E-Commerce

360buy's Qiangdong Liu: China's new e-commerce star

Imagine if Amazon delivered the same day. Qiandong Liu's 360buy does.

By Bill Powell, editor-at-large

FORTUNE -- Sitting in his big office, a stone's throw from the iconic Bird's Nest, the Olympic Stadium in Beijing, Qiangdong "Richard" Liu is explaining how he got the idea for 360buy, China's fast-growing e-commerce site (a mashup of Amazon (AMZN) and Fresh Direct), which global investors are lining up to back. Sure, Liu could claim that he MORE

One Kings Lane: Silicon Valley's newest obsession

The home décor site has a strong pedigree (backing from Kleiner Perkins and a founder named Pincus). Can it become the Groupon of throw pillows and footstools?

Online retail is hot again, thanks to the growing popularity of "deal-a-day" and private sale sites. The latest obsession of tech investors? Home décor site One Kings Lane, which will announce today that it has raised a $23 million second round of funding from MORE

New c-suite seat: CTO of the cloud

C-level positions don't get created overnight. So what is it about the cloud computing revolution that merits a seat in the executive suite?

The cloud: A once, well, hazy term that describes the increasingly vast array of software, applications, and data storage tools that live not on users' home PCs but on the Internet, is taking form. Cloud computing, as tech companies would have us understand it, encompasses all kinds of MORE

Is user data safe in the cloud?

Thousands of websites and millions of pieces of private data are increasingly in one big cloud, where some of the old rules of data security are out the window.

With the rise of cloud computing companies, and the ferocity with which tech's biggest companies are snatching those firms up, it's no secret that a good chunk of our user data is already stored in the cloud. Our emails, our documents, our MORE