America Online Latin America Inc., the beleaguered provider of Internet services in South America, said on Tuesday that it was running out of cash and may shut down or file for bankruptcy protection. Unless AOL Latin America finds a buyer for its assets, it will have to close down operations, the Fort Lauderdale, Florida-based company said in a regulatory filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The world's e-mail network is no longer the friendly place it once was. The booming trade in spam and the looming threat of e-mail fraud, in the form of spoofing and phishing, have seriously dented our confidence in e-mail. Despite a multimillion-dollar industry surrounding antispam software, and several attempts to banish the problem with regulation, spammers and fraudsters continue to stay one step ahead.

Electronic mail touting cut-rate Viagra or how to make big bucks working from home will get pitched right back to the senders by a free program from IBM Corp. The program, announced Tuesday, will identify computers that originate unwanted e-mail, or spam, and bounce it back at the sender--in effect spamming the spammer. The program, designed for use by large businesses, underscores the frustration felt by companies that see the vast majority of their e-mail flooded with junk.

After getting into some trouble for its early marketing practices in the blogosphere, Warner Brothers Records is dipping its toes in the blog waters once again. The company will sponsor podcasts of the Eric Rice Show and provide exclusive audio content from one of its bands. The Eric Rice Show, which is produced by Rice and three of his colleagues, features audio musings on entertainment, technology, and culture. Podcasting, the practice of publishing extended audio recordings in a Web feed format, still reaches a very small audience, but many expect it to take off as digital music players proliferate. Financial …

German media giant Bertelsmann, a former partner of file-sharing network Napster, is launching a new Internet platform for downloading and sharing movies or games over the Internet, it said Tuesday.

Later this month, hundreds of corporate and ad agency executives will come together for what will likely be the first conference devoted to word-of-mouth marketing. That a conference is being held on such a topic -- not to mention that there are now multiple trade associations for word-of-mouth marketing and its cousin, viral advertising -- is testament to the rapid growth and success of these forms of advertising, which until recently were the province of a very few maverick practitioners.

When Jimmy Kuo gave his 13-year-old daughter permission to begin using America Online's AIM Express, he warned her that if she managed to download any viruses, the result would be no IM for a long, long time. Of course, since Kuo is a research fellow at IT security specialist McAfee, he's significantly better informed about the risks of instant messaging than the average parent. Because teenagers as a group are among the most active regular users of IM, lax habits at the keyboard on their part could result in a serious problem, Kuo said. At the heart of the matter …

E-mail marketers still need to monitor ISPs' e-mail blocking vigilantly, as the problem has worsened. Twenty-two percent of permission-based e-mail was blocked by top ISPs in 2004, up 3.3 percent from the second half of 2003, e-mail management firm Return Path, New York, found in a new study.

IAC/InterActiveCorp agreed to acquire Ask Jeeves for $1.85 billion in stock in a blockbuster search engine deal that solidifies the e-commerce player's footing in the online advertising and search market. One of the largest generators of online advertising, Ask Jeeves counts roughly 42 million U.S. users per month, making it an attractive target for a company that wants to become a major player in Internet advertising.

Your eyes probably hurt just thinking about it: Tens of thousands of Japanese cell phone owners are poring over full-length novels on their tiny screens. In this technology-enamored nation, the mobile phone has become so widespread as an entertainment and communication device that reading e-mail, news headlines and weather forecasts -- rather advanced mobile features by global standards -- is routine. Now, Japan's cell phone users are turning pages.