Stories about: Petco

It's 10 o'clock on a sunny April morning in Balboa Park. In a spacious Girl Scout cabin tucked away amid lush green palm trees, 20 girls ranging in age from 11 to 14, most wearing jeans and pigtails, are gearing up for today's camp activities. But there are no sit-upons or s'mores, potholders or paper crafts -- just 21 laptops, two color printers, 10 digital cameras, two scanners and a palpable abundance of preadolescent energy and creative enthusiasm.

Last February at Purdue University, a student taking "cs390s - Secure Computing" told his professor, Dr. Pascal Meunier, that a Web application he used for his physics class seemed to contain a serious vulnerability that made the app highly insecure. Such a discovery didn't surprise Meunier. "It's a secure computing class; naturally students want to discover vulnerabilities."

At the Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT in September, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos gave a keynote talk on the slew of new and innovative Web services his company has recently launched. His discussion of MTurk, S3, and EC2 held no surprises for me, or for readers of this column and of my blog. But one of the questions posed by an attendee, in the Q&A period following Bezos' talk, was a stunner.

After Chuck Latham spent US$300,000 trying, and failing, to launch a mobile sales application for his sales firm, he didn't give up.

The e-commerce shakeout continues as online pet site Petopia.com Inc. and beleaguered Internet toy retailer eToys Inc. close their virtual doors.

Online retailer Petstore.com expired unceremoniously today, laying off most of its remaining employees and selling off some of its assets to struggling rival Pets.com. The move comes two weeks after the Emeryville, Calif.-based company fired a large portion of its workforce, which stood at about 200 earlier this year.