By Robin Wauters

It’s fairly ironic to learn that there was still a lawsuit lingering over Time Warner’s (TWX) merger with America Online from the beginning of this decade, given that AOL is in the process of spinning off and hitting the public markets as an independent entity before year’s end.

By Leena Rao

Experian Hitwise just released its Cyber Monday stats, with Amazon (AMZN) reportedly topping the list as the most visited retail website Monday, seeing a 44% increase in visits compared to 2008. Amazon received 15.53% of the visits among the top 500 online retail sites. Hitwise says Amazon has been the top visited site on Cyber Monday since 2006.

By Leena Rao

As online retailers witnessed strong Black Friday results, Google (GOOG) is reporting that there was a surge in online shopping searches with “Black Friday” on Thanksgiving day and the Friday after the holiday. Searches with the term “Black Friday” were up by more than 20%, year over year, according to Google. Searches for “black friday sales” and “black friday ads” were both up by more than 50%, year over year.

By Robin Wauters

It’s the Monday after Thanksgiving / Black Friday, which means many people will dub today Cyber Monday, a horrendous marketing term that refers to yet another one of the busiest days of the year for retail.

By Robin Wauters

[France] A commercial court in Paris has fined eBay (EBAY) €1.7 million euros (roughly £1.6 million) for allegedly not sticking to an injunction banning users from selling on products of luxury goods conglomerate Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton (LVMH in short).

By Robin Wauters

Website monitoring service InternetVista vigorously measured the uptime and response time of seven of the most popular Internet retail websites from Monday morning November 24 until midnight November 28, to see how the online outlets would cope with the Black Friday madness, traditionally one of the busiest shopping periods in the United States both on the Web and in meatspace.

By Leena Rao

While Black Friday has long been a popular phenomenon for brick and mortar stores, the deal frenzy has been extending to e-retailers and online stores. Now, sales on the web are equally as lucrative as those in the stores. eBay (EBAY) is launching a campaign to capitalize on the holiday shopping season, called “12 Days Of Deals,” and has also rolled out a new Deal-focused iPhone app and partnered with Microsoft (MSFT) to offer deals directly from Internet Explorer 8.

By MG Siegler

Undoubtedly by now you’ve heard about Tiger Woods’ car crash. Early reports had him in serious condition (which, remember, is better than critical condition) after he apparently hit a fire hydrant and a tree while leaving his home in his SUV. The latest reports say he has been released from the hospital and is “fine.” But I’m not going to speak to any of that because that’s not what we do (you can find out more here).

By MG Siegler

There are few things more terrifying to me than the idea of going anywhere near a shopping establishment on Black Friday. But if I lived in New York City, I think I would this year because Google (GOOG), Verizon (VZ), Reuters, and R/GA are teaming up to take over the largest displays on Times Square to allow for a giant Google Search by voice experiment/Droid advertisement.

By MG Siegler

As part of its push to go more social, Google (GOOG) has been attempting to unify its various account profiles into one Google Profile. And now it’s more useful. Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick has just tweeted out that Google Profiles can now be used as OpenIDs.

By MG Siegler

While they’ve been selectively displaying them for a little while now, Google (GOOG) Tuesday took the time to talk about and show off its new search ads. The general gist? Bigger, bigger, click me, bigger. Or, in Google’s own words, “Text is often useful, but sometimes videos and pictures are a more effective way to receive information.”

By Robin Wauters

Internet commerce juggernaut eBay (EBAY) is unveiling a brand new iPhone application dubbed Deals Tuesday, alongside an upgraded version of its shopping app for the iPhone and iPod Touch platform and an enhanced mobile website. And there’s a good reason for eBay to bolster its mobile offering: the company says its mobile GMV (value of goods sold) via its iPhone app and mobile website (m.ebay.com) is on track to top half a billion dollars by the end of this year.

By Robin Wauters

[Germany] Several federal and regional government officials in Germany are trying to put a ban on Google Analytics, the search giant’s free software product that allows website owners and publishers to get detailed statistics about the number, whereabouts and search behavior of their visitors (and much more).

By Leena Rao

Google (GOOG) has acquired display advertising company Teracent for an undisclosed amount of money The deal is expected to close this quarter.

By MG Siegler

Now that we’ve all actually seen Chrome OS, the immediate reaction that most are jumping to is that it won’t be killing Windows anytime soon. Obviously. But that doesn’t mean it won’t hurt Microsoft (GOOG), and apply long-term pressure to the dominant OS. In fact, Google’s (GOOG) positioning for Chrome OS reads like a page out of Apple’s (AAPL) playbook, only from the opposite direction.

By Robin Wauters

eBay (EBAY) has just announced that it has completed the sale of Skype, valuing the company at $2.75 billion. The investor consortium who is the buying party and will control an approximately 70 percent stake is a group led by Silver Lake Partners and includes Joltid (i.e. the company founded by Skype’s original founders) and “certain affiliated parties”, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and VC firm Andreessen Horowitz.

By John Biggs

By Robin Wauters

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong Thursday informed staff that the company will be looking for 2,500 people to voluntarily hand in their resignations, which would represent about one third of the company’s payroll.

By Leena Rao

We’re here at Dreamforce, Salesforce.com’s (CRM) annual cloud computing event in San Francisco. CEO Marc Benioff is delivering the keynote and we will be live-bogging the news below. Salesforce has had a banner year, reporting strong earnings Tuesday for the third quarter, launching a new version of their fastest growing product, Service Cloud 2; and rolling out a lightweight contact manager for small businesses. So what is the future? Benioff has long praised the virtues of the real-time cloud and said recently that real-time technology is not only crucial to Salesforce’s offerings but is the future of the company’s products. Benioff has even praised Twitter for making the transition between the cloud and real-time web seamless.

By Leena Rao

Before there was an iPhone, Android and App Store, there was Yahoo! Go. Launched in 2006, Yahoo! Go was an application offered news, mail, weather, traffic, and Yahoo! search from a mobile device.Yahoo (YHOO) is announcing that Yahoo! Go will be shutdown on January 12, 2010.