AAPL
In-depth analysis and expert insight into the music, mobile media, and computing devices trendsetter.Automating the Herd Mentality
Investing social network Roboinvest now allows users to copy one another’s trades with a single click. They’ve prudently limited this to small dollar values, but it’s still a dangerous plan: market swings already tend to happen when investors overestimate the information content of others’ trades; letting them do this by default seems…
VCs as Lobbyists
One symptom of founders getting stronger relative to VCs is that VCs have been forced to expand their repertoire. YCombinator has an in-house designer, Sequoia has an in-house PR person, and of course many early-stage VCs are informal recruiters (in the sense that they find good employees for their hot startups, and…
Facebook Updates Facebook now offers ads optimized for “Objectives” such as likes, installs, or ad clicks. That should bump up the low bids, raising the effective CPMs for their pages. It’s unclear how popular any of these options are, though. Zynga’s OMGPop purchase has raised their estimated Daily Average Users by about 25%,…
Which Sites Dominate Search Rankings?
SpyFu has some amazing stats on which sites most frequently show up in top Google rankings. The usual suspects are well-represented: Amazon owns product searches, Wikipedia owns proper nouns, and a smattering of other obvious sites own various common query categories. Interestingly, Amazon is trending upwards: whether this is due to…
Why Office for the iPad Makes Sense
The Daily claims—with screenshots to prove it!—that Microsoft Office is coming to the iPad. Dan Frommer reasonably points out that this would be a smart way for Apple to get into enterprise, and it would not exactly be a brilliant strategic move for Microsoft to be…
Google Updates Danny Sullivan has much more information on the “Don’t be Evil” tool. He actually makes a pretty good case for the bookmarklet as a genuinely useful piece of software: if it weren’t for the life-or-death struggle search and social companies, this kind of thing would be an obvious feature to add. Google may be
Amazon.com recently offered customers a “Brick-and-Moral dilemma” through their price-check app, which offers shoppers quick discounts if they scan a barcode and find what they’re buying on Amazon for less. It’s provoked protests from some bookstore owners, and disgust from others.
But it should provoke optimism. When Amazon sees someone run the…
Google Rolls Out Panda 2.5
SearchMetrics has the usual victim list. At this point, the results are pretty random. Google is probably identifying sitewide factors based on what predicts user behavior across all sites. Now that the obvious spammers have been hit, the traits Google identifies will be more superficially unrelated.
In other Google news,…
Yahoo Update
As has been reported at length, Yahoo’s board fired the company’s CEO, who fired back with an infamous email and a furious interview with Fortune. Yahoo’s board is now rumored to be considering spinoffs, divestitures, or a buyout, especially with the encouragement of their 5.1% owner, the activist hedge fund Third Point.
As a…
There are three big typo databases in the world:
The collective algorithmic typo database. There are a few standard typos (transposition, off-by-one, omitted letter, etc.), which are generally understood by anyone in academia who has studied the issue. Google’s massive database of misspelled terms, plus the results customers eventually click on. Apple’s massive database of…
Digital Due Diligence Weekly