Written on 27th April 2009
1 COMMENT Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Lexcycle, creators of Stanza, the popular free e-book application for the iPhone, has announced news that the company has been acquired by Amazon.
Stanza allows users to browse a library of around 100,000 books and periodicals for the iPhone, many of them in the ePub format — a widely accepted standard for e-books that Amazon has yet to support with its proprietary Kindle platform.
No news as to how much the application was acquired for but believe me, we’re digging!
The NYTimes Blog received a quote from Cinthia Portugal, an Amazon spokeswoman
“It’s very early days for e-books, and we believe there is a lot of innovation ahead of us…Lexcycle is a smart, innovative company. and we look forward to working with them to innovate on behalf of readers.”
Marc Prud’hommeaux of Lexcycle says they are not planning any immediate changes the Stanza application for now, “customers will still be able to browse, buy, and read ebooks from our many content partners.”.
Written on 27th April 2009
0 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
“Periscope have updated their Folio booklight case to fit the Kindle 2, which still houses a little memo pad, a pen, and a retractable light for covert reading. At $50 it’s not cheap, but since Amazon charges $30 for a book cover already, you’re only really paying $20 more…” via Gizmodo
Newport Beach, CA – EMBARGO: March 4, 2009, 8AM ET – CircleUp, Inc., the leading group messaging service for membership Web sites, today launched SmartPay, a powerful new service for online payments made among members of groups and teams. SmartPay runs on the SmartMessage Platform, an innovative messaging service operating across multiple channels, partner destinations and platforms.
I don’t normally spout press releases verbatim, but this opening paragraph is pretty good, so I’m making an exception. And I am keeping to the embargo of 08:00 Eastern Time (14:00 Amsterdam). Last time I did that, the US party involved broke their own embargo, but the Next Web was first to receive this news release, so I have a good feeling this time.
I like the cheeky way there’s a “Collect Money By Email™” statement in the press release from Circle Up. I usually refer to ‘™‘ as ‘Totally Meaningless’ in a legal sense, but it signals an intent to ‘own’ the phrase. Good luck guys! But I do like the fact that the service uses Amazon Payments® – apart from the fact I’m not in the USA (of which, more later).
There’s a short screencast to illustrate how SmartPay works, illustrated below:-
Teacher’s and coach’s gifts, group photos, event t-shirts, group transportation, group parties and meals etc have traditionally been paid with cash and cheques – and that’s the area of pain that SmartPay zeroes in on.
And here’s the killer touch:
Over 150 million AOL® and Facebook® members may log in directly to enroll in SmartPay and collect money by email at www.circleup.comwithout creating a new account by simply using their AOL or Facebook user name and password.
Now that’s convenient. No new account, password, phishing worries or lost password anxiety. Just log in and ker-ching!
This is a game-changer, especially with the first 30 days free. And it’s precisely in the area of small payments that it’s likely to succeed – $0.99 per transaction under $20 is an easy-peasy number, as well as being a nice margin. If there are $140bn of transactions in this area as Circle Up’s press release suggests, then even a small percentage of penetration into this market is likely to put a smile on their face and a few dollars in their pocket.
Solves a real problem – well
It’s also making me smile for the the kudos of solving a real world problem that bugs people. “Service solves major pain point” is how they say it. I can say that as a parent, expenditure on nursery, school, team, dance class, tuition, outings, nights out and PTA / PSA events all would all benefit hugely from using this. And I’d be grateful to avoid the darn hassle of doing it the old-fashioned way. Integrating the service with social networks like Facebook or applications like Google Groups is a very smart move. And AOL members trust AOL, naturally. Being able to use and AOL or Facebook login is not just smart, it’s pushing you towards buy-in to this service.
Negative Points: The issue of limited use outside the USA is still a slow-down feature, but you can’t blame Circle Up for Amazon’s limitations in scaling beyond Seattle. World class is as world class does. I can’t sign up for Amazon Payments anywhere else other than in the US of A last time I tried, at 7am this morning. But I’m sure Amazon will fix that soon.
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?
Written on 26th December 2008
1 COMMENT Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
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. (more…)
Written on 19th November 2008
1 COMMENT Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
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
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 18th September 2008
1 COMMENT Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of The Next Web Conference. Twitter: @patrick
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:
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.
Written on 27th April 2009
1 COMMENT 
Lexcycle, creators of Stanza, the popular free e-book application for the iPhone, has announced news that the company has been acquired by Amazon.
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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 off, the future of the Web. (More info 
