AMZN
In-depth analysis and expert insight into the global leader in e-commerce.Amazon.com recently offered customers a “Brick-and-Moral dilemma” through their price-check app, which offers shoppers quick discounts if they scan a barcode and find what they’re buying on Amazon for less. It’s provoked protests from some bookstore owners, and disgust from others.
But it should provoke optimism. When Amazon sees someone run the…
How Search Engines Decide Whom to Trust
Bill Slawski does the usual patent deep-dive, evaluating how Google decides which writers to trust. As Google moves from domain trust to author trust, this will hurt the dwindling number of online media companies that rely on cheap, mass-produced content. (One surprising side effect: this will make…
We’ve already documented that Google hates scalable SEO strategies for economically sound reasons: their utopia is a world in which a CMO who doubles his digital spending has to do so through AdWords or DoubleClick—nothing else scales the same way. That explains a lot about Google: not just why they don’t like paid links, but also…
Baidu’s Cargo-Cult OS Strategy
Google’s move into operating systems makes sense: reducing Microsoft’s leverage over them, and increasing the aggregate number of Internet users are both great for their business, and they both directly benefit Google over competitors. None of those advantages really apply to Baidu’s decision to enter the OS market.
Fortunately, Baidu doesn’t…
Who Facebook Thinks Your Friends Are
A programmer has created a simple bookmarklet that reveals which users Facebook expects you to be searching for. This is notable in two respects: first, it’s a look into your Facebook preferences—not just who you’re looking for, but who you’d decide to be looking for given an ambiguous query. It’s also…
Buddy Media Raises $54mm for Facebook Marketing
Buddy Media, provider of high-end Facebook pages to large brands, has raised another huge round to fund further expansion. Facebook seems eager to have companies raise money in order to expand on their platform. This, despite Facebook being ranked the worst API in a survey of developers.
Opt-In Privacy on…
LivingSocial Updates
Even a few months ago, LivingSocial seemed like the definition of an also-ran: Groupon got PR, small group-buying competitors got PR, and when those small companies got written up, LivingSocial could hope that the phrase “Like Groupon and LivingSocial” would appear somewhere in the copy.
But they’ve recently been recognized as a player…
Forget the debt ceiling. As far as Internet investors are concerned, Apple is the macro situation—it’s the central bank, the legislature, and the source of exogenous unpredictability in the web.
Apple owns a growing number of screens, eyeballs, and minutes. However you measure it, Apple products are a conduit for more and more attention. Apple…
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