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 …
Friday 5 — 5.30.2014
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 …
Friday 5 — 3.14.2014
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 …
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 …
Friday 5 — 11.01.2013
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 …