Following its settlement of a lawsuit against Google, Geico is sending out warning letters threatening to sue other companies that are buying its name as a search engine advertising term. The auto insurer is warning competitors that it now has grounds to take legal action against anyone who purchases the search engine term "Geico" in an attempt to get consumers to click through to a non-Geico Web site.

CEO Meg Whitman says Skype will complement existing businesses the way PayPal did. Or the deal could take her too far from e-commerce?

Timex Corp. is conducting a nationwide model search using the Web and sweepstakes to attract consumers younger than 34 to its new lines of watches with the Color Indiglo nightlight feature.

Online retailer Buy.com said on Monday it would undercut its bigger rival Amazon.com, offering books at 10 percent below the Amazon.com price for the rest of the year.

EBay has agreed to buy Skype Technologies, the Internet phone company based in Luxembourg, for about $2.6 billion in cash and stock.

Yahoo, in its first big move into original online video programming, is betting that war and conflict will lure new viewers. Lloyd Braun, the former chairman of ABC's entertainment group who now oversees Yahoo's expanded media group in Santa Monica, has hired Kevin Sites, a veteran television correspondent, to produce a multimedia Web site that will report on wars around the world.

Kirstie Alley is no longer a fat actress. After eight months on the Jenny Craig diet, Ms. Alley, the star of the short-lived Showtime series "Fat Actress," says she has lost 50 pounds. She shows off her leaner physique in a new ad campaign for Jenny Craig.

Open Source Technology Group, a subsidiary of Open Source proponent VA Software Corp., introduced a new online advertising unit called Slashdot DayPass that lets users see breaking stories on Slashdot.org before anybody else. To gain that privilege, users opt in to view a marketer's interstitial message and get a 30-minute advance peek into Slashdot, a site that offers "news for nerds" through hundreds of thousands of news items, user postings, blogs and reviews on technology software and hardware issues.

China Telecom has started blocking access to a popular Internet telephone service that is threatening its long-distance revenue, according to local media reports and Internet postings. China's largest fixed-line phone carrier recently began blocking access to service from Skype Technologies SA, a European-based Internet telecoms services provider, in the affluent southern city of Shenzhen near Hong Kong, according to the reports, including one in the Shanghai Daily.

Google Inc. said on Thursday it hired Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf to become its "chief Internet evangelist," the latest high-powered engineer to sign up at the Web search leader. Cerf is widely known as the "father of the Internet" for his role in developing the TCP/IP standards that form the structure of the Internet.