The Internet is a great deflator, squeezing out the middlemen and lowering prices. The shifting fortunes of Wall Street brokers and travel agents are good examples. However, the Internet’s deflationary impact is on full display in the international long-distance market, where Skype has started to take away any and all growth from the phone companies. [...]
Have you ever left a store or restaurant without looking at your receipt, only later to find a bogus charge? In most cases, the errors are innocent enough — maybe the harried waitress at the local drive-thru accidentally tacked on an extra soft drink. Even looking back at own our receipts, we sometimes can’t recognize [...]
Parents always crab that washing machines come with manuals, but babies don’t. Joel Bakan’s Childhood Under Siege won’t tell you about the 2 a.m. feeding, but it will clue you in on parent traps you never imagined when you were decorating the nursery. Who knew: • How changes to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, used [...]
When West Philadelphia resident Candice Cheatham was pregnant with her daughter Micaiah, now 7 months, her nurses never mentioned the dangers of mercury poisoning. But Cheatham did some research and learned that mercury spewing from power plants could work its way into the fish she normally ate, which could lead to birth defects. So, she [...]
Inventory shortages caused by the effects of Japan’s earthquake have led to rising prices for new and used vehicles, creating what one analyst describes as a ‘huge seller’s market.’ Attention all car buyers: The era of cut-rate financing, generous cash-back offers and big discounts is coming to an end. With the effects of the earthquake in Japan [...]
The fast rise in food prices could begin to taper off later this year. The government’s latest crop report estimates that the domestic supply of corn, which had been forecast to shrink, will grow in the months ahead. The Department of Agriculture report suggested the high price of corn is prompting ranchers and feed makers [...]
The days of all-you-can-surf broadband are vanishing. AT&T this week began capping its Internet delivery service for broadband and DSL customers. The move comes 11 months after it placed similar caps on its mobile customers. U-Verse — AT&T’s high-speed broadband, television and telephone network — now limits customers to 250 gigabytes of Internet usage each [...]
The pay TV network will begin offering its subscribers access to HBO Go programming on Android mobile devices and Apple Inc.’s iPhone and iPad tablet at no additional charge. “That device has changed television,” HBO Co-President Eric Kessler said this week, pointing to an iPad during an interview at the company’s Santa Monica offices. HBO [...]
What happens when you cross the world’s largest social network with one of the hottest business models in e-commerce? Facebook wants to find out. Facebook is launching a deals program Tuesday in five U.S. cities, following on the popularity of Groupon and other services that offer deep discounts — for example: $50 worth of food [...]
A rare and major outage of Amazon’s cloud-based Web service on Thursday took down a plethora of other online sites, including Reddit, HootSuite, Foursquare and Quora. The outages began Thursday morning just before 5 a.m. ET and were still ongoing more than 24 hours later. In a series of running updates on its Web services [...]
Spending money wisely, from home repair to shopping
