e-commerce trends and players, social commerce and Web social whatnots...
YouGoogle chose a compromise for implementing video ads: no pre-roll (thank God!), but around 15 seconds into watching a video, a transparent "opt-in" video ad appears at the bottom of the video.
technorati tags:google, youtube, ad, advertising, video
Posted by Michael S. Levy at 5:05 PM
Breaking: the Apple iPhone European launch was confirmed this morning.
Apple will enter only 3 test markets, again with an exclusive deal strategy:
- the UK: seems to be 0²
- Germany: to be announced
- France: Orange is confirmed
To say the least, this is terrible news for Vodafone, who hoped to get the exclusive distribution and service for Europe.
Mobile services companies in Europe are already bracing themselves to offer loads of apps and services as soon as the baby hits the market.
More to come later today...
Google Inc. reached a deal Monday with News Corp., the owner of MySpace.com to pay at least $900 million (euro700.39 million) in shared advertising revenue and become the exclusive search provider for the popular online hangout.
technorati tags:google, myspace, newscorp, advertising, social, network
Posted by Michael S. Levy at 2:04 PM
In what I think is a disaster PR move, AOL just released a downloadable dataset that includes about 20 million search queries from 650,000 AOL users in the past 3 months.Techcrunch » Blog Archive » AOL Proudly Releases Massive Amounts of Private Data
The dataset includes all searches from those users as well as whether they clicked on a result, what that result was and where it appeared on the AOL search result page.
What AOL has just done is it has given public access to very private data about its users without asking their permission. Although the AOL username has been changed to an ID number, the abilitiy to analyze all searches done by one user will most often easily point to who the user is, and what he is doing on the Internet.
The dataset includes anything someone might type in the AOL search field: names, addresses, social security numbers, drugs, specific pornographic interests... you name it!
On-line marketers are probably drooling over what they can learn from this very sensitive aggregation of personal user data and how they can exploit that and turn it into "targeted" commercial sollicitations...
According to Techcrunch: "The most serious problem is the fact that many people often search on their own name, or those of their friends and family, to see what information is available about them on the net. Combine these ego searches with porn queries and you have a serious embarrassment. Combine them with “buy ecstasy” and you have evidence of a crime. Combine it with an address, social security number, etc., and you have an identity theft waiting to happen. The possibilities are endless."
Posted by Michael S. Levy at 1:12 PM
Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis are at it again. After P2P/distributed downloads (Kazaa) and telephony (Skype), they're taking a shot at TV.
Their new venture, the "Venice Project", aims at TV show distribution on the Web. Very hush hush, but be sure that it'll tackle and tickle most of current on-line content distribution hurdles, mostly DRM and such.
technorati tags:skype, DRM, TV, video, content, distribution
Posted by Michael S. Levy at 4:55 PM
People, need I remind you that e-commerce is just a derivative from catalog / distant selling?
Just for a second, forget about ajax, javascript, ergonomics, eyetracking, real-time metrics... Benefits of buying online for consumers remain the same as buying from QVC or The Sharper Image catalog: convenience, convenience and convenience.
And with gas prices rising, and the current heat wave we're experienciing this summer (in the US and in France), buying on-line and returning purchases from home makes more sense than ever.
Check out the results of Harris Interactive's US July study:
technorati tags:e-commerce, survey, harris, consumer
Posted by Michael S. Levy at 4:32 PM
Want your own web 2.0 network service? Try Kickapps. Just create an account, copy and paste a code and here it is :
Posted by Michael S. Levy at 8:05 PM
Here it is, folks. The social commerce wave.
eSnips, a social website enabling its users to upload, organize, tag and share files of all formats, has just added a marketplace feature. Payment is PayPal-enabled.
Apparently, the guys at eSnips identified the need for e-commerce on their website by learning that a lot of their users were offering stuff for sale in their shared folders.
To offer a product for sale, all you have to do is create a new shared folder, activate its marketplace capabilities, upload a picture of your product and add price, content and tags. Done!
Seems like the service is free. How eSnips will make money from this I don't know. Maybe it is free while in beta stage?
I'm sure there's more to come. I'll keep you guys posted.
technorati tags:esnips, social, commerce, tagging, tags, paypal, e-commerce, networking
Posted by Michael S. Levy at 10:33 AM
Try applying the "grid computing" concept to outsourcing and you get crowdsourcing.
Some sites have started to appear on the Web, offering outsourced services which will be rendered by a community of experts spread out over the world. Services range from simple tasks like filling up databases to intricate website design.
Check out Amazon's Mechanical Turk, or XHTMlized for a better grasp.
I think it's great stuff!
PS: Oh! Reminds me that I actually used a pioneering crowdsourcing service a few years ago : www.logoworks.com. These guys produce quite sexy corporate logos for a low price, using a network of designers accross the US, competing on your creative brief to get the "bounty".
Posted by Michael S. Levy at 10:41 PM
When Jeff Bezos said Amazon would be the store where one can buy anything, he really meant it: the e-commerce powerhouse quietly beta-launched its groceries tab.
The section includes 12 categories of nonperishable goods such as cereal, pasta and canned soup. The new category also includes merchandise from a variety of well known consumer brand manufacturers such as Kraft, Kellogg and Betty Crocker.
The online grocery business is regional, can be very dependent on local and regional suppliers for perishable goods and is hard for a national player to establish as a profitable business.
It isn’t clear if Amazon will eventually sell more perishable items such as meat and produce, but we can be sure they are making a very calculated move into the online grocery market in a way that could result in a very profitable business over time. They are selling higher margin items in their specialty lines and setting minimal purchasing requirements with lower margin products.
Posted by Michael S. Levy at 12:50 PM
