Stories about: Webvan

The collapse of Wall Street may help make computer science and other IT careers attractive to students who abandoned those fields in droves after the dot-com bust of 2001.

The collapse of Wall Street may help make computer science and IT careers attractive to students who abandoned these fields in droves after the pop of the last big bubble, the dot-com bust of 2001.

A decade ago I was working for Bay Networks in Santa Clara, California. Bay Networks was number two in the internetworking hardware market, with annual revenue of about US$2 billion. Bay was bought in 1999 for $9 billion by Nortel Networks, a telecom hardware manufacturer on an acquisition spree. Faced with a very different corporate culture, I chose in 2000 to accept the position of Director of Vertical Marketing at a small e-commerce startup named Enigma in Boston, Massachusetts.

Business applications company Siebel Systems has appointed George Shaheen as its new chief executive officer (CEO), effective immediately, the company announced Wednesday.

Software project management suffers from confusion over project goals, developers working without supervision, and even from developers being miscast as engineers, said panelists during a keynote session at the VSLive show on Wednesday.

Storage management software is hot. Over the last year the industry has witnessed significant advances in storage management software technology, and an A-list of hardware companies from EMC Corp. to Sun Microsystems Inc. and Compaq Computer Corp. continue to scramble to add new storage software tools to their separate arsenals as hardware margins plummet.

No one at Webvan's San Diego operations saw it coming. In mid-January, four months after acquiring rival HomeGrocer.com, Webvan was set to unite the two most powerful online grocers under one brand and one technology platform. It was a milestone, the first step toward the efficiency the companies had promised Wall Street at the time of the US$1.2 billion merger. HomeGrocer's San Diego warehouse would switch over to Webvan's technology, and other facilities would follow.

Microsoft and U.K. grocery store chain Tesco PLC announced Tuesday an agreement to allow users to shop online over Microsoft Pocket PC devices and smart phones using the retail Web site portal Tesco Access.

The online grocery business lost a second vendor this week when HomeRuns.com, which has been in business since 1996, closed its doors yesterday.

Online grocer Webvan Group Inc. announced Monday that it is ceasing all operations and filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, due to a considerable decline in order volume during the second quarter ended June 30.

Recently-listed software developer Clarity International has scored a big contract in Taiwan's deregulating telecommunications sector, while Trans Union Advantage will bring Thai credit systems up to international standards and m2m has taken coals to Newcastle by selling software and services to a US online grocery. Even on the home front the deals continued unabated