News

Highlights

  • More than $1 billion in sales flooded Amazon on Prime Day.
  • Feel like booking a spa or salon appointment? Google will do that for you.
  • Amazon might fix your computer soon…in your home.

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 Prime Day logo

 

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.

Once upon a time

 

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.

Woman receiving massage

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

  • Google is actively looking for user content to append to Google Earth, especially in areas where there is no existing content.
  • Facebook’s Marketplace service–a Craigslist competitor–is expanding again.
  • A British wifi provider added a “joke clause” to its terms that obligated users to community service projects like hugging stray animals and cleaning public toilets. More than 20,000 people agreed to the (presumably unread) terms.

 

Images of Amazon Prime Day courtesy Amazon. Myth image courtesy Fathromi Ramdlon. Spa image courtesy Jurgen Rubig. 

 

News

Highlights

  • Net neutrality will take over the Internet this week. We explain.
  • Court ruling: Facebook (and others) can track you on other site
  • Zillow backs down in test of Consumer Review Fairness Act

Net Neutrality logo

 

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.”‘

Consumer Review Fairness Act

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.

Facebook employee

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.

Headline Scan

  • About 2.4 seconds is what some search engineers have found is an optimal website loading time according to Google tests and best practices.
  • Google’s mobile index may first roll out to organizations “that are ready”, and it could happen in 2017.
  • A new survey of digital marketers found that 65% of organizations pay at least $12,000 per year for search services not counting social media or advertising. 35% pay $30K-$100K per year.
  • Amazon Prime–due for its annual sale Wednesday–now has 79 million accounts and is expected to exceed the number of pay TV customers next year. Amazon Prime Video is looking more important.
News

Highlights

  • Google jobs, the search engine version, is real.
  • Amazon goes big in clothes. And shoes. Again.
  • Google stops scanning Gmail to place ads.

Mobile phone displays of Google Jobs

Google will now display job postings, including descriptions, from multiple job sites. The company is working with CareerBuilder, Monster, and LinkedIn, as well as smaller sites. Job seekers still have to apply for a job on those sites.

The job listings function like Google’s movie listings. Google displays the showtimes, directions and other information related to a movie. Clicking a showtime link lets a person choose a movie site from which to buy a ticket.

The big deal: people now only go to movie websites for specialty information because facts are shown directly in Google. That will probably be true for job sites. The future value proposition is likely to be some form of signing up businesses and automating their transactions for Google and Facebook.

Learn more fast: Google announcement, Search Engine Land

told you several weeks ago that Amazon’s clothing initiative could disrupt fashion retail. The details are even more impressive. Prime Wardrobe is a new service that will be free for Amazon Prime members.

Amazon will send shoppers clothes to try on at home with no shipping charges. Shoppers then have seven days to return the items in the free box or pay for them.

Discounts start at 10% if 3 items are bought and reach 20% for 5 items. The program’s test starts soon–perhaps soon enough to make back-to-school shopping easy.

We also told you about Amazon’s market share of online shoe sales. Their share will climb after news broke last week that Nike will work with Amazon to sell shoes online through a special Amazon program. 

The big deal: Grocery stocks are still reeling from Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods. Analysis at Bloomberg and Recode shows that stocks for companies like Foot Locker and Dick’s Sporting Goods were hit especially hard by the Nike news. Cash-rich Internet giants now have enough buying power to disrupt any industry.

Learn more fast: Amazon Wardrobe announcement, Recode, Marketing Land

Diane Green, SVP at Google

That’s a picture of Diane Green. Her job is to sell Google services, especially email and its office software suite, to businesses.

Green posted this week that “Gmail and consumer Gmail [would] closely align.” The post was blunt. No Gmail product will scan email looking for keywords on which to base ads. There will still be ads in the free version of Gmail. Those ads will be based on what Google already knows about users. And that’s a lot.

Why change now? The trade press says that Green’s business prospects didn’t get the distinction and thought that Google scanned email in all versions. Now there’s no confusion.

The big deal: Besides Gmail messages not being scanned anymore, Ad Age smartly posits that Green was able to limit Google’s ad business. That move shows the company’s growing interest in enterprise software, That’s more interesting than a keyword in email triggering an ad.

Headline Scan

  • TimeWarner makes $100 million content deal with Snapchat.
  • Microsoft Bing matches Google and Facebook capabilities to target “in-market buyers” of items like mortgage loans, travel services, and clothing.
  • Amazon’s 1 hour PrimeNow service opens in Denver, city #30.
  • Expedia closes its acquisition of Silver Rail, buttressing its UK ops.
  • Google will now remove links to leaked medical records, making them, financial information, and “revenge porn” the only categories of information that Google will remove in the US when requested.