http://readwrite.com/series/builders
http://readwrite.com/2014/02/25/evan-sharp-pinterest-cofounder-builders
http://readwrite.com/2013/11/11/cyanogen-steve-kondik-android
måndag 29 februari 2016
ReadWrite - Builders
ReadWriteBuilders is a series of interviews with developers, designers and other architects of the programmable future.
http://readwrite.com/series/builders
http://readwrite.com/2014/02/25/evan-sharp-pinterest-cofounder-builders
http://readwrite.com/2013/11/11/cyanogen-steve-kondik-android
http://readwrite.com/series/builders
http://readwrite.com/2014/02/25/evan-sharp-pinterest-cofounder-builders
http://readwrite.com/2013/11/11/cyanogen-steve-kondik-android
Valuing high-tech companies
Instead of charging the end customer, Yelp sells local advertising to businesses that register on the website. A basic listing is free, but the company offers paid services, such as enhanced listings with photos and video, a sponsored search (where the company appears early in the consumer’s search results), and a “call to action,” which allows the consumer to schedule an appointment or the business to provide a coupon. In 2014, that local advertising contributed $321 million of the company’s $378 million in revenues.
--
There are approximately 66 million small and midsize businesses in Yelp’s target markets. As of 2014, the company had registered 2 million businesses on its site. Of the businesses that registered, only 84,000 were paying clients. With 1 percent market penetration, there is plenty of room for growth.
--
BIA/Kelsey, a research and advisory company that focuses on local advertising, estimated that local businesses spent $132.9 billion on advertising in 2013, of which $26.5 billion was placed online.
http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/valuing-high-tech-companies
fredag 26 februari 2016
Why Instagram Worked
Oct 20, 2014
A co-founder looks back at how a stalled project turned into a historic success.
--
At first, we were building an app called Burbn, a location-based social
network written in HTML5. Burbn was well-liked and had a few passionate
daily actives, but it wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire. Our
attempts at explaining what we were building was often met with blank
stares, and we peaked at around 1,000 users. For those early adopters,
though, it was a new way of sharing what they were doing out in the
world. Many of our favorite updates came from friends who posted to
Burbn after putting their photos through some early filter apps,
compensating for the lower image sensors on phones like the iPhone 3G.
--
We needed to scope down the product we were building, or risk failure in
trying to be too many things at once. It was time to try something
different — why don’t we take the photo updates from Burbn and make them
into their own product?
--
Our fundamental idea was that people would want to connect and share
experiences out in the real world, through snapshots of their lives. In
retrospect, Instagram may seem “obvious” — communication through photos
is universal. But products are defined by a series of decisions and
assumptions, and our combination of being photos-first and
public-by-default would prove to be a combination that solved an unmet
need.
--
Roughly 100,000 people signed up in the first week.
--
Border-crossing connections are my favorite thing about what we’re building at Instagram.
Fading stars
Hollywood studios can no longer bank on the pulling-power of famous actors
--Thanks to droves of new filmgoers in China, where the market grew by 49% last year, global revenues increased by 4% to $38 billion.
--
The industry’s recent success, at home and abroad, comes from the rise of the big special-effects event film: franchises like “Fast and Furious”, “Avengers”, “The Hunger Games”, “Jurassic Park”, James Bond and “Star Wars” led a group of 14 films with more than $500m each in worldwide box-office takings last year, up from just five such films in 2006.
--
Yet there is one arena where stars are as relevant as ever: the international market. Foreign cinemas like to exhibit films with known names in the lead roles. Some old-school stars are still big draws—the likes of Mr Cruise or even, apparently, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
http://www.economist.com/news/business/21693591-hollywood-studios-can-no-longer-bank-pulling-power-famous-actors-fading-stars
Preload: What is it good for?
Preload is a new web standard aimed at improving performance and providing more granular loading control to web developers.
--
In human terms, it’s a way to tell a browser to start fetching a certain resource, because we as authors (or as server administrators, or as smart-server developers) know that the browser is going to need that particular resource pretty soon.
--
--
That means that prefetch’s main use case is speeding up the next navigation rather than the current one.
--
While most markup-based resources are discovered fairly early by the browser’s preloader, not all resources are markup-based. Some of the resources are hidden in CSS and in JavaScript, and the browser cannot know that it is going to need them until it is already fairly late. So in many cases, these resources end up delaying the first render, the rendering of text, or loading of critical parts of the page.
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/02/preload-what-is-it-good-for/
--
<link rel="preload"> is a declarative fetch directive.
In human terms, it’s a way to tell a browser to start fetching a certain resource, because we as authors (or as server administrators, or as smart-server developers) know that the browser is going to need that particular resource pretty soon.
--
<link rel="prefetch"> has been supported on the web for a long while, and has decent browser support.--
<link rel="prefetch"> is a directive that tells a
browser to fetch a resource that will probably be needed for the next
navigation. That mostly means that the resource will be fetched with
extremely low priority.That means that prefetch’s main use case is speeding up the next navigation rather than the current one.
--
While most markup-based resources are discovered fairly early by the browser’s preloader, not all resources are markup-based. Some of the resources are hidden in CSS and in JavaScript, and the browser cannot know that it is going to need them until it is already fairly late. So in many cases, these resources end up delaying the first render, the rendering of text, or loading of critical parts of the page.
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/02/preload-what-is-it-good-for/
Do Red Carpet Appearances Impact Designers’ Sales?
We looked at the five award shows with the most watched and talked about
red carpets — the Oscars, the Grammys, the Screen Actor Guild Awards,
the Golden Globes, and the People's Choice Awards — from the past three
years and found out what label every female celebrity wore to the event.
Looking at the past three years and the resulting sales, it appears that
red carpet appearances don't have an appreciable effect on designers'
revenue. The most difficult thing about translating this type of success
into bigger sales is that oftentimes celebrities' red carpet dresses
are one-offs or cost such an exorbitant amount of money that there may
as well only be one in existence.
http://www.racked.com/2016/2/25/11109990/red-carpet-designers-sales-effect
http://www.racked.com/2016/2/25/11109990/red-carpet-designers-sales-effect
Adele: The full story
--
The album's launch was straight out of Steve Jobs's handbook. Control everything, withhold information, build up anticipation, never break cover, keep the message simple, and treat your product's arrival as if it is a major event. Don't worry about feeding the wider media machine. It will gorge itself quite happily on scraps. Adele is up there with Star Wars, Grand Theft Auto, and Apple Corp, as a masterful promoter of her brand.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35152397
torsdag 25 februari 2016
In Season of Returning, a Start-Up Tries to Find Homes for the Rejects
Optoro, a start-up company that aims to reduce the financial and environmental costs of another great holiday tradition: returns.
--
Americans returned $260 billion in merchandise last year, up more than
66 percent from five years ago, according to the National Retail
Federation. And a quarter of that was during the holiday season.
--
As e-commerce sales surge and free return shipping becomes the norm, shoppers are set to return even more this year.
--
A majority of returned items never make it back to retailers’ shelves.
Instead, the items wind their way through liquidators, wholesalers and
resellers, many of the purchases ending up in landfills.
--
Optoro
is becoming a player in the “reverse logistics” industry handling
returns in the United States, one that is growing together with the rise
of online sales.
And
the space is attracting investors’ attention. Last December, Genco, one
of the biggest operators, processing about 600 million returned items a
year and raking in about $1.6 billion in sales, was acquired by FedEx.
--
At least 15 percent of e-commerce sales end up as returns, according to
industry estimates, compared with an estimated 8 percent of purchases
made at brick-and-mortar stores.
--
For undamaged products that have a high resale value, like baby goods,
power tools or tablet devices, Optoro’s software might direct products
to its own discount site, Blinq.com,
which sells open-box goods at discounts. (Optoro helps retailers test
and grade those products.) For returns, or even excess inventory, that
are available in bulk, products are routed to another site, Bulq.com, where discount stores and other off-price retailers can purchase merchandise by the pallet.
Nordstrom’s High Cost for Online Sales
This strategy, known as omni-channel, is at the center of the retail industry’s efforts to fend off competition from Amazon.com Inc. But it’s a costly tactic to pursue, and increased sales often come at the expense of profits.
--
“This business model has a high variable cost structure, driven by fulfillment and marketing costs, in addition to ongoing technology investments.”
--
For the full year ending in January, Nordstrom’s e-commerce business made up 20% of revenue, up from 8% five years ago. However, profits fell 17% from a year earlier, to $600 million, as expenses rose 10%.
--
Balancing inventory at physical stores and in distribution centers is also part of the calculation. Nordstrom executives said part of the hundreds of millions of dollars the company invested in technology in recent years has gone toward tools that would help manage inventory.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/nordstroms-high-cost-for-online-sales-1456174730?
China Could Beat Hollywood by 2017
Buoyed by holiday audiences, The Mermaid, a quirky comedy from
director Stephen Chow about a mermaid who falls in love with a real
estate tycoon she’s sent to assassinate, is the highest-grossing film of all time
in China. It’s rung up more than $440 million in ticket sales since
opening on Feb. 8, according to box-office researcher EntGroup.
--
The country has about 31,630 movie screens; it added 8,035 last year.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-25/china-could-beat-hollywood-by-2017
--
The country has about 31,630 movie screens; it added 8,035 last year.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-25/china-could-beat-hollywood-by-2017
WordPress Sites Now Support Google’s AMP To Make Mobile Pages Load Much Faster
Starting today, any website on WordPress.com now automatically supports
AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). There’s nothing to do. Self-hosted WordPress websites can also
enable AMP by installing a plugin.
How 4 fragrance brands sell perfumes online, where there is no smell
“Beauty Board” is Sephora’s Pinterest-like user-generated social
platform, which allows users to upload pictures of their own makeup
looks — and also gives others the option to shop those looks.
How Instagram polices its growing ad business
Instagram announced this week it has topped 200,000 advertisers.
Despite that growth, there are few signs that users have been turned
off by the rapid expansion of ads — Instagram also recently topped 400
million users.
--
Instagram has a number of quality controls for its ads. It hosts
workshops with brands, agencies and ad tech partners to teach them about
the rules. It sets style guidelines, including limits to how much text
is allowed in the ads. There’s also a team of people looking for ads
that don’t meet standards.
Google Seeks to Pacify Consumers With Faster Mobile Pages
AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) sits alongside similar efforts by Facebook Inc., via Instant Articles, and Apple Inc., via Apple News, to speed up the rate at which articles load on mobile devices. Pages built with the technology load about four times faster and use 10 times less data than typical pages, Google said in a blog post announcing the general introduction of the technology.
--
The key difference between Google’s initiative and similar efforts from Facebook and Apple is that Google allows publishers to control the platform and the advertising.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-24/google-seeks-to-pacify-consumers-with-faster-mobile-pages
https://www.ampproject.org/
onsdag 24 februari 2016
Brave - A Browser
Brave. It's a browser that blocks trackers and intrusive adverts, so you get to decide what you download.
http://www.creativebloq.com/web-design/new-tools-february-21619378
https://brave.com/
https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop
http://www.creativebloq.com/web-design/new-tools-february-21619378
https://brave.com/
https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop
Design, Map, Buy: Snapchat Launches On-Demand Geofilters
Snapchat has launched on-demand geofilters, enabling everyone to create their own special overlays.
--
To date, almost half a million Community Geofilters have been submitted,
and every day, Snaps overlaid with Geofilters are viewed hundreds of
millions of times!”
Under Armour explains why it's moving more of its ad budget away from TV
Under Armour's senior vice president of brand marketing Adrienne
Lofton said the split between digital ads and TV ads is around 50/50.
It used to be 70/30.
--
Under Armour has reported 23 quarters of consecutive growth of more than 20%. The company aims to grow its annual sales to $7.5 billion in 2018, up from around $4 billion today.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/under-armour-has-5050-digitaltv-advertising-budget-split-2016-2?r=US&IR=T
http://uk.businessinsider.com/under-armour-what-you-do-in-the-dark-puts-you-in-the-light-holiday-campaign-2016-2?r=US&IR=T
It used to be 70/30.
--
Under Armour has reported 23 quarters of consecutive growth of more than 20%. The company aims to grow its annual sales to $7.5 billion in 2018, up from around $4 billion today.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/under-armour-has-5050-digitaltv-advertising-budget-split-2016-2?r=US&IR=T
http://uk.businessinsider.com/under-armour-what-you-do-in-the-dark-puts-you-in-the-light-holiday-campaign-2016-2?r=US&IR=T
LinkedIn Problems Run Deeper Than Valuation
LinkedIn’s weak MAU (monthly active user) figures ...
only one-quarter of its members use the site every month. This low level of engagement has made the product less and less useful for recruiting. Top performers in some industries, like tech, try to avoid LinkedIn as they get bombarded by recruiters.
http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/23/linkedin-problems-run-deeper-than-valuation/
tisdag 23 februari 2016
The Weird Global Appeal of Heavy Metal
In late August, Sony Music Entertainment bought Century Media Records, a
leading metal and hard rock label, for an undisclosed sum. Universal
Music Group last month bought metal label Candlelight. Aside from record
sales and concert tickets, merchandise is a big part of metal
culture—especially T-shirts.
--
Metal festivals are proliferating—there are some 50 world-wide. Dubai’s “Rock Fest” and “Desert Rock Festival” events have drawn metal-heads from across the Middle East.
--
Over 100,000 metal bands from about 150 countries have listings on Encyclopaedia Metallum, an online archive. That is roughly double the figure from 2007.
--
Driving metal’s growth are intensely loyal fans with unusual consumer habits. Many metal-heads still collect physical products, such as CDs. Younger fans connect not just to older bands like Black Sabbath and Death, but also established groups from all over the world like Brazil’s Sepultura, Germany’s Rammstein and Sweden’s Opeth.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-weird-global-appeal-of-heavy-metal-1455819419
--
Metal festivals are proliferating—there are some 50 world-wide. Dubai’s “Rock Fest” and “Desert Rock Festival” events have drawn metal-heads from across the Middle East.
--
Over 100,000 metal bands from about 150 countries have listings on Encyclopaedia Metallum, an online archive. That is roughly double the figure from 2007.
--
Driving metal’s growth are intensely loyal fans with unusual consumer habits. Many metal-heads still collect physical products, such as CDs. Younger fans connect not just to older bands like Black Sabbath and Death, but also established groups from all over the world like Brazil’s Sepultura, Germany’s Rammstein and Sweden’s Opeth.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-weird-global-appeal-of-heavy-metal-1455819419
Genombrott för matvaror på nätet 2015
E-handeln växte med 19 procent till 50 miljarder kronor 2015.
Bygghandeln hade ett fantastiskt år, samtidigt som försäljningen av mat
på nätet tog fart på allvar, enligt E-handelsbarometern.
--
Även livsmedelshandeln imponerade med en tillväxt på 40 procent, till
drygt 4 miljarder kronor. Det är mycket pengar, men endast cirka 1,5
procent av all livsmedelshandel.
http://digital.di.se/artikel/genombrott-for-matvaror-pa-natet-2015
http://pages.postnord.com/rs/184-XFT-949/images/e-barometern-arsrapport-2015.pdf
Mobile shopping is doubling in China each year
According to analysis produced by UBS equity analysts Xinyu Liao and Yunyun Hu, retail sales of consumer goods grew at a compound average growth rate (CAGR) of 13.8% since 2000, leaving the total amount spent by Chinese households last year at a mammoth 30 trillion RMB (US$4.6 trillion).
--
Breaking down the retail sales figure further, there’s one component that stands head and shoulder above the rest when it comes to annual growth: online retail sales.
It grew by an astonishing 33.% in 2015, accounting for more than 10% of total retail sales, a figure that dwarfs comparable online spending figures from the US and Japan.
http://www.businessinsider.com.au/mobile-shopping-is-doubling-in-china-each-year-2016-2
Daily fantasy sports outlook: No profits, lots of uncertainty, and dying unicorns
The daily fantasy sports market rose dramatically in the past few years with the rise of DraftKings and FanDuel. But in 2015, regulators closed in, with some declaring the betting on sports outcomes amounted to illegal gambling, rather than legal skill-based wagering as the companies alleged.
A total of 29 states are considering legislation related to daily fantasy sports, according to a report by market analyst firm Eilers & Krejcik Gaming.
--
Still, Eilers estimates that FanDuel lost $137 million before taxes in 2015, while DraftKings lost an estimated $280 million. The biggest expense is prizes for fans, while the second-biggest cost is sales and marketing. And roughly 70 percent of that cost was TV advertising. In other words, the companies have been playing an unprecedented user acquisition game on the assumption they could always raise more money.
--
“While this massive ad spend helped drive record first time depositors (FTDs), it also resulted in a uptick in customer acquisition costs.” The cost to acquire a new user was somewhere around $125 to $175 in 2015.
http://venturebeat.com/2016/02/22/daily-fantasy-sports-outlook-no-profits-lots-of-uncertainty-dying-unicorns/
måndag 22 februari 2016
Mall of Scandinavia – som en liten barack …
Med sina 100 000 kvadratmeter köpyta är Mall of Scandinavia en liten barack jämfört med giganterna runt om i världen.
--
The Dubai Mall, som ligger i Dubai i Förenade Arabemiraten, räknas som världens största galleria.
--
Gallerian är uppdelad i fyra våningsplan, runt 500 000 kvadratmeter
stor. Förutom omkring 1 200 butiker, finns biografer, restauranger och
kaféer, men även ett stort saltvattenakvarium och en isbana. Parkeringen
har plats för 14 000 bilar.
I det dolda har Sony Music byggt världens största spellistetjänst
I Stockholm har skivbolaget Sony Music byggt upp världens största tredjepartstjänst för musikspellistor, Filtr.
--
Idag prenumererar över 20 miljoner människor på Filtrs spellistor.
http://www.breakit.se/artikel/1551/i-det-dolda-har-sony-music-byggt-varldens-storsta-spellistetjanst
Xaxis Brings Programmatic to Political Advertising with Xaxis Politics
November 9, 2015
Haystaq DNA is a big data and predictive analytics firm founded by the team behind President Obama’s ground breaking microtargeting operation in 2008. Since then, Haystaq DNA has provided individual-level microtargeting for thousands of political campaigns, non-profit organizations and commercial clients.
https://www.xaxis.com/news/view/xaxis-brings-programmatic-to-political-advertising-with-xaxis-politics
http://haystaqdna.com/
https://www.xaxis.com/
Xaxis Politics, the industry’s first targeted political advertising
solution for reaching U.S. voters across all digital channels without
utilizing personally identifiable information.
--
Xaxis Politics incorporates the Haystaq National Voter Database – the
nation’s largest and most accurate source of voter data, representing
166 million voters – into Xaxis’s proprietary Turbine data management
platform (DMP), enabling advertisers to engage voters across a multitude
of hot button issues, political affiliations and other demographic
information.
--
About Haystaq DNAHaystaq DNA is a big data and predictive analytics firm founded by the team behind President Obama’s ground breaking microtargeting operation in 2008. Since then, Haystaq DNA has provided individual-level microtargeting for thousands of political campaigns, non-profit organizations and commercial clients.
https://www.xaxis.com/news/view/xaxis-brings-programmatic-to-political-advertising-with-xaxis-politics
http://haystaqdna.com/
https://www.xaxis.com/
Ad blockers: How online publishing is fighting back
Free London-based business newspaper CityA.M. is one of several
publishers to have tried blocking visitors to its site if they have an
ad blocker switched on.
The firm, which has been working with the anti-ad block start-up Rezonence, says about a quarter of its readers use ad blockers, but that there has been "no perceivable drop in traffic" since it launched the strategy in October 2015.
--
Privacy app Ghostery is also adopting a more nuanced approach. It shows consumers which ad-serving technologies a website has switched on, and then offers the choice to block or whitelist those services.
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-35602332
http://rezonence.com/
The firm, which has been working with the anti-ad block start-up Rezonence, says about a quarter of its readers use ad blockers, but that there has been "no perceivable drop in traffic" since it launched the strategy in October 2015.
--
Privacy app Ghostery is also adopting a more nuanced approach. It shows consumers which ad-serving technologies a website has switched on, and then offers the choice to block or whitelist those services.
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-35602332
http://rezonence.com/
fredag 19 februari 2016
Ghostery - Victoriatornegren.se
Ghostery - Victoriatornegren.se
https://corp.trackermaplive.com/#/live/overview?token=248624862
http://victoriatornegren.se/
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