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Tag: amazon

Friday 5 — 6.13.2014
1. Amazon launched a streaming music service — a relatively commoditized offering with competitors like Spotify, Beat, and Rdio. The differentiator may not be a more robust feature set, in part because Amazon’s offering does not include Universal Music Group’s catalog. Instead, as this article points out, the Prime bundling with free shipping and book lending may tip the balance over its competitors.
2. Can Twitter survive against the Facebook juggernaut — and other rapidly growing social networks? Today, Twitter usage hovers at about 19% of U.S. online adults, versus 71% for Facebook. This Pew Research Center article suggests that Twitter may have niche staying power, with use cases around breaking news, political influencers, and activists.
3. What is the impact of unmoderated comments on your website? In one study, respondents rated articles with comments as lower quality— with as much as 8% difference in perception.
4. With over 200M active users and a top ten smartphone app, Instagram is a draw for many brands. Buffer offers a great how-to guide for businesses getting started on the photo sharing social network. Also included: best times to post to various social media outlets.
5. We’re in the midst of a hardware renaissance, and excitement about the promise of virtual reality (VR). Oculus Rift CEO Brendan Iribe talks about the potential of the technology and its role within Facebook, which acquired the tech company back in March for $2B. Salient quote: “When you put on Oculus, people are just streaming with ideas, dreaming about things.”
Weekend fun: Irritating linkbait meets brutal satire at the Onion’s new venture, Clickhole. And it’s a winner whether people know it’s satire or not.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
June 13, 2014
Friday 5 — 5.30.2014
1. Mary Meeker released her annual, comprehensive internet trends report. Lots of stats reinforce the enormous potential in mobile, like room for growth in global smartphone adoption, and opportunity in mobile advertising. She notes that the education industry is at an “inflection point,” with increasingly global user bases (particularly for duolingo above) and the rise of personalized, online education from MOOC to app.
2. Amazon and Hachette are embroiled in an escalating battle, which has led to Amazon, in some cases, refusing to sell or discount Hachette books — see this useful explainer. In highly related news, a Harvard Business Review article outlines four strategies suppliers can use to capture value from powerful platform owners.
3. Does our addiction to tweets, Buzzfeed slideshows, tl;dr summaries, and explainers mean that we no longer devote focused time to explore primary sources? This opinion piece offers one worrisome take on our facile faking of cultural literacy.
4. What does Apple buying sub-par headphone company and high-margin lifestyle brand Beats mean (apart from the fact that Dr. Dre is now linked to Steve Jobs by far fewer than six degrees of separation)? Explore some theories here.
5. We’ve discovered the ideal recipe for crowdfunding $2M on Kickstarter in less than 48 hours. Mix a heady dose of nostalgia with an accessible and compelling cause, and then add in cultural icon LeVar Burton.
Weekend fun: The bad news: otters at the Smithsonian National Zoo may well have more enrichment activities than you do at your desk. The good news: it’s pretty awesome to watch.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
May 30, 2014
Friday 5 — 3.14.2014
1. Comscore data show that users coming directly to a news site stay longer and view more pages than those coming from search and social. Users arriving via search and social drive up views, but are more difficult to convert into loyal readers. Two caveats to the study: mobile traffic is not included, and email is often improperly tagged, which causes some users to be improperly counted as “direct.”
2. Tony Haile, CEO of realtime analytics product Chartbeat, will convince you: what you think you know about the web is wrong. Saddled with a web measured by the click, we’re now trying to better understand user behavior while interacting with a site. Among the more compelling observations: if a site can hold visitors’ attention for three minutes, they are twice as likely to return than if you hold them for only one minute.
3. The Web turned 25 this week, kicking off a flurry of pieces reflecting on the internet era. Here’s a brief timeline from Fast Company. Fun fact: When web creator Tim Berners-Lee was asked to name one thing he never envisioned the web being used for, his reply was “kittens.”
4. It’s astonishing to think that a gigabyte of hard drive would have cost you about $190,000 dollars back in 1980. In a move designed to compete with rival Dropbox, Google Drive is now offering 100GB storage for only $1.99/month.
5. Sadly, the money you just saved on storage will now be spent on Amazon Prime membership, which just rose from $79 to $99/year. Prime was a genius feature — the ultimate gateway drug for online impulse buying. I guess those drones aren’t going to pay for themselves.
Weekend fun: According to a recent report on millennials, 55% of them say they’ve shot and shared a selfie, versus 24% of Gen X, and of 9% of boomers. Bucking the trend, this former Secretary of State beats Ellen’s product placement hands down.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
March 14, 2014
Where’s my stuff?

The trend of staying home and spending made for a strong online shopping season. Amazon recorded roughly 426 orders per second on Cyber Monday, and overall online sales were up 21% over 2012. Good news for some retailers, but the high volume combined with bad weather and a shorter than usual holiday shopping season to create a perfect storm for package shipping companies like Fedex and UPS.

Which firm is bearing the brunt of the blame? Google Search Trends topics view, which aggregates various search terms to gauge overall interest, suggests UPS may be fielding the most angry phone calls. You can see above where UPS and Fedex have had roughly the same search volume over the past 90 days. But UPS search volume rises sharply the first week of December with the largest differential right around Christmas. Welcome to the “Where’s my stuff?” debacle.

December 29, 2013
Friday 5 — 11.01.2013
1. Has a Chinese language photo app become the first one to achieve global popularity? This app allows you to snap a selfie and then modify as a cartoon character. Its meteoric rise has prompted some skepticism — can an app with instructions only in Chinese be so popular in Australia, US, and Canada, or are the numbers somehow being gamed?
2. Healthcare.gov remained in the news this week, with more fingerpointing and testy hearings. This article argues for the US government’s developing a “digital core” of in-house expertise with more direct control over resources and deliverables.
3. Pew reports that both image creators and curators are on the rise, at 54% and 47% of internet users respectively. 18% of cell phone owners have Instagram, and 9% have Snapchat — the latter speaking to this hunger for just-in-time but oh-God-not-forever content.
4. More on this visual web: Pinterest late last week signed a deal with Getty. Pinterest licenses the images, and Getty hands over the metadata. Seems like a smart win for both, and not the last deal we’ll see where clean, searchable metadata about visual assets is core to the value.
5. Many would kill to have a review from Michiko Kakutani that concludes the author “tells this story of disruptive innovation with authority and verve, and lots of well-informed reporting.” If you’re interested in entrepreneurship, leadership, and the internet, run don’t walk to, well, the device in your hand an order it. Amazon is the most innovative and algorithmically-optimized internet company that people rarely talk about, and The Everything Store is about to change that.
Weekend fun: Recovering from the World Series and Halloween, and just a few things left before you get to the weekend? Perhaps you can relate to this mouse’s struggles …

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
November 1, 2013