From the offices of the San Francisco Chronicle, where some of the newspaper’s local ad sales used to be, we caught up with Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and CEO of Square, who wants to redefine the payments process.
Seattle-based Lockerz is trying to build an all-new e-commerce experience for Generation Z. Here’s how it plans to do that using techniques from FarmVille and Facebook.
PopCap Games is planning to go public this year after spending more than a decade as an independent company.
Groupon, which is still trying to figure out how to break into China, is close to investing in one of the largest group-buying sites there, we have learned.
This is the year that one of the big opportunities in e-commerce is mobile, and it seems a lot of big brands are starting to get on the bandwagon. To get a taste for how shoppers interact with applications, we caught up with the folks at Amazon-owned Zappos, a relative newbie in the space.
Amazon.com announced fourth-quarter financial results today, saying it hit two milestones: It had its first $10 billion quarter, and its Kindle book sales had overtaken paperback books as the most popular format on the giant bookseller’s site. Since the beginning of the year, it has sold 115 Kindle books for every 100 paperbacks sold (not including free books). During the busy holiday quarter, net income jumped eight percent to $416 million on a 36 percent increase in sales, compared with the previous year’s period. Revenues totaled $12.95 billion, which fell short of the $12.99 billion analysts were expecting, according to Thomson Reuters.
With Groupon’s and LivingSocial’s success at securing hundreds of millions of dollars in financing and achieving hyper revenue growth, who wouldn’t want to copy their business model? In an industry that is only a year-or-so old, the trend of the past five minutes (or so it seems) is to target moms.
If there’s one area of mobile advertising that’s hot right now, it’s hyper-local, or the ability to target coupons, offers or recommendations within a block or two of a person’s location. So, what about regional ad plays?
Nintendo announced the pricing and release date today for the 3DS, which it hopes will rejuvenate sales as its other hardware platforms start aging.
Don’t call it a boom yet, but retail sales in 2010 saw the biggest gains since 1999, with the help of online retailers like Amazon.
Microsoft’s Xbox dominated the charts at the end of 2010, despite year-over-year revenue declines for both videogame hardware and software.
The goods may be virtual, but the revenue is real. A small minority of social game players in the U.S. spend money on virtual goods, but that’s adding up to a whopping $653 million this year alone.
With Google’s Android Market being a disappointment, here’s how Amazon plans to build an App Store that differentiates on pricing, recommendations and payments.
One of the problems with ordering clothing online is not knowing whether it will fit or look good. EBay has a technology fix for that using augmented reality on the mobile phone. Now you will never have to go to the mall!
Best Buy reported today that U.S. same-store sales declined 5 percent in December compared to a strong 9.3 percent sales growth in the same period last year. The company’s performance matched the experiences of other retailers, which also reported declines at year end. In the case of the big-box electronics retailer, it said the drop was driven by softness in entertainment software and TV, but was partially offset by growth in Best Buy Mobile and appliances. Online sales were also strong, resulting in a 13 percent increase in December year-over-year.
Tricia Duryee has been covering technology for more than a decade and her whole career has been spent in Seattle, an area rich in software, mobile and e-commerce. Read more »
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