Barack Obama is a hot ticket to high sales online, according to the latest rankings on Amazon.com. The president-elect’s “The Audacity of Hope” and “Dreams From My Father” are the two top bestsellers among Kindle e-books and paperbacks on the site and his September policy pitch “Change We Can Believe In” is ranked No. 11. Sales of an Obama tie have soared and Obama t-shirts from some of Amazon’s independent retailers are jostling with iTunes accessories and Levi’s jeans for the top spots in the apparel category.
But it’s not all about Obama. Sales of Mickey Edwards’ “2008 Reclaiming Conservatism: How a Great American Political Movement Got Lost — And How It Can Find Its Way Back” have climbed to 131st place from way down at No. 23,190 just a day ago.
In what could be seen as a victory for doers, and a bit of a setback for thinkers, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has made a rather significant ruling on what is and isn’t patentable. The court ruled against a man who was attempting to patent “a method for hedging against weather-related effects on businesses.” As a result, infamous patents like Amazon’s “one-click” shopping concept may no longer be valid, because they don’t either “involve a particular machine” or “physically transform anything.”
In essence, the ruling means that business ideas in and of themselves aren’t patentable. In addition to Amazon’s “one-click” patent, which is the concept of purchasing something via credit card by just clicking a single website link, Friendster’s patents on social networking also come to mind as being unpatentable based on this judgement. That patent covers a “system, method and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer system based on their relationships within social networks” and a “method of inducing content uploads in a social network,” amongst other claims.
To me, this all sounds like a pretty reasonable ruling, although two judges offered dissenting opinions. While Friendster so far hasn’t tried to enforce their patent by going after competing social networks – all of which would seemingly be in violation based on their patent claims – you can imagine the type of drama and disruption of innovation it would cause in our space if they did. For some more in-depth analysis of the ruling and its legal ramifications, check out Mike Masnick’s coverage at Techdirt.
Imagery provided by iStock/ ftwitty
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AmieStreet has revamped its site design to focus more on music discovery, including launching a new media player with social features. The company, which allows artists to upload their own music and prices it based on customer demand, also announced that is currently raising another round of financing - its Series B. AmieStreet received an investment from Amazon last year.
The new site has been redesigned from top-to-bottom, greatly simplifying the way users can browse and find new music. For instance, navigating genres from the “browse” music page has become much more user-friendly, with a new navigation bar down the side. Meanwhile, artists pages have been revamped to better section off content, with separate pages for each album, artist info, and seeing what other users are fans of the artist.
Another nice feature is that on the Recommendations page, you can see exactly why a song is being recommended – for example, what songs you’ve purchased and what previous recommendations you have enjoyed that makes the site think you’ll like the new music.
One of the more significant upgrades on the site comes on the Web-based media player. In addition to being able to browse through all of your music and playlists, you can now also look through your friends’ tunes via an integrated buddy list. While you’ll need to own a track in order to hear the full stream, co-founder Joshua Boltuch notes that many of the previews on the site are at least a minute long, as the indie artists that make up much of the content are more willing to give away more for free.
Meanwhile, AmieStreet’s music catalog has been exploding over the past year. Since the Amazon investment last summer, the company has grown its database from 100,000 to more than 1 million tracks. Additionally, the company claims that each customer is spending $30 per year on average, with the customer base recently growing 18% month-over-month.
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Earlier this year, when Bill Gates retired from Microsoft, I wrote a post explaining why no one was going to replace Bill and Steve (Jobs). The only person I thought was within striking distance of being the likely replacement was Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon (AMZN).
Amazon has proved to be a proxy for future trends of web and technology; cloud computing and Kindle being the most recent examples. Today, when I read this quote from him in the New York Times…
“Our willingness to be misunderstood, our long-term orientation and our willingness to repeatedly fail are the three parts of our culture that make doing this kind of thing possible”
…I realized that Amazon would keep pushing the envelope and coming up with interesting ideas and that should make Bezos a lock for the inheritor to Bill and Steve’s crown. His company’s “willingness to repeatedly fail” and focus on the long term is what makes him and Amazon different from others.
P.S. Check out my video interview with Jeff Bezos
I am pretty sure at some point we have all done this — gone on a shopping spree to mask the feelings that come after a cataclysmic event. It doesn’t make our problems go away but somehow it helps us feel better for a few hours. It is good to see that large, lumbering tech giants have a similar approach to business life.
eBay, a San Jose, Calif,-based company today announced that it was cutting 10 percent of its workforce, about 1,000 jobs, in addition to getting rid of several hundred temps. These cuts will cost them between $70 million and $80 million and will be predominantly recorded in the fourth quarter of 2008. I am told the majority of the blood letting has been in the Marketplaces part of the business.
The company also spent $1.21 billion buying up two companies.
- U.S.-based online payments business Bill Me Later for approximately $820 million in cash and approximately $125 million in outstanding options. Bill Me Later had raised a total of $200 million in funding from Amazon along with several others. It was spun out of Nortel in 2001.
- Denmark’s leading online classifieds site dba.dk and vehicles site bilbasen.dk for approximately $390 million in cash.
These are two major moves by new CEO John Donahoe, who replaced Meg Whitman in January 2008.
Both acquisitions are smart and make strategic sense for eBay, though the company has some serious challenges in its core marketplace business. The CEO of eBay Marketplace Operations, Lorrie Norrington, who was named to the job in July and was recently named to Fortune’s 50 Most Powerful Women list, has been looking to transform the business, which is in serious trouble.
How bad? The sellers — aka the customers of eBay — are so mad that they are putting out statements publicly denouncing the company. Professional eBay Sellers Alliance (PESA) on its web site wrote:
In the first nine months of 2008, we have observed a substantial deterioration in the value of the marketplace for merchants. Broader e-commerce growth is in the high teens while eBay’s GMV has increased at low single digit rates; a clear sign that eBay is losing wallet share among online shoppers.
Today eBay merchants have an increased level of business uncertainty due to eBay’s poor execution of changes in many areas including seller performance measurement, fees, site search, buyer activity, and seller communication. The result is that merchants are changing their behavior in ways that we believe is not beneficial to the eBay marketplace.
Merchants are pursuing alternate channels for their businesses which are more economical, including launching their own website, participating in other third party channels such as Amazon and Overstock, and even opening brick and mortar stores.
Whichever way you look at it, that is a big fat F for the company. I think buying new companies might give eBay a near-term lift, but the business is a bureaucratic mess and as a company eBay has had trouble coming to terms with the future. It has failed the innovation test — a metric almost every Silicon Valley company should be judged by — and all it has done is use its monopolistic position to paper over its shortcomings.
Given the poor performance of that stock — down almost 50 percent over the past 12 months — the investors seen to be in agreement with my F-rating on the company. I hope new deals are a new start for the company, and to them I say good luck! They are going to need it.
Photo courtesy of eBay Inc.
Yesterday, Microsoft CEO Steve “Developers” Ballmer revealed that Windows is working on a cloud-based operating system while Amazon is now offering Windows as an available server environment through it’s EC2 service.
A lot of hay has been made recently over the term Cloud Computing. Frankly, it’s a sign a term is overused when Richard Stallman is unclear on the concept. That’s why Sean and I sat down today to attempt to lay out exactly what cloud computing means in the context of these two bits of news today.
The short answer is that we’re not talking about web apps primarily here. Steve Ballmer was particularly short on details when he dropped the term “Windows Cloud,” and it seems to be a slight misappropriation of the term as purists define it.
The Amazon offering is very easy to define, and we do so, and proceed to talk a bit about what this means in terms of long term Microsoft enterprise strategy as well as what sorts of branding issues Microsoft might be running up against with these new offerings.
Watch our talk on it or download the MP4.
At the time we recorded, the details of the Windows Cloud were a bit, well, cloudy (though we had a pretty firm grasp on what was going on with the Amazon EC2 Windows situation). They’ve since been cleared up a bit, so for more analysis on that, see Stan’s post from earlier today.
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ZocDoc, the service for finding doctors and making appointments online, is announcing two new high profile investors this morning: Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, and Marc Benioff, Founder and CEO of Salesforce.com. The investments follow news last month that the company had raised a $3 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures.
The company, which launched about a year ago, is touting some impressive growth numbers in its announcement, writing “ZocDoc offered patients nearly 20,000 available appointments in September, a 2,000% increase since the company launched a year ago. The company has grown its consumer and practitioner base by an average of 50% per month as it continues to add new specialties and extend its geographic reach.”
Currently, the company’s service is only offered in the New York City area, though earlier this year they announced plans to expand to Washington DC and San Francisco.
Meanwhile, for Bezos, the investment in ZocDoc marks yet another addition to his Web 2.0 portfolio. It was recently revealed that the billionaire backed Twitter, while prior investments include 37Signals, Kongregate, and ChaCha.
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It was a matter of when, not if, Amazon would launch a content delivery business in addition to its current suite of web services that include S3 storage service and EC2 on-demand computing. The Seattle-based company has announced its intention to offer a content delivery service that could shake the very nature of the industry and pose a serious challenge to not only dozens of CDN upstarts but also become a thorn in the side of existing giants such as Akamai Technologies and Limelight Networks.
In an email to its customers today, Amazon said that the service will be available later this year and will utilize the company’s points of presence in North America, Europe and Asia.
This new service will provide you a high performance method of distributing content to end users, giving your customers low latency and high data transfer rates when they access your objects. The initial release will help developers and businesses who need to deliver popular, publicly readable content over HTTP connections.
Ironically, Amazon was beaten to the CDN punch by New York-based Voxel that started offering CDN services based on Amazon’s S3 service. ”We are announcing this right now because we want to give a heads up to our customers,” said Adam Selipsky, Vice President of Product Management and Developer Relations for AWS. It is more like putting their competition on notice, but Adam was too polite to say that. “It is a more horizontal and broad offering.” In other words, while it is not going to replace Akamai tomorrow, it is going to make CDNs affordable even for the tiniest startup, without major cash outlays.
Why is this service disruptive? Amazon is going to bring a level of transparency to a business that has a sales model much like an brokerage firm in the 1980s. Amazon wants to make buying CDN services as simple as buying a book. Amazon executives told me that company is going to be charging its customers on usage instead of long-term contracts current players foist on their clients.
In addition, the company will publish its prices on the web and most importantly it is going to be inexpensive.And that will make the service even more attractive to hundreds of small companies who are already using Amazon Web Services for their web operations, who don’t want to sign long contracts with CDN operators. When I asked Tal Saraf, General Manager of the AWS Content Delivery Service, if the company expected the video-delivery to be one of the most used service, he said the company expected to delivery all sorts of content including web-objects (images, JavaScripts etc.)
You’ll start by storing the original version of your objects in Amazon S3, making sure they are publicly readable. Then, you’ll make a simple API call to register your bucket with the new content delivery service. This API call will return a new domain name for you to include in your web pages or application. When clients request an object using this domain name, they will be automatically routed to the nearest edge location for high performance delivery of your content. It’s that simple.
Amazon executives declined to talk about the pricing. “We will talk about the pricing when we launch the service,” Selipsky said. He declined to comment on the impact of their pricing will have on their competitors – nearly two dozen content delivery networks – and how much their business is going to suffer. DowJones Venture Source estimates that from 2005 through second quarter of 2008 nearly $980 million was invested in content delivery companies.
If Amazon delivers what it is promising – a simple API based CDN – then it would put then not only ahead of all CDN players, but also force rivals to meet the rules (and pricing) set by Amazon. There is a good chance that it is going to drive weaker players right out of the game.
My final take on this news: Akamai is less likely to be impacted in the near term, but it further commoditizes the CDN business and forces a big shakeout in the industry, taking down the small and the weak. Akamai has been focusing on value add services, as a way to stay ahead of the commoditization of the basic CDN services.
In the world of paid digital music downloads, there’s iTunes, Amazon MP3, maybe the Zune Marketplace and eMusic a rung or two lower on the industry ladder. The rest seem to comprise the land of the unspoken. Even Microsoft’s efforts and the indie fave eMusic are susceptible to falling into insignificance. After all, the music industry as a whole, as with virtually any market of capitalist design, tends to support winners. The tracks go where the traffic is. Most of the time anyway. Enough for the strongest of players to claim ubiquity and permanent and unchallenged staying power, and for those underneath to struggle for breath.
You might wonder why it is that I raise a point raised so many times before. The health of the music industry has been opined over ad nauseam, and to do so once more is to toss tired copy on a pile of wasted wordplay, right? Well, it depends, really. The story of the digital sales model is far from complete, and with new developments happening in the land of Apple and Amazon, as well as a steady flow of stories occurring along the fringe of the market, there still is room to press points further along and observe the space from underrepresented perspectives.
The last 24 hours or so, for example, have brought items having to do with a Napster letter addressed to shareholders, in which it notes that it is “open to a sale,” according to Joseph Weisenthal of PaidContent, as well as something or other to do with recently launched LimeWire MP3 Store and a marked 100% growth in its music catalog, to a mere 2 million in total, as noted by Jacqui Cheng of Ars Technica. These you might thing to be insignificant. And taken as they come, I would admit that they are not very impactful. But if you consider them to be the newest round of pockmarks in the middle- and lower-class digital music scenes, they add to the subtle signs emerging each season that tell us the market’s bottom feeders are not long for this world.
Is that a good thing? Well, only the best survive, yes? Sure, ideally. It’s hard to say who would be left standing. Rhapsody? Maybe. The Zune Marketplace? That’s quite a variable at this point. Microsoft doesn’t seem to be “in it to win it.” On the upside, the loss of such actors - if indeed they do expire in the next year or two or three - would perhaps uncomplicate things more. Too many choices can more detrimental than few in some cases.
But, just for kicks, imagine a world that doesn’t have the spread of choices that we have today. If we start to see Napster, LimeWire, et al., start to drop like flies, what’s to say the consumer will really benefit? Those interested in music subscriptions, say, may no longer have such options. And labels that currently opt for one outlet or another due to variations in revenue agreements, might have to succumb to less advantageous contracts elsewhere. Which could hurt their bottom line. And though more musicians are taking an entirely solo route to promotion, the role of the studio, big or small, remains important. The music industry is busy enough as it is with a small set of great sounds and a vast amount of non-sellers. Some editorial is a good thing.
Granted, there are quite a number of ifs to take into account as things in the digital industry progress, but its certainly worth contemplating its evolving dimensions. It’s not been a decade since music downloads became “popular,” and already we’ve seen it balloon, we’ve seen its squeezed, and we’ve even seen it begin to consolidate.
Some might argue that where one gets his or her downloads won’t matter much. But I disagree. Businesses in a complex market such as media move to higher ground at the expense of others. And the “others” don’t simply get to continue on when left behind. So just know this. It may now seem purposeless to quibble over the failed and the failing. But if all but a few disappear, the consumer experience that might have been - that you can get what you want, how you want - probably won’t be realized. And that’s a shame if proven true. If any paradigm shift of modern making in the media world could be taken closest to an ideal, it is the convenience of the digital music download.
(Image source: Flickr/peymon)
If you’re an avid mobile-to-Web application user, you might know how much your life can be simplified by sending an SMS to Twitter, letting it know a new user you’d like to follow, or updating your Remember the Milk to-do list through your mobile phone. Kwiry is a mobile-to-Web service that allows you to text yourself reminders, which are then categorized as bookmarks of sorts, and available for further organization, Web search, and direct purchasing options.
A new update to Kwiry fits nicely with the easy integration of SMS capabilities for sending information or commands to a Web-based service, so you don’t even have to text yourself a reminder. Just text in the command itself! Kwiry now offers new Shortcuts for Amazon and Netflix, allowing you to add items to your wishlist and movie queue. The new Shortcuts are pretty well integrated, so adding a movie to your Netflix queue via Kwiry means you don’t have to think about it again. You’ll just see the movie show up in your mailbox. I wouldn’t mind similar integration with Amazon subscriptions, because I’m that lazy and I hate keeping track of grocery lists.
Kwiry is also launching calendar updates through its new Shortcuts option, so you can add an appointment to your calendar via SMS. While the calendar option is something found through other services like Google Mobile, it’s still nice for Kwiry to have, especially as it’s clear that Kwiry is looking to build out its feature set and make interaction with its service as simple (and mobile) as possible. Still relying on SMS as a major form of mobile communication, Kwiry is making its new Shortcuts option as widely available as possible, right out the door.
As the new Shortcuts option is also competing with the likes of other mobile-to-Web bookmarking services like Evernote, the battle amongst these services will likely come down to the functions (automated and otherwise) that occur with the content once it’s been submitted. Such organization tactics and third-party integration will make the difference on an individual user basis.
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