Tag: amazon

Has Yahoo got its mojo back?

Yahoo’s offer of three months free access to their Flickr Pro photo sharing service could be the start of CEO Marissa Mayer’s plan for the company’s recovery.

One of the disappointments with Yahoo in recent years has been management’s inablity to effectively use the impressive portfolio of online assets that they’ve built up over the last 15 years. Could this be about to change as Marissa Mayer finds her feet as CEO at Yahoo?

A first step may be Yahoo’s free offer of Pro accounts on their Flickr photo sharing service which is coupled with a new iPhone app and a marketing drive.

Their timing is exquisite as Instagram, the file sharing service of the moment, struggles with privacy concerns. Flickr offers far better control over photographers’ rights than Instagram or most other social media services.

While the Flikr offer won’t reverse Yahoo’s long term decline on itself, it could be the start on a long journey of re-establishing the company’s credibility as one of the leading web companies.

2013 promises to be a turbulent year for the big four online empires as Apple adapts to life without Steve Jobs, Amazon fights on a number of fronts, Facebook tries to justify its massive market valuation and Google digests Motorola while dealing with declining internet advertising rates.

If Mayer and her management team can get a coherent strategy that realises the strengths of Yahoo’s product portfolio, then the company might be in a position to challenge the Internet’s big four.

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Trapped in a walled garden

Can social media services like facebook stay relevant as they manage content?

Following up on last week’s criticism of Facebook, US entrepreneur Mark Cuban clarified his position about the social network.

Central to Mark’s criticism are three points about Facebook’s business model; that it is a time waster, it takes control away from users and it doesn’t succeed in connecting people to information and friends.

All of this is true, and these features are key to the walled garden model that all of the internet empires want to build.

Central to this strategy is the “time on site” metric and so far Facebook beats all comers, with a huge 400 minutes per month per user.

Users who spend a long time on a website are more valuable than those who don’t hang around and Facebook’s success has been in capturing the attention of their members and locking them into their platform.

The willingness of other websites, particularly media companies, to lock themselves into Facebook’s platform has puzzled many observers as they are giving their customers away to the social media service.

How willing internet users are in hanging around Facebook’s, or Amazon’s, Google’s and Apple’s, walled gardens remains to be seen; it depends upon how compelling the content and value is.

If Mark Cuban’s right, viewers’ eyeballs and advertising dollars may start moving away from Facebook when people realise they are missing out on relevant information.

The real value in media organisations, whether we talk about old media such as newspapers or new media like social platforms, is in presenting relevant information to visitors and readers. As the many news organisations are learning, when you stop being relevant then people stop paying attention.

Being relevant is the great challenge for Facebook, newspapers and all media organisations.

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ABC Nightlife computers – who owns your data?

For November’s ABC Nighlife we look at how digital rights management can affect you.

Paul Wallbank joins Tony Delroy to discuss how technology affects your business and life. For the November segment we look at the perils of digital rights management.

If you missed the spot, the podcast is available from the ABC Nightlife website and the answers to listeners’ questions is available in the following post.

We all value our collections of CDs, books and photos, but what happens when we completely lose the digital equivalents? Tonight on the Nightlife we look at who really owns e-books and computer programs.

Last month a story appeared on the Internet where Linn, a Norwegian lady, lost her entire collection of eBooks from her Kindle reader when Amazon decided she had breached their conditions.

  • What happened to Linn and her ebook collection?
  • How did Amazon respond when she complained?
  • So who actually owns those ebooks?
  • Is this shutting down of accounts common?
  • At their big event a few weeks back Apple focused their iPads and iBooks on education, could this happen to schools?
  • It’s not just ebooks though, can this happen with other online services?
  • Is this a problem with cloud computing services?
  • What about the data you’ve saved, do you lose that if the account is shut down?
  • What about businesses and all the work they go to build a Facebook or Pinterest following, are those online friends the business’ property?

We’d love to hear your views so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on the night on 1300 800 222 within Australia or +61 2 8333 1000 from outside Australia.

Tune in on your local ABC radio station or listen online at www.abc.net.au/nightlife.

You can SMS Nightlife’s talkback on 19922702, or through twitter to @paulwallbank using the #abcnightlife hashtag or visit the Nightlife Facebook page.

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Tech’s tough days

Apple and Amazon’s quarterly reports steal the attention from Microsoft’s Windows 8 launch

Today sees another tough day for tech stocks with both Apple and Amazon missing their projected earnings which again finds Microsoft being stood up at their own party.

For Amazon, along with the costs involved with a new range of Kindles, there’s a huge write down in their Living Social investment, another indicator that the group buying bubble has passed into history alongside tulips, 19th Century Argentinian railway bonds and South Sea investments.

It’s worrying that while Amazon’s quarterly sales have increased by 23% over last year’s figures to $11.546 billion dollars, their cost of sales has also gone up 23% from $8.325 to $10.319 billion. This is a trend to watch closely over the next few quarters.

Unlike Amazon, Apple still made a fat profit with income going up to $8.2 billion for the quarter, an increase of 24%. This missed many Wall Street analysts’ estimates.

Apple’s missed earnings were put down to supply chain constraints and development costs, but what jumps out looking at the cash flow is the six billion turnaround in the company’s Accounts Receivable. One assumes this is the value of pending invoices on the new ranges of iPhones, iMacs and iPads sent out to their sales channel.

If that’s right, Apple are looking at a big boost in their cashflow next month, although there’s few companies who would like to have five billion dollars in outstanding invoices in today’s economic climate.

Once again though, Apple have managed to steal Microsoft’s thunder. Despite the glitz and glamour of the Windows 8 launch in New York, Microsoft’s announcement has been muted by the tech and business press’ reaction to the earnings reports.

What is clear from all three companies though is that hand held devices – the Apple iPad, Amazon Kindle and Microsoft Surface – are going dominate the tech and financial coverage of all three companies for the rest of the year.

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Moving on from the gadget era

Amazon reinvent their business to suit changing economic times

Yesterday at the launch of the next generation of Kindle e-readers Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos observed why the various Google Android based tablets have failed.

Why? Because they’re gadgets, and people don’t want gadgets anymore. They want services that improve over time. They want services that improve every day, every week, and every month.

Throughout the industrial revolution progress and innovation was about creating products that improved people’s lives – whether it was Josiah Wedgwood making affordable crockery, Thomas Edison commercialising the light bulb or Henry Ford making cheap motor cars available to the masses – these innovations changed the way we lived or did business.

In the late Twentieth Century business focused more on creating gadgets and our lives became a race to accumulate more useless tat to store in our big McMansions to store the junk in.

We wore out our credit cards and home equity in “buying stuff we don’t need to impress people we don’t like” throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.

Today that’s changed, consumers are now more cautious and, despite the efforts of governments to prop up the broken system, the great credit boom is over.

Jeff Bezos is onto this, instead of Amazon offering me-too products that don’t add value,  “people don’t want gadgets anymore. They want services that improve over time.”

The word ‘service’ is notable — one of the things Amazon have achieved is changing how customers use books and DVDs from outright purchases that they can trade and sell to licensed products where Amazon and publishers control distribution.

Amazon are consolidating their position as one of the big four Internet empires. How Google, Apple and PayPal respond to Amazon’s suite of services will define much of the online economy.

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How much server space do Internet companies need to run their sites?

How much server space do companies like Google, Amazon, YouTube, Hotmail and Facebook need to run their sites?

“How much server space do companies like Google, Amazon, or YouTube, or for that matter Hotmail and Facebook need to run their sites?” is the question I’ve been asked to answer on ABC Radio National Drive this evening.

This isn’t a simple question to answer as the details of data storage are kept secret by most online services.

Figuring out how much data is saved in computer systems is a daunting task in itself and in 2011 scientists estimated there were 295 exabytes stored on the Internet, desktop hard drives, tape backup and other systems in 2007.

An exabyte is the equivalent of 50,000 years worth of DVD video, a typical new computer comes with a terabyte hard drive so one exabyte is the equivalent of a million new computers.

The numbers when looking at this topic are so great that petabytes are probably the best way of measuring data, a thousand of these make up an exabyte. A petabyte is the equivalent to filling up the hard drives of a thousand new computers.

Given cloud computing and data centres have grown exponentially since 2007, it’s possible that number has doubled in the last five years.

In 2009 it was reported Google was planning to have ten million servers and an exabyte of information. It’s almost certain that point has been passed, particularly given the volume of data being uploaded to YouTube which alone has 72 hours worth of video uploaded every minute.

Facebook is struggling with similar growth and it’s reported that the social media service is having to rewrite its database. Last year it was reported Facebook users were uploading six billion photos a month and at the time of the float on the US stock market the company claimed to have over a 100 petabytes of photos and video.

According to one of Microsoft’s blogs, Hotmail has over a billion mailboxes and “hundreds of petabytes of data”.

For Amazon details are harder to find, in June 2012 Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos announced their S3 cloud storage service was now hosting a billion ‘objects’. If we assume the ‘objects’ – which could be anything from a picture to a database running on Amazon’s service – have an average size of a megabyte then that’s a exabyte of storage.

The amount of storage is only one part of the equation, we have to be able to do something with the data we’ve collected so we also have to look at processing power. This comes down to the number of computer chips or CPUs – Central Processing Units – being used to crunch the information.

Probably the most impressive data cruncher of all is the Google search engine that processes phenomenal amounts of data every time somebody does a search on the web. Google have put together an infographic that illustrates how they manage to answer over a billion queries a day in an average time of less than quarter of a second.

Google is reported to own 2% of the world’s servers and they are very secretive about the numbers, estimates based on power usage in 2011 put the number of servers the company uses at around 900,000. Given Google invests about 2.5 billion US dollars a year on new data centres, it’s safe to say they have probably passed the one million mark.

How much electricity all of this equipment uses is a valid question. According to Jonathan Koomey of Stanford University, US data centres use around 2% of the nation’s power supply and globally these facilities use around 1.5%.

The numbers involved in answering the question of how much data is stored by web services are mind boggling and they are growing exponentially. One of the problems with researching a topic like this is how quickly the source data becomes outdated.

It’s easy to overlook the complexity and size of the technologies that run social media, cloud computing or web searches. Asking questions on how these services work is essential to understanding the things we now take for granted.

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Culture beats strategy

What does the executive car park tell us about a business’ management culture?

Writer and business consultant Joseph Michelli says”Culture beats strategy, in fact it eats it for breakfast and lunch”.

This was one of the key points in a recent webinar about online retailer Zappos and its customer service culture.

Joseph’s right, the culture of an organisation is the ultimate key to its success, if managers and staff work “according to the book” and declaring “it’s not my job” then you end up with a siloed organisation where management are more interesting in protecting and growing their empires over helping customers.

With Zappos it’s interesting how it appears easy the integration into Amazon’s ownership has gone and this is probably because both have service centric cultures.

Both companies seem to have avoided employing Bozos as Guy Kawasaki famously put it a few years ago.

Your parking lot’s “biorhythm” looks like this:

  • 8:00 am – 10:00 am–Japanese cars exceed German cars
  • 10:00 am – 5:00 pm–German cars exceed Japanese cars
  • 5:00 pm – 10:00 pm–Japanese cars exceed German cars

Guy’s German car observation is spot on. When I was running a service business, one measure I used for a potentially troublesome client was how many expensive German cars were in the executive parking spaces, it was usually a good indicator that an organisation’s leaders are more interested in management perks than maintaining their technology.

Another useful measure was where those cars are parked, a good indicator of management’s sense of entitlement is when executive parking spots are conveniently next to the building entrance or lift lobby while customers expected to find a spot anywhere within ten blocks.

It all comes down to culture and when management are more concerned about parking spots and staff about free lunches, you know you’re dealing with an organisation where the customer – or the shareholder – isn’t the priority.

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