Henry Blodget and Jeff Bezos, together again! As Blodget explains on his own site, the Amazon CEO is personally leading a $5 million investment round in Blodget’s six-year-old Web publishing business. By my count, that brings total investment in Business Insider to more than $18 million; via IM, Blodget tells me that the new deal values the company above the $50 million valuation it earned during its last round in 2011. (Because of my conflict of interest , this makes me happy.) So there’s the nuts and bolts of the deal (for more background on Henry and TBI, see Ken Auletta’s well-timed piece ). The only other thing to spell out here is that this deal reminds you that life is long, and relationships last. In 1998, Blodget and Bezos helped boost each others’ careers, when Blodget correctly predicted that Amazon’s stock would pass $400 a share (thanks to Patrick LaForge for catching my bone-headed typo ). Blodget has remained an Amazon bull since then, and it looks like Bezos has stayed in the Blodget fan club, too.
Read MorePerhaps you’ve heard that Netflix is showing “ House of Cards ,” a new TV series starring Kevin Spacey. But maybe you don’t have an $8-a-month Netflix subscription, or don’t want to try the service’s free one-month trial. Or maybe you just don’t like streaming video. Here’s your answer: You can buy the series, on DVD, this summer. From Amazon, Netflix’s most serious video rival. This isn’t a cost-effective solution — the series’ first 13 episodes will cost $44.96 on standard DVD , and $52.99 on Blu-ray – but presumably some of you will find value in a physical object. (For one thing, you can re-sell your discs .) The bigger (but smallish) point here is that even though this is a series commissioned for and funded by Netflix, it still isn’t Netflix’s series. Netflix’s money bought it an exclusive first “window” to stream the show. But Media Rights Capital, which actually produced the show, has the rights to sell it in other venues; Sony is handling distribution duties in the U.S
Read MoreImage copyright Norm Hall | Getty Images Sport Web, mobile and social platforms have created a huge conundrum for media companies: We are experiencing an explosion of content, and yet it is harder than ever to find an audience. It’s a stark contrast from the glory days, where distribution was fixed and scarce, and all we had to do was put a great product out there. At the time, all content had found its own native distribution outlet — a channel on the dial, a spot on the newsstand, a movie theater, video store — that delivered it to the bulk of its audience. That distribution was beautifully limited — there’s only room for 12 channels on the old VHF dial, 16 movies at a multiplex and maybe several thousand titles at video rental stores. But today, distribution and consumption are in constant flux. Look at TV.
Read MoreHere’s a name I haven’t heard in awhile: Anso Labs. Remember this was the cloud computing startup that originated at NASA, where the original ideas for OpenStack, the open source cloud computing platform was born? Anso Labs was acquired by Rackspace a little more than two years ago. It was a small team. But now a lot of the people who ran Anso Labs are back with a new outfit, still devoted to cloud computing, and still devoted to Openstack. It’s called Nebula. And it builds a turnkey computer, that will turn an ordinary rack of servers into a cloud-ready system, running — you guessed it — Openstack. Based in Mountain View, Nebula claims to have an answer for any company that’s ever wanted to build its own private cloud system and not rely on outside vendors like Amazon or Hewlett-Packard, or Rackspace to run it for them. It’s called the Nebula One. And Nebula CEO and founder Chris Kemp said the setup is pretty simple: Plus the servers into the Nebula One, then you “turn it on and it boots up cloud.” All of the provisioning, and management that a service provider would normally charge you for, has been created on a hardware device. There’s no services to buy, no consultants to pay to set it up. “Turn on the power switch, and an hour later you have a petascale cloud running on your premise,” Kemp told me. The Nebula One sits at the top of a rack of servers, on its back are 48 Ethernet ports. It runs an operating system called Cosmos that grabs all the memory and storage and CPU capacity from every server in the rack and makes them part of the cloud. It doesn’t matter who made them: Dell, Hewlett-Packard, or IBM. Kemp named two customers: Genentech and Xerox’s research lab PARC. There are more customer names coming he says. And it also boasts investments from Kleiner Perkins, Highland Capital, and Comcast Ventures. Nebula is also the only startup company that is a Platinum member of the Openstack Foundation . The others are IBM, HP, Rackspace, RedHat and AT&T among others
Read MoreOne of the less-remembered legacies of Eliot Spitzer’s governorship was the “Amazon tax.” It was his administration that came up with a plan to get Amazon.com and other out-of-state online retailers to start collecting state and local sales taxes from New York customers. Read the rest of this post on the original site »
Read MoreSeeing natural synergies with its bookselling business, Amazon on Thursday said it was buying recommendation site Goodreads . “Goodreads has helped change how we discover and discuss books and, with Kindle, Amazon has helped expand reading around the world,” Amazon VP Russ Grandinetti said in a statement. “Together we intend to build many new ways to delight readers and authors alike.” Amazon didn’t disclose the terms of the deal, but said it should close in the second quarter. Goodreads will keep its San Francisco offices, Amazon said. It’s not the first time Amazon has bought a social book site. Back in 2008, the company acquired Shelfari .
Read MoreGoogle today called for San Francisco Bay Area residents to sign up for six months of free, unlimited same-day delivery of purchases from national and local retailers. The company is calling the program “a new experiment” — more specifically, it’s named Google Shopping Express. Users can browse in an online storefront and then select a delivery window for a “Google courier partner” to arrive at their home later that day. Google has not yet had a home run from its many shopping, wallet, commerce and payment efforts. But same-day delivery is looked at as a sort of holy grail for online retail, since it can bring near-instant gratification to shoppers. As such, Amazon, eBay, Walmart and startups like Postmates are already trying it. Users who sign up for Shopping Express are told they may be selected through a gradual rollout “over the coming months.” Participating retailers include national brands like Target and Walgreens and local brands like Blue Bottle Coffee, Palo Alto Sport Shop and Toy World. News of the service was first reported earlier this month by TechCrunch.
Read MoreOne of BlackBerry’s key goals is getting developers to write apps designed to take advantage of its all-new operating system. But, knowing that not all developers are ready to bet on a native app, the company has offered some shortcuts designed to get programs running on devices like its Z10, which went on sale this week at AT&T . One of those is an emulation engine that allows Android apps to run. Roughly 20 percent of the 100,000 BlackBerry 10 apps fall into this category, according to Martyn Mallick, BlackBerry’s vice president for global alliances and business development. “We give them a very nice on-ramp to get onto the platform,” Mallick said in an interview Tuesday. “Our users deserve to have great content. If that is the fastest way we can get some of that content, that’s great.” Some of those developers whose initial plans were to simply port their Android app are now committing to a native app based on the strong early sales of BlackBerry 10 devices in other countries. Still other developers, Mallick said, are sticking with their Android apps but adapting them to take advantage of BlackBerry 10-specific features, such as the BlackBerry Hub. Mallick noted that Amazon added BlackBerry-specific features when it brought over the Android version of its Kindle app, while eBay is adding support for push notifications to the Android app it brought to BlackBerry 10. Longer-term, of course, Mallick wants companies to build native BlackBerry 10 applications
Read MoreFacebook COO Sheryl Sandberg might still be trying to figure out the social networking giant’s mobile monetization strategy, but there’s one thing she has locked: The top spot on two of the most important bestseller lists at the same time. This week, for the first time, her “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead” ranked No. 1 on the influential New York Times list for hardcover nonfiction, as well as for combined print and e-book nonfiction. The list, which appear in this coming Sunday’s issue of The New York Times Book Review, actually reflects sales for the week ending March 16, 2013. “Lean In” has been on Amazon’s top 100 lists of all books for much longer — in fact, for 32 days. The tome on the many difficulties faced by women in the workforce reached No. 1 status several weeks ago. The official release date of the book was March 11, which was followed by a publicity blitz of massive proportions, including the cover of Time magazine, huge takeouts in innumerable newspapers and laudatory television pieces on “60 Minutes” and with Oprah Winfrey. “Lean In” has also attracted a huge dollop of controversy, with everyone and their mother (and my mother, Lucky, too) arguing over its merits, as well as its message — including whether Sandberg blamed women too much for the lack of advancement in the executive ranks. She doesn’t actually — if you actually read it, which many pundits appear to not have. But that has not stopped the rigorous and welcome debate over the important issue, which seems to be exactly what Sandberg was aiming for. Sales appear to have been widespread, but seem to also be helped by big purchases by companies, such as Cisco, which are encouraging employees to read it.
Read MoreThirty-five percent of U.S. visitors to Apple properties in February were mobile-only, compared to 22 percent for Amazon and Wikipedia, 17 percent for Facebook, 14 percent for Google, 11 percent for Yahoo and 5 percent for Microsoft. So says comScore. That makes sense, given that Apple preinstalls a whole bunch of key apps on iOS (though some of us have stopped using some of them ), and gives us little reason to go to its websites. It’s also pretty clear why people would shop on Amazon and look things up on Wikipedia on the go, even if they don’t do these things on their desktop every month. The folks who measure how many people visit websites have been slow — sloooow — to count up mobile Web, smartphone and tablet users. But comScore is catching up, with its new “Multi-Platform” rankings that combine desktop, Android and iOS usage by U.S. users. (What would really be great is global numbers, but this is a start!) These are the same new rankings we wrote about in November , but today is their official launch out of beta. From now on, they’ll come out every month. The order of the Top 10 U.S. properties are remarkably unchanged when you add mobile, though. The only significant gainer at the top is Apple, which comes in at slot No. 8, with comScore calculating an incremental audience of 54 percent. ComScore notes that the average Top 100 property adds 38 percent to its audience when you count mobile-only visitors who wouldn’t previously have been included. The biggest mobile gainers were Groupon at No. 47, with 36.9 million visitors, an incremental percentage gain of 223 percent; Zynga at No
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