Online retail sales are booming, and small and medium businesses are trying to find ways to capitalize on this trend. IBM has been focusing on tools to help SMBs to launch profitably into the cyber world of retailing. IBM Targets SMB Market

The growth of Wikis, blogs and RSS on the net has engendered a new era of user-added value. This poses opporutnities for business. It may mean the development of new business models, based on user input. Perhaps not unlike the era of user self-service? Higher Learning - Wikis, Weblogs and RSS: What Does the New Internet Mean for Business? - Higher Learning - CIO

The music recording industry may have found its new business model, which it has desperately needed since the original napster ran amuck with illegal downloads. Now, legal music downloads have tripled in the first half of 2005, with illegal downloads rising only 3%. It's good news for the industry and the artists. The legal downloads generally sell single tracks, but give the user the choice of buying single tracks, or whole albums - still often called CD's (I wonder how long that will last?). E-Commerce News: Personal Tech : Report: Legal Music Downloads Triple in First Half of '05

Universities in the US are increasingly combining business degrees with technology degrees. It's based on the idea that modern managers need deeper IT skills to properly do their job. It's an idea that has been around for several years, but not one that has fully hit the mainstream. However, with the growth of e-business and the use of technology in business generally, it seems an obvious course to take. It is particularly needed in MBA programs, and one could argue, necessary to their continuing relevance. 2 for 1: Colleges eye combining tech, business degrees - Computerworld

XBRL International has announced the release of a new working draft of its XBRL GL taxonomy. This taxonomy enables the tagging of data at the GL and journal entry level. It is expected to be particularly useful in linking different and disparate systems. Since XBRL is an XML taxonomy specifically intended for Financial and Business Reporting and has been identified by the SEC and others as the prime technology for data tagging for these purposes, it is expected that XBRL GL will become an important part of Financial Reporting Control Systems. XBRL releases new version of its GL taxonomy

As if copyright laws in the internet age weren't hard enough to cope with, a new amendment to Canada's Copyright Act, if passed, could possibly make it illegal to allow your search engine to cache webpages - you could end up in jail according to some lawyers. In Canada: Cache a page, go to jail? | CNET News.com

A couple of major legal firms have gotten into hot water over privacy issues, showing once again the minefield that firms must navigate in the face of the privacy laws in the age of the internet. Globetechnology: Firms get wrists slapped over privacy breach

Yet another entry into the internet business model sweepstakes is Podcasting. Based on the popular iPod, Podcasting uses the internet to send out radio programs that can be created by anyone and that can be time shifted (i.e. listened to at a time convenient to the listener). How to make money on it is the issue. People are looking at the traditional options for internet content - advertising and subscriptions. http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/index.cfm?fa=viewArticle&id=1239

Is technology running your life? Is it making you run so fast you don't enjoy life? If so, you have lots of company. One answer is to make sure you turn it all off for a day or two once in a while. BBC NEWS | Technology | Time to switch off and slow down

If you use your cell phone for internet browsing, things should get better. A new naming system using a "mobi" suffix has been approved that will enable people to recognize sites specifially designed for phones. CNN.com - New .mobi Web suffix�for phones - Jul 11, 2005

In a review of a new book by John Markoff, called "What the Dormouse Said", this article tells an interesting story of the early days of computing, from the invention of the mouse to character based screens. It tells how computing graduated from number manipulation to knowledge management, one of the great quantum leaps of history. The Dream of a Lifetime

The International conference on System Sciences has produced a paper that contains a timely proposal on business stakeholder analysis. hicss,Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'05) - Track 1: "As the Web is used increasingly to share and disseminate information, business analysts and managers are challenged to understand stakeholder relationships. Traditional stakeholder analysis approaches fail to accommodate the rapid Web growth while existing business intelligence tools lack analysis capability. This paper proposes an automatic classification approach to business stakeholder analysis on the Web. "

A paper has been published in Global Perspectives dealing with three accounting issues of particular interest to e-commerce firms: 1. Expensing versus capitalizing web site development costs;2. Auction sites fees – amortization versus recognizing all at once; 3. Barter transactions – when is the fair market value known? Global Perspectives

The CBC has put togeher a fascinating collection of articles from the past thirty years that show the history of the internet age in Canada. for anyone with an interest in e-Business history, it's interesting reading. Inventing the Internet Age - Science and Technology - CBC Archives

There has been a lot of publicity recently about identity theft, loss of personal data and the like. Now it seems this is causing a decline in online sales, as customers lose confidence in the security of the online system. It's another reason why the whole issue of security over private data needs to be addressed.Security Breaches Cause E-Commerce Confidence to Wane