Written on January 2, 2009 – 1:05 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Reddit user mattyrules submitted the below picture to the social bookmarking site with the title: “Are eBayers really this stupid?“. As you can see, people are bidding more money for a gift card than it’s actually worth (click for a larger version)
Are some people really that stupid? Maybe. But there are two better explanations. One: money laundry. Two: earning money through the Paypal cashback program. Kraftmatic explains:
[He] means that some businesses, namely Paypal and MSN Shopping, offer coupons that can be used for discounts on eBay purchases. So presumably eBay bidders who are willing to pay more than face value for gift cards are doing so because they have coupons that will make up for the overage, thus resulting in a net gain for themselves.
Is this illegal in some way? Or is it just being creative with money on eBay?
I hope you like that post!
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Written on December 26, 2008 – 7:19 pm Zee, Internet Marketer, Design Connoisseur & Web App Devotee
Amazon.com had it’s best Christmas ever with more than 6.3 million items ordered during its peak day December 15th, nearly 1 million more than 2007’s 5.4 million. There has however been no mention of figures for revenues and profits, which is clearly what matters.
As we posted yesterday, shopping online seems to be where most consumers are heading for their Christmas shopping and late bargains. With the economy in the state it is, it seems Amazon (unlike other major retailers) have a particularly successful year ahead.
Interesting Facts
In premarket trading, Amazon’s shares jumped $2.85, or 5.5 percent, to $54.29 Friday morning.
Amazon.com sold enough “Breaking Dawn” books that stacked end to end they would reach the summit of Mt. Everest eight times.
Written on November 19, 2008 – 5:09 pm Zee, Internet Marketer, Design Connoisseur & Web App Devotee
Amazon web services have just announced a new addition to their line of services and its a new content delivery network called CloudFront. The service will help websites, big and small, improve their download speeds at a cheaper cost and as with it’s other offerings, Cloud Front is pay as you go and will be particularly atractive for smaller sites out there. One of the most exciting aspects of the announcement, for the average internet user, is that we we could end up with a generally much faster internet.
What exactly is CloudFront?
CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) similar to the networks that large sites such as the iTunes store would use to ensure downloads are immediate and fast.
How does does it work?
Well, CloudFront lets your customers download your website’s content from a location generally nearer to them, therefore greatly increasing the performance of your website.
You may wonder why this hasn’t been happening all along, well the answer is that CDN’s are not cheap but if you’re a company like Amazon with S3 backing - you are able to offer the service at a much cheaper price. CloudFront competitors aren’t twiddling their thumbs however, Limelight is cutting prices and Akamai is aggressively leveraging its patents on CDN technology to keep ahead of the competition.
Startups such as Woot and Playfish, have already begun using the service with Luke Duff, Retail IT Director at Woot, claiming amusingly that he “can feel the rage melting away” thanks to CloudFront!
Cost
Just like other Amazon Web Services (and unlike some other content delivery services that have up-front costs), CloudFront is entirely pay as you go. Cost varies by location, with prices cheaper in the United States than elsewhere. Pricing is also more expensive if less data is transferred. In the United States, CloudFront is priced at 17 cents per gigabyte up to 10 TB, but 9 cents per gigabyte after the first 150 TB of bandwidth has been used. The most expensive location to cache data is Japan, which starts at 22 cents per gigabyte for up to 10 TB of data transfer.
Sound like something you could be interested in trying out? Stop by Amazon CloudFront for more details
Written on September 26, 2008 – 12:01 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Werner Vogels shared his wisdom and experience today with 100 cross media talents at Picnic yesterday. He’s the CTO of Amazon, a company with a 20 billion dollars revenue and 17,000 employees. Despite its giant size, the Seattle-based company experiments with products. Like the Kindle, the nifty little device that supplies books on the go. The process behind this innovative approach is called corporate creativity, Vogels said. He was kind of enough to share it with the young and eager audience.
Take a moment and look back
Every successful person has someone even he looks up to or learns from, same goes for Vogels. He starts the presentation with a quote from American computer scientist, researcher, and visionary Alan Kay: “perspective is worth 80 IQ points”. Look back every once in a while to not lose perspective. Within Amazon, employees have to periodically ask themselves: “Why are we in this business? Are we as agile as we would like to be?”
Grow really, really big trees
Perspective is important for innovations, so much is clear. At Amazon, you’re not supposed to have a short term version. Vogels: “An Amazon principle is to plant a seed and watch it grow. Innovations don’t have to pay off in six months, they might take five or seven years to fully bloom. We are interested in growing really big trees”. That sounds like a healthy ambition, but how does Vogels figure out whether something is going to be big?
Focus on needs that last
Amazon found one thing that works for them. There are two ways of finding inspiration for innovation. There’s the reactive mode. Notice what changes in the world or what your competitors do and try to adopt to that. But why wouldn’t you focus on the inverse? Vogels: “Focus on things that stay the same all the time”.
In Amazon’s retail space, it’s not hard to imagine what customers want: more choice, faster shipping, and lower prices. Innovate with keeping those basic needs in mind. Innovate to extend your catalog, innovate to deliver products faster, and innovate to drive prices down. “By doing that”, Vogels said, “you build flywheels. They keep spinning faster and faster”.
Cannibalize
With that vision in mind, most innovations don’t seem logical at first sight. Amazon now has earth’s largest catalog, which is an absolute unique selling point. Yet the company didn’t always have that, since only a limited amount of sellers had access to the site. Thus Amazon invited other parties to use the site as a selling platform. At first glance this seemed to be wrong, as Amazon would lose money by cannibalizing its own business. But in the end, as we all know now, it turned out to be a master move.
Another example, Vogels: “When Amazon introduced customer reviews, book publishers became extremely angry. What if somebody would put up a bad review? We pushed it through and now there’s not one ecommerce site without customer reviews”.
What are you known for?
Back to the reactive mode, you should really, really, not adopt it. “When Google became popular, we figured we might add some more white space to the Amazon site as well. Sales dropped immediately because the site didn’t look ‘messy’ anymore.”
So don’t focus on competition because you’ll lose focus on your own goals. Sure, you can benchmark yourself against them, they’re perfect for that. But it’s more important to be ahead of the game and ask yourself: what are you known for? Vogels: “Amazon wants to be the world’s most customer-centric focused company. It’s our tie breaker when we face tough decisions”. Daring decisions like choosing for free shipping seem logical when your focus is customer centric. So stay put with your focus and “do experiments all the time”.
Make it hard to say no
These basics of corporate creativity would be worthless if there wasn’t something like the “institutionalized yes”. “It’s very hard to say no to innovation at Amazon”, said Vogels. So if you’re trying to run an innovative company, make sure it’s really difficult for anyone to say no to new innovative approaches”.
Written on September 18, 2008 – 12:48 pm Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of The Next Web Conference
An hour ago, Amazon announced that it will launch its own Content Delivery Network. It brings a service like this, formerly only available for big companies, to the masses. Akamai, eat your heart out!
After Amazon changed the landscape of webhosting with services like EC2 and S3 they now give you the opportunity to distribute data via their content delivery service as an extension on S3.
Today we are announcing that we are expanding the cloud by adding a new service that will give developers and businesses the ability to serve data to their customers world-wide, using low-latency and high data transfer rates. Using a global network of edge locations this new service can deliver popular data stored in Amazon S3 to customers around the globe through local access.
Om Malik explains why this is an disruptive service:
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.
Here is Werner Vogels’ keynote titled “Uncertainty” from The Next Web Conference 2008. Vogels shares with us that “everything fails all the time. We lose whole datacenters! Those things happen.” and “let us worry about those things, not you as a startup. Focus on your ideas.”. An interesting presentation whether you are considering using Amazon’s shared hosting solutions or not.
There is also a very detailed post about this keynote by Anne Helmond for TheNextWeb.org, and you can listen to an audio interview with Werner given at the Next Web Conference to David Petherick about Amazon’s Kindle. The video also shows all the questions and answers from after the keynote. Also see our other Next Web Conference videos:
Written on July 16, 2008 – 12:54 pm Joop Dorresteijn, Contributing editor
We would like to give you an early suggestion for the holiday season, Crunchgear heard an “insider” whisper at Amazon about an update to their electronic book reader. The electronic book seller is planning to release the first as early as October 2008. The “insider” told Crunchgear that Amazon has “Skipped three or four generations” in comparison to the iPod releases.
There is a lot of criticism about the original Kindle in terms of ergonomic use, some say that it is hard to read from the device and accidentally pressing one of the buttons. The first expected model would have an improved interface and setup with the same type of screen but a smaller form factor. The second expected model would be considerably larger and shaped at the size of an A4 paper. Both models are expected to be available in trendy new colors, there are no price indications yet.
We were hoping that Amazon would take the Kindle a step further and supply the nifty device with some foldable LCD screens. But who knows what the future of this device might bring, A4 sized reading would at least improve the experience dramatically, and we look forward to get our hands on one of these babies.
A few hours ago I bought a few books in anticipation of my next holiday. I do hope they got through before the servers crashed. Yep, Amazon is down with a ‘Http/1.1 Service Unavailable’ error message:
Sometimes reloading does get you some content but then the next page you click to shows you the error message again.
Amazon sells over 150,000 books a day.
There are 86,400 seconds in a day
Amazon is losing approximately two book sales every second they’re down.
A profit of $5/book would be losing $10 every second.
For every hour they’re down that would be losing $36,000.
But you figure that it is peak hours for web traffic, so I would estimate double that.
Amazon is losing approximately $72,000 per hour.
Then again I have no idea how much profit they make. But no doubt, they’re losing thousands of dollars by the minute.
Venturebeat has a post up with some details about the outage too. They say Cnet estimated that a global outage would cost Amazon more than $31,000 per minute. But Amazon sites in other countries aren’t down so it is likely to be less than that. (more…)
According to research firm Parks Associates roughly one-fifth of all U.S. households are disconnected from the Internet and have never used e-mail. Apparently they called 20 million households and asked them if they had Internet Access. (Had they gone door to door that number would have been way higher as I can imagine that a high percentage of people that don’t have a phone in their houses also don’t have Internet.)
John Barrett, director of research at Parks Associates is quoted:
“Nearly one out of three household heads has never used a computer to create a document. These data underscore the significant digital divide between the connected majority and the homes in the unconnected minority that rarely, if ever, use a computer. Many people just don’t see a reason to use computers and do not associate technology with the needs and demands of their daily lives”
There is hope though as 7 percent of the 20 million disconnected homes plan to get connected within the next 12 months.
Werner Vogels at The Next Web Conference 2008
Last Friday we had dinner with Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon, who told us how dangerous it is to ignore users who still use 800×600. One guest said “It is just too much work to design your website in such a way that it works on all resolutions. You should just ignore the older browsers and systems and make sure everything works for 98% of your users”.
Vogels replied that Amazon currently has over 80 million members, that lots of those come to the service because of its low pricing. Many Amazon customers are very price aware and that Amazon is also attractive for customers with lower incomes. If he would ignore even a few percent of his customers that would come down to millions of disappointed users.
When you are surrounded by geeks and early adopters it is easy to forget that not everybody own the latest MacBook Pro, a speedy broadband connection and a 23 inch monitor. We are very focused on what the Next Web will look like and are always looking ahead. Just remember that sometimes it pays to look back a bit too…
Written on May 15, 2008 – 2:13 pm Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of The Next Web Conference
Earlier we reported about Animoto, but that was before they launched their Facebook app. Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon is presenting at Next08 and started of by showing a short movie he made on Animoto followed by the Animoto fairytale.
Animoto was running on Amazon EC2 server and was using 50 servers when they had 25.000 users (note that their technology needs a lot of compute power). Probably most of you were already users then.
Now it becomes interesting. The day they launched their Facebook app, they signed up 25.000 new users per HOUR, resulting in the need of scaling to 3500 servers within 2 days. If it wasn’t for Amazon Animoto would have gone down and missed the million new users which would probably be the end of this great service.
I wonder how long it would take to call Dell, get the country manager on the line and negotiate a deal on buying 3500 new servers, meanwhile calling your local data center telling them you’re buying all their space immediately and order him to start building a new data center next to it…. I’m not sure but my guess is it takes more then two days and then I’m not talking about the costs of such a process and the opportunity costs of all those new Pro accounts.
Breaking news: Amazon invests in Animoto! Good call Jeff and Werner
Save 5 dollars on a signup (and give me 3 months extra :)) via the referral code: oqilswmk
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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
