AMZN
In-depth analysis and expert insight into the global leader in e-commerce.Automating the Herd Mentality
Investing social network Roboinvest now allows users to copy one another’s trades with a single click. They’ve prudently limited this to small dollar values, but it’s still a dangerous plan: market swings already tend to happen when investors overestimate the information content of others’ trades; letting them do this by default seems…
A current YCombinator company founder who also participated in the summer 2009 session has compared and contrasted his experiences. The most sweeping change: valuations are far higher than they used to be: ” It’s weird to see entrepreneurs compare convertible note caps of 7, 8, 10 million dollars from this lens of low, medium and high….
Which Sites Dominate Search Rankings?
SpyFu has some amazing stats on which sites most frequently show up in top Google rankings. The usual suspects are well-represented: Amazon owns product searches, Wikipedia owns proper nouns, and a smattering of other obvious sites own various common query categories. Interestingly, Amazon is trending upwards: whether this is due to…
Google Updates Google is already using their new privacy policy to offer search across devices; a desktop search (for a restaurant, for example) will be connected to the mobile search experience (giving users a shortcut to the restaurant’s location and hours, for example). This shouldn’t have a measurable revenue impact in the short term, but…
Google Updates Google’s new privacy policy is now in effect. Expect the sky to fall, or for all of your ads to be slightly better-targeted. Danny Sullivan points out that although Google+’s numbers don’t look good, Google is forgoing lots of revenue to promote the service. That’s telling. This Google search screenshot is making the rounds. The…
Pinterest has been growing absurdly fast (despite a laid-back work culture. It’s gotten to the point that marketers are doing a find/replace on their old “How to use Twitter” blog posts.
So it’s inevitably time for some sort of weak backlash. This time, the problem is their revenue model. They have one: they’re modifying links to…
Google Updates Danny Sullivan has much more information on the “Don’t be Evil” tool. He actually makes a pretty good case for the bookmarklet as a genuinely useful piece of software: if it weren’t for the life-or-death struggle search and social companies, this kind of thing would be an obvious feature to add. Google may be
Google Updates Google’s Q4 earnings disappointed investors—they had higher ad clicks and lower costs per click (for the first time in a while). It’s hard to understand exactly what happened here, but John Ebbert at Ad Exchanger has an interesting theory: Google may be funneling traffic to PPC advertisers whose cookies can be used by…
When Google announced Search, plus Your World, they made a dramatic decision: they’re embracing the paradigm of a web of people, rather than a web of verbs. And it’s a dangerous move.
There are two broad strategies for improving search engines: making them more aware of intents, or making them more aware of preferences. Most…
Why Infographics Still Work
This horrible Mashable article reveals why infographics are still such a powerful marketing tool. The author of the article clearly has no idea what any of this means (for example, at one point she seems to think that the amount of money Facebook is raising from the IPO is also somehow an…
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