universal

Are you ready to trade your current location for a discount? If you are, there are plenty of retailers looking to take you up on the trade with coupons, special deals and more. Services like Foursquare, Loopt and Gowalla are in an arms race to sign up users, and in partnership with advertisers, are...

Once again, the consumer loses in the DVD rental business. A month after Netflix agreed to wait 28 days before mailing new Warner Bros. movies to its customers, Redbox agreed to the same waiting period -- 28 days after the movie goes on sale -- before renting them for $1 a night. That might be...

Late last month, Somali brigands in a dinghy hijacked the Maran Centaurus, an American-bound tanker carrying millions of barrels of crude oil, in the latest episode of escalating pirate attacks off the coast of the failed, anarchic East African state. But that event won't come up at Tuesday...

Private-equity firms don't have a good track record for improving the properties they buy. They're better known for buying firms, improving efficiencies (sometimes to the company's detriment), milking them for cash, and then flipping them when they can profit. Recently I wrote the sad but familiar...