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Delighting customers is the surest way to build long term value

Jeff Bezos’ latest letter to the Amazon shareholders is a timely reminder that keeping customers happy is the best way to build a sustainable business. He opens the letter by contrasting the approaches of focusing on competitors and focusing on customers:

As regular readers of this letter will know, our energy at Amazon comes from the [...]

The next wave of ecommerce

Jason Goldberg, Founder and CEO at Fab wrote an interesting post earlier this week titled The 3rd wave of e-commerce disruption: emotional commerce. For the historians amongst you Jason has commodity commerce as the first wave, which was all about bringing value and convenience to the consumer a la Amazon, and digital commerce as [...]

Amazon to challenge Google in online advertising?

Amazon has been slowly building an adtech business for the past few years now. Back in 2008 I wrote about the launch of their advertising network and since then there has been a steady trickle of announcements and hires that show they are getting more and more serious about becoming a player in the [...]

In search of common standards for text input

Like many people these days and, I suspect just about everybody in the future, I now use a range of computing devices to do email, browse the web, and access the various web services I use. I’m typing this post on my laptop (still far and away the best device for blogging), I do [...]

Thought for the weekend: I’d rather be a missionary than a mercenary

Jeff Bezos was interviewed by his CTO Werner Vogels at the AWS: Reinvent show yesterday. I’m a big admirer of Bezos. As well as building an amazing company he has a great business brain and regularly comes up with pithy quotes and insights which help us to understand the world better. The interview [...]

Disintermediation–an old story playing out now

Disintermediation is one of the oldest stories of the internet. From the 1990s onward people have been making the obvious case that the internet is a revolutionary communications platform that can remove the middleman and his cut from all sorts of transactions leaving the parties on both side of the deal to share the [...]

Amazon’s gadget as a service strategy

As you’ve probably seen Amazon announced a slew of new devices yesterday, no smartphone, but their four new Kindles have been well received in the blogoshpere, particularly the Kindle Paperwhite and the new Kindle HD, both of which have got me excited.

Perhaps most interesting though is that once again Amazon is playing the [...]

Google’s ‘Knowledge Graph’ is changing the landscape of the web

Google is currently rolling out a new feature called ‘Knowledge Graph’ which will enhance our search experience by intelligently guessing what information we are looking for and putting it at the top of the results page. In other words they will be serving information not links. The picture above was released by Google [...]

Jeff Bezos explains why gatekeepers are a brake on innovation

Regular readers will no that I’m a long-time fan of Jeff Bezos and Amazon and also that I have a keen interest in the evolving roll of gatekeepers in the internet age (see here and here for two recent posts). For these reasons I was very interested to read the following quote from Jeff [...]

Amazon acquires robotics group Kiva for $775m – trend to vertical integration continues apace

Yesterday Amazon announced the $775m acquisition of robotics group Kiva Systems. These squat orange robots automate part of the shelf picking process for ecommerce companies. Instead of the workers walking to the shelves, the robots bring the shelves to the workers who then stay in the same place. With a robotics system in [...]