incidents in other U.S. states. As it turned out, 11-year-old Brennan Hawkins was simply lost. Still, a few ...

Monster.com CEO not selling
By John Henry X - Sun Jun 26, 2005 10:54:21 PM ET
NEW YORK - Monster Worldwide Inc., which runs the biggest U.S. recruiting Web site, Monster.com, has good prospects and is a tempting takeover target, even though its shares are not cheap, Barron's said in its June 27 edition. But the New York-based company's 70-year-old chief executive, Andrew McKelvey, ...

40M credit cards hacked
By John Henry X - Sun Jun 19, 2005 3:10:15 PM ET
Of the cards involved, 13.9 million were MasterCard-branded cards, which include Maestro and Cirrus, and 22 million were Visa cards, said Visa spokeswoman Rhonda Bentz. The breach took place at the Tucson office of CardSystems Solutions, which processes transactions on behalf of financial institutions ...

Bank of America to buy into China lender
By John Henry X - Fri Jun 17, 2005 12:14:33 AM ET
HONG KONG/SHANGHAI - Bank of America Corp., the second biggest U.S. bank, said it would pay $3 billion for a 9 percent stake in China Construction Bank in the largest single foreign investment in China's banking sector. Bank of America wants to expand abroad after reaching the 10 percent maximum share ...

eBay agrees to buy Shopping.com
By John Henry X - Thu Jun 2, 2005 11:56:05 AM ET
SAN FRANCISCO - Online auctioneer eBay Inc. said on Wednesday it agreed to buy Shopping.com, which provides online comparison shopping and consumer reviews, for about $620 million in cash. The move by eBay would strengthen its hand in being able to bring consumers online comparison shopping, something ...

Top 10 cities for living
By John Henry X - Mon May 23, 2005 3:23:23 PM ET
The living costs measured in the new Salary Value Index include housing, food, transportation, utilities and state taxes. The index also factors in an area's employment and job-growth rates. What it does not account for are quality-of-life issues, such as culture, school systems and the weather. ...

Everybody loves Google?
By Steven Charles - Tue May 3, 2005 4:59:24 PM ET
NEW YORK - In honor of National Teacher Day, Google featured on its home page Tuesday a graphic of a chalkboard with an apple at its base. Quirky tributes like this are meant to engender goodwill among the Google masses. Not everyone, however, is feeling warm and fuzzy toward Google. A new study ...

Features of Bankruptcy Legislation
By Steven Charles - Thu Apr 14, 2005 5:03:57 PM ET
The legislation to overhaul U.S. bankruptcy laws would: 1.Set up a new means test for measuring a debtor's ability to repay. 2.Require people filing for bankruptcy to pay for credit counseling. 3.Give top priority to a spouse's claims for child support among creditors' claims on a debtor ...

Scientists Scramble to Destroy Flu Strain
By John Henry X - Wed Apr 13, 2005 12:50:47 PM ET
Scientists around the world were scrambling to prevent the possibility of a pandemic after a nearly 50-year-old killer influenza virus was sent to thousands of labs, a decision that one researcher described as ``unwise.'' Nearly 5,000 labs in 18 countries, mostly in the United States, were urged by ...