Stories about: priceline.com

There's an age-old choice in IT -- whether to adopt a "best of breed" strategy for the power and flexibility it can bring, or go with a single vendor for accountability and simplicity. J. Craig Venter Institute Inc. (JCVI) believes in best of breed. The genomic research company runs Linux, Unix, Windows and Mac OS in its data center. For storage, it draws on technology from EMC, NetApp, Isilon, DataDomain and Symantec.

Eliot Spitzer, the disgraced New York governor making headlines in the US this week for being linked to a prostitution ring, is perhaps best known for his aggressive takedown of unethical Wall Street firms during his days as attorney general. But the former prosecutor also played a big role in cleaning up the high-tech and network industries.

Not all leadership qualities are ingrained at birth. You can learn some of them. But it helps if you want to lead and are willing to listen.

To manage application performance, Evolution Benefits starts right at the source -- the code itself. "We sell our performance and uptime," explains Sean Erwin, vice president of application development for the U.S.-based company.

Priceline.com, the online travel service, has bet its business model on the fact that Web-savvy customers like to help themselves -- in this case, to deals on airfare, hotels, car rentals and the like. The US-based company has extended that model to its customer service operations, adopting an e-service strategy to complement its telephone-based call center. If customers run into trouble during a travel search, they're encouraged to try self-service or e-mail options -- more cost-effective ways to handle services issues -- before resorting to a phone call.

Further expanding its online travel empire, InterActiveCorp agreed to buy discount travel Web site Hotwire.com for US$665 million in cash and the assumption of about US$20 million in options and warrants, the company said Monday.

It's easy to fool e-mail harvesting software, even though the primary source for spammers' e-mail lists are e-mail addresses listed on public Web sites, according to a six-month experiment from the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT).

The decline in travel brought on by the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and the weakened economy have forced airlines and travel companies to cut costs wherever they can. As a result, CTOs are using Web services and other technologies as strategic weapons to meet that itinerary. Underscoring the situation's seriousness is the Aug. 12 bankruptcy filing of U.S. Airways, which listed US$7.81 billion in assets and $7.83 billion in liabilities, and the fiscal troubles facing major carrier United Airlines.

Ramifications from the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 continue to ripple through the business world this week, as the online travel company Priceline.com Inc. reported a 40 percent drop in bookings Monday, and a 35 percent drop Tuesday.

There are two ways to look at last week's largely uneventful Code Red fire drill.

More evidence that cash is king among Internet execs can be found in the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission filings of public Internet companies, according to "The Internet Compensation Survey: 2001," a study recently released by Unifi Network, a subsidiary of PricewaterhouseCoopers.