The benefits of the long tail may go beyond selling large quantities of niche items. Having a comprehensive inventory makes your customers more satisfied and more likely to patronize you again, according to a new paper from Yahoo presented earlier this month. Read More »
Liz's Posts
Venmo is quite simple — it allows you to send payment to your trusted contacts by using SMS. “This is one of the first things I’ve done where my mom understands what I’m doing,” is how co-founder Andrew Kortina put it during an interview today. Read More »
Less than a week after Google bought Aardvark for a reported $50 million, Joel Spolsky, the influential long-time software blogger, said that he plans to raise funding for StackOverflow, the programming Q&A site, and will be on a road show next week in Silicon Valley. Read More »
AnchorFree’s ad-supported VPN, Hotspot Shield, has been on a tear in the last year. The tool, which people use to protect their browsing privacy and also to access web content that has been blocked, tripled its userbase in 12 months to 7 million. Read More »
The flags, the speeds, the gates, the snow, the ice, the blades, the luge, the twirling adolescents — get psyched! The Vancouver edition of the Winter Olympics are starting today. Want to follow along online? Here are a few key resources. Read More »
Online video has largely succeeded at many of its goals, but let’s be honest, it’s done more displacing and unstabilizing than it has wealth creation. On the eve of Veoh’s bankruptcy, we can look back and see a lot of VC dollars down the drain. Read More »
Google has acquired the social search startup Aardvark for $50 million, according to TechCrunch. The Aardvark founders had formerly worked at Google, so it’s an embarrassment that the search giant couldn’t foster the same kind of innovation from them internally. Read More »
Owen Van Natta, the former Facebook executive who was picked to revive MySpace last April, is stepping down, News Corp just announced. He’ll be replaced by two of his hires, Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn, who now each share the title of co-president. Read More »
I’m not sure Shashi Seth knew what he was getting into, but he must have had an inkling. Yahoo’s new SVP of search products (as of three weeks ago) invited the press over to Sunnyvale today to try to “reset” perceptions about Yahoo and search. Read More »
I was totally on board with Google Buzz, the company’s late entry into the modern-day social web launching today, until it became dramatically evident how freaked out Google is by Facebook. To be fair, however, Google Buzz looks quite useful. Read More »
It’s clear that location is an opportunity ready for its time, but making technology smarter by knowing where we are is by necessarily a part of a platform, not an end unto itself. Phil Hendrix lays out the space in a new report for GigaOM Pro. Read More »
With more than 4 billion mobile phone users and some 1.7 billion Internet users, there’s a market opportunity to provide web-style services for people who aren’t online. That’s what the Sequoia-funded Bubble Motion wants to do with its new service Bubbly. Read More »
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