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The old-school approach to order fulfillment doesn't fly for many internet retailers. Warehousing, packing, shipping and return-order processing are labor-intensive and time-consuming. This has led to a growing trend among online sellers -- the use of Web technologies to automate order fulfillment. I'm talking about e-commerce fulfillment providers.

In the current US election, I would argue the winner actually will benefit from the excessive negative campaigning done by his opponent, who sacrificed trust and in many cases implied the U.S. voter was too stupid to go to the Web and look things up. The well-executed Mac vs. Windows ads, while at least funny and entertaining, drifted from solid hits to outright hypocrisy.

I was sitting in a rather boring meeting last week when my iPhone buzzed. I took a peek at the SMS, hoping it was a text message from my daughter. It was not. Like millions of other iPhone owners from New York to L.A., I got a message stating that," Your Apple iPhone now has free AT&T WiFi access at thousands of hotspots nationwide, including Starbucks ..."

How closely will competitors follow in this latest digital home pursuit?

All the major studios are on board. Is Apple's iTunes store in trouble?

Our design doyenne Helen Bradley shows you how to add reflections to product shots in Photoshop.

MySpace, MTV Networks and online ad platform Auditude are teaming up to try and squeeze money out of pirated video -- content distributed online without the permission of the rights holder. The trio's plan is to identify online pirated video clips, slap an ad overlay on top of them, and monetize their use, returning a portion of the proceeds back to the copyright holders.

The same credit problems that have hit many a home mortgage holder are also threatening to unplug troubled electronics big-box store Circuit City. The nation's second-largest seller of consumer electronics said Monday it will close 155 stores, lay off up to 17 percent of its 43,000-employee U.S. workforce, and consider all options to restructure its business.

As the U.S. presidential election season winds down, a handful of political polls that include mobile phone users show Democrat Barack Obama beating Republican John McCain by a substantially wider margin than polls that do not include cell phone users. In polls that extended to cell phones, Obama beat McCain by an average of 10 points versus just 5 points in polls limited to land lines.

Spending a couple million dollars doesn't guarantee commercial success.