Competing with Amazon in a Depressed Environment

Sunday, February 1st, 2009

Amazon’s results this week were in sharp contrast with the overall health of the retail sector. As highlighted during the holiday seasons, Amazon ruthlessly grabbed market share in an overall down retail market and turned a respectable profit on its very solid execution. Amazon’s success builds on - a ...

Apple App Store’s Untapped Potential

Saturday, December 13th, 2008

Apple has quietly released a few changes to its iPhone App Store on iTunes, in an attempt to alleviate some of the growing pains around its app ecosystem. The App Store has recently hit 10,000 apps and is expected to accept many more. "Most popular" lists and 19 ...

Techmeme’s Human Eye for the Straight Algo

Thursday, December 4th, 2008

Gabe Rivera of Techmeme fame has sparked a lively debate as he announced he had hired an editor to improve interestingness, reactivity and relevance of his news aggregation website (see VentureBeat, TechCrunch, and ReadWriteWeb). Rivera’s plight echoes Netflix’s challenges at boosting its movie recommendation engine, as algorithmic improvements gradually near ...

Music discovery services chart new paths for gift recommendations

Thursday, November 27th, 2008

Pandora, Last.fm, and iLike have broadened the appeal of recommendation algorithms and social discovery and sharing. Despite a challenging – even hostile - business environment, passionate entrepreneurs and music lovers are bringing to market new ways to explore and discover new music. Mufin has gathered the most attention so ...

Will Kelkoo’s Sale Spur a Turn-Around?

Friday, November 21st, 2008

Yahoo! sold Kelkoo today for a mere €100M – a fifth of what it paid in 2004 to acquire it (€475M). Beyond Yahoo’s internal issues and ability to absorb a large entity, a few fundamental issues have plagued Kelkoo and its likes (Shopping.com, PriceGrabber.com, etc.). Kelkoo and other first-generation ...

Why Invest in Personalization Now?

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

Today’s statistics about ecommerce show the devastating impact of the financial crisis. Ecommerce websites have been hit hard and revenue growth has ground to a halt. Tim Walters at Forrester makes a compelling case for advancing personalization efforts in corporate and ecommerce websites, despite the current recession – and ...

Invest in Recommendation, Search, and User-Generated Content to Boost Retail Website

Friday, October 3rd, 2008

The State of Retailing Online report for 2008 is an in-depth look at the top online retailers’ priorities and opportunities to strengthen and differentiate their websites. According to Sucharita Mulpuru, Senior Retail Analyst from Forrester Research, who wrote the report, “online retailers are finding that their best investment efforts are ...