Jeffrey Rothfeder

In privacy circles, a mostly forgotten incident from the end of the dot-com euphoria aptly illustrates the lack of regard most companies have toward protecting personal data, even if they make a point of promising to do so. The episode occurred in mid-2000, when Toysmart.com Inc., a Web-based retailer, went out of business. Among the […]

Beaver Street Fisheries is the prototypical manual-labor shop. Tons of clams, lobster, alligator, octopus and other exotica, from coastal waters in over 50 countries—hard-won catches of hard-edged fishermen and hunters—roll in and out of the Jacksonville, Fla.-based companys distribution site every day, to be carried by trucks, planes and ships to customers around the world. […]

/zimages/3/74576.jpg No one would confuse Crown Media Holdings Inc. with media giants like Time Warner Inc. and Viacom Inc. With only $208 million in 2003 sales, the Greenwood Village, Colo. owner of the family-friendly cable station Hallmark Channel competes for advertising and distribution agreements with some of the best-known corporations in the U.S. Still, over […]

Sept. 11 was the great divide. Decisions companies made about technology infrastructure, personnel, security, business resilience and supply-chain protection took on a much more urgent cast. At the same time, questions had to be answered about how to face the new New Economy, already wobbly and listing further south. For Merrill Lynch & Co., the […]

ATA Holdings Corp. navigated the new rules of engagement with software vendors for the first time nearly two-and-a-half years ago. The Indianapolis-based parent company of discount ATA Airlines Inc. was in the midst of the post-Sept. 11 air-travel crisis, when air travel dropped off a cliff. Thats when management decided that a reborn Internet site […]

John McKinley, chief technology officer and president, AOL Technologies, recalls vividly the afternoon in late december 1998 when Charles Schwab Corp.s market valuation reached $25.5 billion, surpassing merrill lynch & co. Inc. For the first time. The upstart brokerage—a pioneer in discount brokerage and online trading—had trumped the much larger and established company, which many […]