E-Marketing

Online retailers are shifting their marketing from traditional advertising to less expensive tools like Facebook.comand Twitter and e-mail as they seek market share or just work to retain customers, according to an industry study being released Tuesday.

Conducted by Internet analysis firm Forrester Research forShop.org — the online arm of the trade group National Retail Federation — the survey found that merchants believe online business is better suited to withstand an economic downturn than physical stores or catalogs, though they acknowledge challenges for both.

The study involved 117 online retailers polled between Feb. 18 and April 1.

The companies, which Shop.org didn't name, reported scaling back hiring and their increasingly expensive search marketing programs, which include paying for top billing in the results consumers see for their Web searches. Online merchants whose business is beating expectations will likely fuel much of the e-commerce investments in the coming months, the survey found.

Windows 7 near done

Microsoft Corp. has released a near-final version of the Windows 7 operating system that adds a few new features, including a way to run Windows XP applications.

The Windows 7 "release candidate" was made available to a large group of technology-savvy testers Thursday and will be ready for anyone to download and try out starting Tuesday. The release candidate is typically the version used by Microsoft's corporate customers to test how the new system will work for them. Software developers, hardware makers and other partners also base their next-generation products on this version because they trust that it's stable and close to finished.

Microsoft published the Vista release candidate about five months before the final version went on sale to consumers. If Windows 7 were to follow the same trajectory, it could be available by the start of October. Officially, Microsoft expects to start selling Windows 7 by the end of January 2010, but has said this week that it is possible it could launch in time for the holiday shopping season.

The software maker is counting on Windows 7 to win over businesses that put off upgrading to Vista, which got off to a rough start because it didn't work well with many existing programs and devices.

Disney joins NBC and News Corp. with Hulu stake

The Walt Disney Co. is taking a stake inHulu.com. This means titles from The Walt Disney Studios library of films and full-length episodes of ABC television shows will join the online video site.

Disney joins NBC Universal, News Corp. and private equity firmProvidence Equity Partners, who own Hulu in a joint venture.

Disney said Chief Executive Robert Iger, Disney/ABC Television Group President Anne Sweeney and Kevin Mayer, a Disney senior vice president, will join Hulu's board.

Financial terms were not disclosed.

Obamas first 100

The President almost seemed apologetic. "This may be a slightly longer speech than I usually give," he told his audience at Georgetown University on April 14. "This is going to be prose and not poetry." What followed, as promised, was not poetry. Barack Obama doesn't do much poetry anymore. But in prose that was spare and clear and compelling, the President proceeded to describe how his Administration had responded to the financial crisis, the overriding challenge of his first 100 days in office. He had covered this ground before, nearly as well, in his budget message to Congress. But now Obama went further, using a parable from the Sermon on the Mount - the need for a house built on rock rather than on sand - to describe a future that was nothing less than an overhaul of the nature of American capitalism. "It is simply not sustainable," he said, "to have an economy where, in one year, 40% of our corporate profits came from a financial sector that was based on inflated home prices, maxed-out credit cards, overleveraged banks and overvalued assets."

Cablevisions fast internet

Cablevision Systems Corp. on Tuesday unveiled the fastest Internet speeds available from any cable or phone company.

Starting May 11, the Bethpage, N.Y.-based cable operator will offer speeds of up to 101 megabits per second downstream throughout its service area, and 15 megabits per second upstream.

That means a 4-gigabyte, high-definition movie can be downloaded in 5 1/2 minutes. It would take two minutes for a 1.6-gigabyte standard definition movie.

Cablevision, which has 3 million subscribers in the New York metro area, also plans to double the downstream speed of the Wi-Fi Internet service it offers at "hot spots" in New York's Long Island, Connecticut and Westchester County, and in parts of New Jersey.

Cablevision is in a race against Verizon Communications Inc., which is rolling out its fiber-optic FiOS service in New York City.

At present, Verizon's top Internet speed is 50 megabits per second with a starting cost of $140 a month plus a free wireless router. Cablevision is offering its service at $99.95 a month.

Hollywood vs DVD ripper

Hollywood calls it "rent, rip and return" and contends it's one of the biggest technological threats to the movie industry's annual $20 billion DVD market — software that allows you to copy a film without paying for it.

On Friday, industry lawyers urged a federal judge to barRealNetworks Inc. from selling software that allows consumers to copy their DVDs to computer hard drives, arguing that the Seattle-based company's product is an illegal pirating tool.

RealNetworks' lawyers countered later in the morning that its RealDVD product is equipped with piracy protections that limits a DVD owner to making a single copy and a legitimate way to back up copies of movies legally purchased.

The same federal judge who shut down the music-swapping site Napster in 2000 because of copyright violations is presiding over the three-day trial, which is expected to cut to the heart of the same technological upheaval roiling Hollywood that forever changed the face of the music business.

Facebook adopts new rules

Facebook will adopt new rules governing the social network even though a vote fell well short of a minimum threshold.

The new documents specify, among other things, that users own their information, not Facebook. An earlier attempt to push changes led to user confusion and protests over who controls the personal information people share on the site.

More than 600,000 of Facebook's 200 million regular users voted over the past week, with nearly three-quarters in favor of the changes. Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook said Friday an outside auditor is verifying the results.

Ted Ullyot, Facebook's general counsel, said turnout is "a small number" compared with the site's user base. Facebook had set a minimum threshold of a 30 percent voter turnout for the vote to be binding. That would have been about 60 million people, or about 100 times the actual turnout