Bamboo Innovator

How America’s Web 1.0 Companies Survived

How America’s Web 1.0 Companies Survived

“If we hadn’t pivoted, we’d be out of business today”: Shutterfly CEO Jeffrey Housenbold

by Natalie Robehmed | Nov 2, 2013

Some dinosaurs from Web 1.0 that you probably thought were long dead have surged back onto our annual list of America’s Best Small Companies. Here’s how they survived—and thrived Two weeks into his new job, Stamps.com’s CFO Ken McBride started slashing the first of 485 workers—87 percent of the staff. It was October 2000, six months after the initial popping sounds of the dotcom implosion, and the electronic-postage company was spurting gobs of red ink. Just a year earlier Stamps.com had gone public, raising a staggering $450 million in two offerings. Read more of this post

Google is becoming every Apple fanatic’s dream company

Google is becoming every Apple fanatic’s dream company

BY NATHANIEL MOTT 
ON NOVEMBER 1, 2013

Google is doing everything that many investors and pundits want Apple to do. As I wrote yesterday, many refuse to understand Apple’s attempts to build its business by releasing luxury goods instead of commodity products. They argue that the company should release a cheap smartphone, or operate its own data network, or improve its software to a point at which it would seem foolish to use anything besides Apple products. Google has done all that and more. Read more of this post

Fab has lost its special sauce

Fab has lost its special sauce

BY ERIN GRIFFITH 
ON NOVEMBER 1, 2013

Fab CEO Jason Goldberg has always said that no other site could compete with his because “This is a taste business,” and “They don’t have a Bradford.” Guess what? Now, neither does Fab. The news that Fab’s co-founder and Chief Creative Officer is leaving the company does not bode well. Bradford Shellhammer has been touted as the secret ingredient to the biggest, most well-funded, fastest-growing e-commerce company of the last few years. Goldberg has said many times: He built the company around Bradford’s taste. (That taste, for the unfamiliar, is a sort of a cross between the MoMA store and Spencer’s Gifts.) Bradford Shellhammer is Fab. Or was. Read more of this post

Bezos, Amazon And Refusing To Act Your Age

Bezos, Amazon And Refusing To Act Your Age

Posted 19 hours ago by Matthew Panzarino

In early 1998, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and CFO Joy Covey co-authored a letter to shareholders discussing the previous year’s accomplishments. That letter has become holy writ inside the company, and is republished every year in its annual report. The letter and its contents struck me as incredibly prescient, or perhaps simply potent, as I read through Brad Stone’s excellent The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the age of Amazon. It’s no surprise that the letter has continued to be viewed as a touchstone for the company and its employees. The tenets set out in it are clearly represented by the way that the company develops and releases products, and the approach that it takes to everyday business. Read more of this post

Being A CIO At Tesla Motors, A Startup That Builds Cars And Its Own IT

Being A CIO At Tesla Motors, A Startup That Builds Cars And Its Own IT

Posted yesterday by Alex Williams

Tesla Motors has proven that it can build the most modern cars in the world. And apparently Elon Musk insisted they build their own IT systems and e-commerce platform, too. Most all of Tesla’s IT is homegrown, said CIO Jay Vijayan, appearing onstage at the Constellation Research Connected Enterpriseevent today. The reason: the traditional enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems did not cut it, and the company has a vertically integrated operation that required a custom environment. Read more of this post

Apps for Pampering on Demand; iPhone and Android apps for scheduling last-minute massages, skincare treatments and salon services

Apps for Pampering on Demand

iPhone and Android apps for scheduling last-minute massages, skincare treatments and salon services

Nov. 1, 2013 1:58 p.m. ET

Massage Therapy: Zeel

With Zeel, summoning a massage therapist to your home or, if you prefer, office in the New York metro area takes less time than it does to find your car keys. After entering a few preferences—type of massage (Swedish or deep-tissue are offered), treatment length (60 or 90 minutes), male or female practitioner—the app will dispatch a massage therapist to your doorstep in as little as in hour in most cases. Zeel plans on expanding coverage to Miami later this year; San Francisco and Los Angeles are to follow in early 2014. Free, available for Android and iOS, zeel.com Read more of this post

Amazon tries free, on-time delivery to lure India online

Amazon tries free, on-time delivery to lure India online

5:20am EDT

By Nandita Bose

BANGALORE (Reuters) – Free shipping on a 100 rupee ($1.60) book. Delivery times guaranteed to the minute. These are some of the incentives the world’s biggest online retailer Amazon.com Inc is using to entice Indians to shop on the web, a sector where growth has been stifled by payment problems, low Internet usage and a challenging logistics environment. Amazon’s investors are counting on its international business and expansion to help drive growth and support its $165 billion market value, one of the highest among U.S. firms. Read more of this post

Amazon Mines Its Data Trove to Bet on TV’s Next Hit; Company Banks on Collecting Viewer Feedback in Unprecedented Ways to Improve Traditional TV Development Process

Amazon Mines Its Data Trove to Bet on TV’s Next Hit

Company Banks on Collecting Viewer Feedback in Unprecedented Ways to Improve Traditional TV Development Process

AMOL SHARMA

Nov. 1, 2013 11:02 p.m. ET

In May, a dozen Amazon.com Inc. AMZN -1.38% executives, including Chief ExecutiveJeff Bezos, gathered in a Seattle conference room to select the first original TV shows the company would produce for its streaming video service. A group of 14 “pilot” episodes had been posted on the company’s website a month earlier, where they were viewed by more than one million people. After monitoring viewing patterns and comments on the site, Amazon produced about 20 pages of data detailing, among other things, how much a pilot was viewed, how many users gave it a 5-star rating and how many shared it with friends. Read more of this post

Amazon and the “profitless business model” fallacy

Amazon and the “profitless business model” fallacy

October 26, 2013, Eugene Wei

[DISCLOSURE: As always when I write about Amazon, I’ll note I worked there from 1997-2004 and that I still own some shares in the company. I still have many friends who work there, though I have no more idea what Amazon is working on now than any of you in the public.]

With every quarterly earnings call, my Twitter feed lights up with jokes about how Amazon continues to grow its revenue and make no profits and how trusting investors continue to rewards the company for it. The apotheosis of that line of thoughts is a quote from Slate’s Matthew Yglesias earlier this year: “Amazon, as best I can tell, is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers.” Read more of this post

Hon Hai announces entry into mobile game industry

Hon Hai announces entry into mobile game industry

Kang Wenrou and Staff Reporter

2013-11-02

Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry Co, the world’s largest electronics contract manufacturer by revenue, will introduce its first mobile phone games within six months, entering the field of digital content to forge a new business territory for itself, our sister paper the Taipei-based China Times reports, citing Hon Hai chairman Terry Gou. Whether it’s easier to enter the hardware industry from the software industry, or vice versa, Gou believes that transitioning either way has its strengths and weaknesses. Read more of this post

Hong Kong media and Giordano fashion magnate Jimmy Lai acquires 2% of HTC

Hong Kong media magnate acquires 2% of HTC: report

By Ted Chen ,The China Post
November 2, 2013, 12:15 am TWN

TAIPEI, Taiwan — A Hong Kong-based media magnate has reportedly acquired a 2-percent stake in HTC, a beleaguered Taiwanese handset maker whose share price has tumbled over 50 percent this year. Jimmy Lai (黎智英), founder and chairman of NextMedia (壹傳媒) group, acquired about a 2-percent stake in HTC through the open market, according to a statement by a NextMedia spokesperson which appeared in the Wall Street Journal. Read more of this post

UCWeb CEO Yu Yongfu on how mobile ‘super apps’ are taking over the globe

UCWeb CEO Yu Yongfu on how mobile ‘super apps’ are taking over the globe

By Josh Ong, Yesterday

With over 400 million users around the globe, UCWeb is ready to make the jump from a mobile browser to a platform that supports its own app ecosystem.  During last week’s GMIC event, we met up with UCWeb CEO Yu Yongfu to discuss the company’s rise as a “super app” and its plans for continued international growth. UCWeb defines a super app as “an app that has a large user base, high usage rate, and the ability to support extended services by acting as a platform for third party apps and services.” For instance, Asian messaging services like WeChat, Line and Kakao have achieved super status. Over in the west, services like Facebook, Twitter and Evernote have earned the title. Read more of this post

Messaging apps are not just for chatting: WeChat is disrupting mobile games in China

Messaging apps are not just for chatting: WeChat is disrupting mobile games in China

By Kaylene Hong, Yesterday

Messaging and gaming seem like two entirely different platforms. You would never have thought it possible — but a messaging service is disrupting the mobile gaming scene in China. In a report released by Chinese Android app store Wandoujia – which monitors trends in China’s mobile market based on its downloads — two out of the top three games on its app store this month are integrated with popular Chinese messaging service WeChat. It appears that playing games in a social setting helps spread the games faster and keeps people hooked to the games — a major advantage over standalone games. Read more of this post

Alibaba restructures Alipay’s parent, Jack Ma’s share reduced

Alibaba restructures Alipay’s parent, Jack Ma’s share reduced

3:42am EDT

By Matthew Miller

BEIJING (Reuters) – The online payment affiliate of China’s biggest e-commerce company Alibaba Group Ltd will be restructured to attract new strategic investors, in a move that will reduce the shareholding of Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma in the affiliate. Zhejiang Alibaba E-Commerce Co Ltd will be restructured as a new company in which 60 percent of its shares will be offered to new strategic investors, Lucy Peng, head of the restructured entity, said in a letter published on its official Weibo microblog account on Friday. Read more of this post

Sony Struggles to Stay In the Game; Bleak Outlook for Consumer Electronics Business Worries Analysts, Investors

Sony Struggles to Stay In the Game

Bleak Outlook for Consumer Electronics Business Worries Analysts, Investors

JURO OSAWA

Updated Nov. 1, 2013 12:10 p.m. ET

In just three months, Sony Corp. 6758.TO -11.13% went from a company on the mend to one whose recovery is now in serious doubt. Hidekazu Miyahara, an analyst at Marusan Securities, 8613.TO -1.25% recalls the celebratory mood at Sony’s earnings briefing in Tokyo in late July. The Japanese electronics giant had just reported a net profit for the three months ended June 30 and analysts saw signs of a recovery in Sony’s core electronics operations following restructuring that involved 10,000 layoffs. During the question-and-answer session, another analyst told the executives how excited he was to see the television business finally turn profitable. Read more of this post