Highlights
Good morning! It is August 21, the day of the solar eclipse. People are excited beyond words about that event. Here is a nice CNN resource with maps, transit times, and explainer videos. And remember that the day without solar eclipse news is coming. |
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Highlights
Good morning! It is July 17th, World Emoji Day. No, we don’t think there should be one either. Microsoft will announce earnings after the market closes Thursday. Keep an eye on them for announcements especially around Azure, their cloud-based business that is challenging Amazon Web Services.
Amazon raked in about $1.1 billion during its July 11 Amazon Prime Day according to Bloomberg estimates. This is the third year of Amazon’s giant sale. Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping each generate slightly over $3 billion in revenue. That means that Amazon has cracked the code in creating a non-holiday shopping event. Retail Week says that there were 538,650 transactions in the 8 p.m. hour before slowing to “just” 128,640 sales in the sale’s last hour.
A lot of Amazon’s strategic motivation involves selling its Echo voice-activated assistant and Amazon Prime memberships. About 20% of shoppers and 37% of millennials have ordered using a voice command instead of typing or clicking in the last year according to a Walker Sands report released last week.
Learn more fast: Amazon press release with numbers, Search Engine Land on voice ordering.
This week’s myth: Amazon chose July 11 (7/11) as Prime Day because both numbers are prime numbers, that is, they are divisible only by 1 and themselves. That’s true, but there are dozens of other dates made up of prime numbers that include 2, 3, and 5 so be careful about the myths. Five of our twelve months include multiple prime numbers so by that reckoning, Prime Day could also be February 2.
Ready for a spa day? Or perhaps a quick visit to the salon? Google can now book appointments from its Search and Map products using five different services with nine other named services coming soon. Three weeks ago, we wrote in this newsletter that “the future value proposition is likely to be some form of signing up businesses and automating their transactions for Google and Facebook.” This is exactly what we meant. Google also announced that it would like you to start backing up your photos and your hard drive to the Google Drive service. That was something that Google didn’t encourage before, but see our earlier comment about Microsoft Azure and remember that Amazon, among others, encourages media backups to their services. The Google backup service is free and includes 15 gigabytes for all your Google usage. Space upgrades are available at a cost of $2/month for 100 gigabytes or $10/month for a terabyte. Amazon is also playing the disruption game again this week. We’ve covered their clothing service and Whole Foods acquisition. Now Amazon is chasing Best Buy’s Geek Squad in seven West Coast cities, according to Recode. The announcement on Monday caused Best Buy stock to shed $1 billion in market cap especially when news reports showed Amazon hiring in other areas including Dallas and Miami. Don’t count out Facebook from grabbing some old economy money. Digiday reports that the social media giant will start direct selling subscriptions to news products like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Learn more fast: Google announcement for booking and for backups. Headline Scan
Images of Amazon Prime Day courtesy Amazon. Myth image courtesy Fathromi Ramdlon. Spa image courtesy Jurgen Rubig. |
Highlights
We told you in May about the looming Net Neutrality battle. It’s here and kicks into high gear Wednesday when giant Internet companies begin their consumer-focused campaign.
Companies that sell you Internet service like Verizon, Comcast, and others are required to treat all Internet traffic the same. They can’t favor one company over another or slow down a competitor’s website. That kind of interference was common until an FCC rule prohibited such behavior.
The FCC announced plans to eliminate this provision of the regulation as part of a White House business-friendly platform. Just about everyone using the Internet is affected in some way.
Here is an early look at the Save the Open Internet website that will be heavily promoted all week. You can get a quick overview of the issue and even directly connect to the FCC to leave your comments.
Learn More Fast: Recode is quoting Internet Association direction Michael Beckerman, “The FCC’s looking for comments here. They hear the comments.”‘
The Consumer Fairness Review Act is a relatively new law that makes it illegal for organizations to try to prevent people from posting honest reviews about a product or customer service online. Contract provisions, including terms of service, that allow for a penalty or similar issues are not allowed.
President Obama signed this bipartisan bill into law in December. We’re telling you about it now because real estate giant Zillow threatened a one person blog that goes by the fun name of McMansion Hell.
Zillow wanted the blogger to stop using images from its site and threatened legal action. The new CFRA legislation and fair use guidelines allowed the Electronic Frontier Foundation to fight back and win one for the much smaller website.
Why you need to know this: The FTC says, “The law protects a broad variety of honest consumer assessments, including online reviews, social media posts, uploaded photos, videos, etc. And it doesn’t just cover product reviews. It also applies to consumer evaluations of a company’s customer service.” Read their guidance for businesses.
A California judge has ruled for the second time in two years that Facebook is not violating consumer privacy by tracking user browsing activity on other websites.
The court found that the plaintiffs had no reasonable expectation of privacy without using tools for that purpose and that they had not suffered financial harm.
The big deal: No reasonable expectation of privacy is a very big deal. This puts the onus on consumers to protect their privacy by using tools such as virtual private networks (VPNs), incognito mode on browsers, and similar tactics. And then financial harm has to be addressed. We’ve said this many times: you are often the product if you aren’t required to pay for a service online. Let us know if you’re interested in ways to minimize your online presence, but be aware that doing so means that you’ll lose a lot of your favored settings, stored passwords, and other goodies that all require identification to track your ease-of-use.
