Amazon, the Company That Ate the World - BusinessWeek

Excerpt:

If the Kindle Fire is half as good as it looked in Bezos’ conference room, it will fan the fears about Amazon’s growing dominance. The tablet funnels users into Amazon’s meticulously constructed world of content, commerce, and cloud computing. Just like owners of Kindle e-reading devices tend to start buying all their books from Amazon, Kindle Fire owners are likely to hand over an increasing chunk of their entertainment budget to Jeff Bezos.

Tablets represent a huge opportunity for Bezos, not only to sell a new kind of device but also to entice people to buy more stuff. Even with only 28.7 million iPads sold, e-commerce sites say they see an increasing amount of traffic coming from tablets.Forrester Research (FORR) reported this summer that online purchases made on tablets now account for 20 percent of all mobile e-commerce sales, and that nearly 60 percent of tablet owners have used them to shop. Bezos says tablets “are a huge tailwind for our business.” Amazon once saw spikes in traffic during the workday lunch hours. Now traffic is more evenly distributed as people pick up their tablets anytime of the week, buying the books and albums they see on television and making impulsive decisions about replacing their dishwashers.

The Kindle Fire (internal code name: Otter) is designed to ensure that even more of those purchases go to Amazon. The company has built a tablet-optimized shopping application, with simplified and streamlined pages but none of the clutter of the main website. The app is pre-installed and sits at the bottom of the Fire’s main screen (users can get rid of it if they want). The device also comes with the enticement of a 30-day free trial of Amazon Prime, the company’s $79-a-year two-day delivery program that tends to convert members into Amazon addicts who triple or even quadruple the amount they spend on the site. Since March, Amazon has also administered its own app store for Android devices, culling Google’s more comprehensive selection and removing everything that’s offensive and unreliable. Kindle Fire owners will have access to apps from Pandora (P), Twitter, Facebook, and Netflix (NFLX). Other competitors such as Barnes & Noble (BKS) can submit their apps, but it will be much easier for Kindle Fire owners to find Amazon’s own content.

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Google Plus & the Data Scientist Who's Navigating It to Hell

Excerpt:
Horowitz and O'Reilly talked dreamily about a sensor-rich future where almost unimaginable technologies were built on tidal waves of data. "Imagine we all opted-in and donated our microphone sensors in this room to capture an aggregate of data," he imagined. "There will be sensors like dust everywhere and it will be [technologists' job] to harvest that data and return it as killer apps."

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Amazon's New Cloud-Fueled Web Browser Will Predict Your Browsing Habits

Excerpt:

Another way the browser aims to speed things up is by predicting the future. Silk uses machine learning to predict browsing patterns and pre-load pages that the user is likely to request next. Just as Amazon can guess which books and other products you'll be interested in, it can also figure out which pages you're likely to navigate to on the Web.

"The browser observes aggregate user behavior across a large number of sites," said Jon Jenkins, Silk's director of software development. "For instance, we might notice that people who view the New York Times homepage, often go to the New York Times business page afterwards. Our browser is capable of detecting these aggregate user behavior patterns and actually requesting the next page you're likely to need before you even know you need it."

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Banking -- Reframed, Rebooted

Introducing BankSimple:

BankSimple, the most-hyped pre-launch web application in the nerd-o-sphere, is about to make its web-only personal banking service available to its first customers. An incredibly ambitious little project that promises no surprise fees, hot web design and real time data processing, BankSimple is very eagerly anticipated. Today the company released a video demo of its web interface and the feedback has been enthusiastically positive.

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To HP's New CEO: Keep PCs And Focus On Consumerization Of IT To Best Serve The Enterprise Customer - Forbes

Excerpt:
Forrester believes we’re at the beginning of new trend on the consumerization of IT, where consumer products skills will be increasingly important and relevant to selling to SMB and enterprise customers. Abandoning consumer markets and skills now is to give up a strategic advantage that HP now has over IBM and Dell for succeeding in the rapidly evolving work of business technology.

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What's a business plan?

yes! ::clap:: RT @LukeGWilliams: A business plan is not a document. It's a STORY about how you're going to create & capture value. #Disrupt

http://twitter.com/#!/frogdesign/status/111871913026007040


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11 Reasons why responsive web design isn't that cool!

Spotify Gets Pandora-Style Web Interface Called ‘Echofi’ | Underwire | Wired.com

Excerpt

Millions of prayers have just been answered. Spotify has been granted a Pandora-esque web radio interface called Echofi. But not by the company itself — it’s been built by coder Andy Smith, who’s also the brains behind Spotibot.

It’s glorious in its simplicity. You go toEchofiapp.com, type in the name of a band you like, hit play, and it’ll keep playing music that’s similar to that band until you tell it to stop. The recommendations are supplied by Echo Nest’s API.

“After Spotify launched in the U.S., a lot of people were lamenting the lack of artist radio (which has since been re-implemented) and comparing it directly — if unfairly — to Pandora,” Smith told Wired.co.uk. “Reading this, I couldn’t see a reason why you couldn’t give some extended control to Spotify. Playlists are great, but they are finite. The joy of set-and-forget systems is you can do just that. Radio is a constant background, with the occasional ‘I love this song!’ and ‘I hate this song!’ What I want to do is use those moments to drive the station into something where you’ll never experience the latter.”

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Social circles are complicated

Excerpt

People are naturally social creatures. That’s what makes social media such a powerful concept. Social media channels allow human beings to sort themselves into groups and factions seamlessly, and maintain intimate relationships at greater distances than ever before.

But as anthropologist Herbert Spencer describes in his theory of the social organism, society is a system of interrelated parts that operate interdependently. Social media users understand that concept intuitively, and segment their relationships accordingly.

For instance, you are not the same person at work as you are among friends on a Friday night. The things you talk about, the vocabulary you use and the friendships you maintain in different contexts are the products of years of learning how to interpret relationships cues. From flirting to non-verbal communication, the way we present ourselves to others is constantly shifting based on whom we are talking to, and why.

The current social media environment has evolved to reflect this reality. It is made up of a number of independent social channels (FacebookTwitter,LinkedInFoursquare, etc.) that allow users to create and maintain separate and distinct parts of their identity with different social circles. For example, your friends are on Facebook, but you find business colleagues on LinkedIn.

This disconnect creates complications for anyone attempting to use social data to connect with customers or prospects. Where do you find the most appropriate audience? Do marketers need to maintain an ever-increasing number of individual social channels? How can we create a system that is scalable?


How Google+ Makes Social Networking More Confusing


The Google+ approach aims to simplify managing relationships, but ultimately fails because it works against people’s natural behavioral patterns. This is why Google+ faces an uphill challenge to adoption. Google+ allows users to define their own “circles” of contacts, like “High School Classmates,” “Family” or “Classic Car Fans.” The platform seeks to merge distinct interaction groups together into a unified experience. Users spend time creating the circles they want to share with, a tactic that helps push information into your contacts’ streams.

But the system breaks down once you try to consume content from a variety of different sources in your own stream. Suddenly, college roommates are mixed in with professional contacts, or people you’ve never actually met. This requires additional cognitive effort of the user to filter content by relationship, rendering the experience frustrating and confusing.

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LukeW | Killing Sign Up Forms

Excerpt:

In my recent Sign Up Forms Must Diepresentation, I outlined a few solutions for getting people engaged with digital services without asking them to fill in a bunch of input fields up front. In case you are interested in trying one of these alternatives to sign-up forms, here are some resources to get you started.

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New Approaches To Designing Log-In Forms - Smashing Magazine


Excerpt:

For many of us, logging into websites is a part of our daily routine. In fact, we probably do it so often that we’ve stopped having to think about how it’s done… that is, until something goes wrong: we forget our password, our user name, the email address we signed up with, how we signed up, or even if we ever signed up at all.

These experiences are not just frustrating for us, but are bad for businesses as well. How bad? User Interface Engineering’s analysis of a major online retailer found that 45% of all customers had multiple registrations in the system, 160,000 people requested their password every day, and 75% of these people never completed the purchase they started once they requested their password.

To top it off, visitors who are not logged in do not see a personalized view of a website’s content and recommendations, which reduces conversion rates and engagement. So, log-in is a big deal — big enough that some websites have started exploring new designs solutions for the old problem.


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