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Feds Back Off Amazon Request

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 23:38:05 +0000

A subpoena for information regarding Amazon.com customers and used book purchases as part of a criminal investigation into Robert D’Angelo has been withdrawn after withering criticism from the presiding judge.

Federal Judge Stephen Crocker in western Wisconsin rebuked US Attorneys for seeking records from Amazon in connection with D’Angelo’s tax evasion and mail fraud case. News of his stance against the grab for personal information emerged after D’Angelo’s indictment, and the subsequent unsealing of court records.

MarketWatch cited Crocker’s comments, where he likened the request to "an Orwellian federal criminal investigation into the reading habits of Amazon’s customers." D’Angelo reportedly sold 24,000 used books through Amazon over a four year period.

Crocker perceived news of such a request would have a chilling effect on e-commerce. He considered the impact of such news becoming public knowledge online, and the resulting debate:

"One might ask whether this court should concern itself with blogger outrage disproportionate to the government’s actual demand of Amazon. The logical answer is yes, it should."

The Bush Administration’s Justice Department endured a similar setback when former US Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and DoJ attorneys tried to subpoena Google for hundreds of thousands of search records. The two sides finally settled on a much more scaled-back amount of search data being disclosed to the Justice Department.

An AP report noted federal prosecutors did not want these court records unsealed.

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Yahoo Merchants Toasted By Monday Outage

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 11:12:22 +0000

Customers with credit cards to burn found some of Yahoo’s merchants unable to process orders due to problems with the underlying technology.

Yahoo Merchants Toasted By Monday Outage

Heavy holiday traffic crushed Yahoo’s Merchant Solutions service on the mythical Cyber Monday, leaving merchants angry and customers frustrated. Many merchants expecting to see transactions merrily rolling through the system found themselves watching an error message from Yahoo.

"Some merchants are reporting that shoppers are receiving an error message indicating ‘system unavailable’ during the checkout process. We are aware of this issue and are currently investigating," Yahoo advised merchants, according to MarketWatch.

One merchant cited in the report had to post a telephone number for customers to call to place orders. Others waited fruitlessly for the situation to be corrected.

Even worse, sites impacted by the lengthy service outage will likely suffer the brunt of consumer anger, rather than Yahoo. CNBC said the error messages encountered by visitors did not make it clear Yahoo, not the merchant, was responsible for the problem.

Despite the lousy performance by Yahoo, merchants should take heart. Cyber Monday is a marketing creation dreamed up by Shop.org two years ago. The heaviest shopping tends to take place much closer to the middle of December than the Monday after Thanksgiving.

Perhaps a prudent merchant can turn the outage to an advantage. Acknowledging and apologizing for the irritation consumers endured, and offering some sort of mild incentive to return, may help bring those visitors back for another go at making a purchase.

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Google Still On a Hiring Binge

Doug Caverly — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 14:17:07 +0000

I support Google’s relaxed dress code. But given all the hiring the company’s doing, I’d recommend one tweak: name tags. Google added over 2,100 employees this last quarter, making it seemingly impossible for anybody to keep track of anything.

“That’s an average of about 35 people showing up for their first day of work each business day during the past three months,” computed CNET’s Elinor Mills. And that’s despite earlier assurances that Google would stop bringing so many people onboard.

So should investors be uneasy? Probably not. The story of Google’s hiring binge is less important than that of its fantastic third-quarter earnings; such successes give the company license to do more or less whatever it sees fit. Still, Eric Schmidt tried to assure onlookers that excessive hiring won’t be a problem in the future.

“The number you’re seeing is essentially an overhang from hiring that had been agreed to many months earlier,” Schmidt said, according to MarketWatch. “I don’t know that that will be repeated. Going forward we’re paying a lot of attention to the head count.”

In the meantime, have pity on Google’s many employees. Sure, they get to have free food, dogs at work, and all other sorts of incredible benefits. But as they interact with each other, I’ll bet a lot of embarrassing what’s-your-name-again situations come up.

BEA Flips Off Oracle Offer

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 22:46:05 +0000

A 25 percent premium for BEA in an all-cash offer from Oracle elicited a mild chuckle from BEA’s VP of business planning and development, William Klein.

$6.66 billion won’t be enough to yank BEA into the Oracle fold. After Oracle made an offer to BEA today, Klein responded with a polite letter that likely concealed a hearty laugh from BEA’s principals.

“It is apparent to our Board, however, that BEA is worth substantially more to Oracle, to others and, importantly, to our shareholders than the price indicated in your letter,” Klein said in his public response to Oracle president Charles Phillips.

Just what BEA may be worth is something of a mystery. As Klein noted in his letter, BEA is not current with its SEC filings.

“We believe that the absence of current financial information in the public markets limits investor visibility into our performance,” said Klein.

BEA noted in a public statement that they sent this response letter to Oracle before Oracle’s bid was published this morning.

MarketWatch noted investor Carl Icahn has a significant stake in BEA. Icahn wants BEA sold, and he stands to make $200 million in the deal.

Jobs, Gates To Share A Stage

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 25 May 2007 17:05:46 +0000

The D: All Things Digital conference taking place next week will bring together the two most iconic figures in US technology: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

The buzz around the forthcoming 75-minute session featuring Jobs and Gates at the D Conference has been palpable. MarketWatch and others have been agog over the upcoming milestone in computing history.

It’s instructive to remember the last time these two tech giants shared a stage. It was 1997, with Jobs physically on-stage at a MacWorld conference in Boston. Apple was having money troubles, and Microsoft needed to get antitrust regulators off its back.

Gates appeared on a big screen behind jobs via a remote link. The Apple faithful in attendance erupted in boos. To them, and much of the computing world, having Gates involved in Apple was akin to Satan offering Eve a snack in the Garden of Eden, with equally dramatic repercussions.

Microsoft made a $150 million investment in Apple, and to this day is the biggest developer of Apple software outside of 1 Infinite Loop. Apple’s resurgence under Jobs has the company flying high with the public and investors.

Jobs and Gates will be interviewed by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, in what should be one of the most compelling moments in tech we are likely to see this year.

Mrs. Brin Gets Google Investment

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 22 May 2007 23:19:03 +0000

Google has dropped some cash in Anne Wojcicki’s 23andMe biotech firm, to the tune of $3.9 million for a minority holding in the company co-founded by Sergey Brin’s new missus.

There are probably plenty of men who help their wives with their work. Very few are going to be able to match the generosity of Google’s co-founder, whose company gained a stake in 23andMe by writing a check with lots of digits before the decimal point.

MarketWatch picked up on the investment, as noted in an 8-K filing with the SEC that posted today.

Other details of the transaction showed Brin’s involvement with 23andMe before this investment:

Prior to Google

MarketWatch Seeks Community ‘MarketPerception’

WebProNews Staff — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 16:17:44 +0000

MarketPerception will allow stock market followers to invest their opinions in what they think will happen with a stock over the course of a trading day.

MarketWatch Seeks Community ‘MarketPerception’

Visiting MarketWatch online to see how the stock for Google happens to be doing presents the visitor with a voting option. "Will GOOG close Up or Down from its current price on the next trading day?" the just-debuted MarketPerception feature asks.

People can click up or down, and the MarketPerception box then shows the current vote totals. At press time, 69 percent of 437 voters think Google will finish up from the quote they viewed.

The curious visitor can click to view more MarketPerception results, on its Community Sentiment page. Users can make further predictions on other stocks from here. They can also see which stocks are hot based on recent voting, what the most popular stocks have been during the trading day, and the symbols receiving the most bullish and bearish sentiment.

MarketWatch owner Dow Jones said in a statement, "Future enhancements to MarketPerception will allow registered MarketWatch users to aggregate and share these predictions in a community setting, among other tasks."

They also made a change to their search functionality, making it a little more aware of the requests users make while going from two different search boxes to one. That makes it more convenient when hunting for publicly-traded company information; no more entering the company name in the symbol search box by mistake.

Dow Jones as a whole has been slowly moving toward a more open content scheme. It’s virtually a given these days that a feature story on Google will be placed in the public area of the Wall Street Journal rather than behind the subscription wall.

The recent addition of the Deal Journal to their blog lineup brings their active roster of blogs up to an even dozen. It’s a low percentage of the content available to paid subscribers, but compared to years past when nothing from the WSJ made it outside the subscription wall, this is another positive step toward embracing more readers in the Journal’s niche.

Apple, Google Ready To Make “New Things”

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 17:38:52 +0000

Rumors of a Mac Tablet spurred a question to Google CEO Eric Schmidt about what his company and Apple may be doing to make that product a reality.

The answer, of course, did not directly address the question. The two companies are doing “more and more things together.” Evidence of that came during Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ MacWorld keynote, where his iPhone unveiling included a look at Google Maps on the device.

Excitement over those comments, which hit the Internet courtesy of MarketWatch, has spread to several Mac sites:

Without commenting specifically on the rumor, Schmidt said Google and Apple are “doing more and more things together. We have similar goals, similar competitors.”

Schmidt likely meant Microsoft, but when it comes to applications Yahoo should merit a mention. They want to be on desktops and mobiles just as much as Google does.

A tablet running a Mac operating system and hosting a number of Google applications doesn’t look any more likely today than Apple Tablet rumors have over the years.

Steven Frank suggested several reasons why an Apple Tablet, though widely desired, probably won’t become reality. For one:

Remember the Jobs quote that “we make computers; computers have keyboards”? As angry as that made me and every other Newton owner as the axe fell, history has proven him right. Virtually all popular smartphones now sport keyboards. The “slate” (keyboardless) Tablet PC form factor is virtually non-existent any more. People want keyboards. Could Apple still make a convertible Mac Tablet? Sure… but what would be… the point?

The speculators populating the comments on a related post on Digg have generated one interesting and plausible idea: sending the .Mac service to Google’s server farms. Ridding .Mac of its $99 annual fee would make Apple’s diehard user community pretty happy.

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Is Google Losing Money Too Fast?

Nathan Weinberg — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 19:04:54 +0000

JP Morgan has published a report on how Google Checkout did in 2006, and their findings show that Checkout reached 6% of the 1,100 consumers they surveyed, compared to 42% for PayPal, what I call a good, but not massive, start.

They also found that:

Google Checkout users are younger (57% under 35), more likely to be male (penetration rates 2x more for men) and more affluent (34% have incomes over $75,000) than PayPal.

Only 19% of Google Checkout users reported it as Good or Very Good, abysmal compared with 44% of PayPal users and 65% of credit card users. Indeed, most Google Checkout users probably never would have (and in the future, never will) used it if not for the steep discounts.

43% of PayPal users indicated they would continue to prefer it over Google Checkout, while only 2% said they would continue to prefer Checkout over PayPal. In other words, Checkout has established virtually no brand loyalty at all.

56% had no familiarity with Google Checkout.

So, Checkout has had a rocky start, one that suggests the only reason anyone has used it is because of discounts, discounts which will not continue in the future, and that most Checkout users would prefer not using it at all.

Search Engine Land also covered this.

MarketWatch suggests that Checkout is taking a toll on Google, and they couldn’t possibly be wrong. See, Google Checkout has waved all processing fees for the year, which means that it will achieve $0 (that’s zero dollars) in revenue for all of 2007. Meanwhile, Google is giving ten dollars to all new users, as well as having to pay its own credit card processing fees to Visa and others, meaning it is losing more money as time goes by.

In all likelihood, Checkout is going to have a negative effect on Google’s fourth quarter financials. Google is spending money, bribing users and online stores to use this service in the hope that it will keep all those users and stores in 2008, basically giving the service zero incentive to survive on its own merits. Based on the amound of money Google is pouring into Checkout, Google is making a huge mistake, refusing to fail at any cost, even when the cost is too high.

In two weeks, when Google holds its investor conference call, it is going to have to answer the question of how much money it loses on Checkout, and why this is a wise strategy. I’ll ask the question myself, if I have to.

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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.
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AOL Looks to Acquire TradeDoubler

Joe Lewis — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 19:36:20 +0000

Early Monday, Time Warner announced plans to purchase TradeDoubler, a European provider of online marketing and sales services. The deal, which has yet to be finalized, is reported to cost the company around $900 million.

According to MarketWatch, Time Warner plans to assimilate TradeDoubler into AOL’s advertising network, Advertising.com, which buys advertising from publishers, and then uses its technology to sell that advertising to individual companies.

More info from the Marketwatch piece:

TradeDoubler shares rallied 12% to 221.50 krona in early Stockholm action, indicating investor hopes for a possible counter-bid.

TradeDoubler’s board has backed the offer, and investors that hold 20% of its shares have also accepted the Time Warner offer. TradeDoubler’s top shareholder, Arctic Ventures, is among the investors backing the deal.

In 2006, TradeDoubler was the subject of much speculation for a possible takeover, but those talks stalled late in the year. Here’s a little more information about the company:

General facts:

• Founded in 1999
• Operations in 18 European markets
• 344 employees throughout Europe
• Head quarters in Stockholm
• Local offices throughout Europe

Business facts:

• Offers online marketing and sales solutions
• Solutions to B2B and B2C companies
• Performance-based marketing model
• Proprietary technology platform

Financial facts:

• 117 million Euros in turnover 2005
• 82% increase in turnover from 2004 to 2005
• Break even reached in Q3 2002 on a group level

According to analyst reviews, TradeDoubler sports a solid free cash flow and holds a strong position within the European marketplace, which probably figures into why Time Warner is willing to shell out $900 million in order to acquire the company in the first place.

It will be interesting to see what positive effects, if any, the move has on AOL’s long-term financial success, and whether or not this means Time Warner has put plans to offload AOL on hold for now.

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Joe is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest ebusiness news.