Good morning, Quite a bit happened today across a wide range of industries, but today’s update is all about payments. Max Levchin to be CEO of Affirm A few weeks ago I wrote The Problem with Payments which argued innovation in payments is hard because there isn’t much margin available if you’re building on topSubscribe […]
Daily Update: Amazon’s Phone Announcement, Apple’s New Ad, Twitter Buys Namo Media
Good morning, Today is my last day in San Francisco; I will have a Daily Update for tomorrow, but it may be a bit shorter than usual. I’m looking forward to getting back on my usual schedule next week. On to the update: Amazon Teases Smartphone Event From Bloomberg: Amazon.com Inc. is planning to introduceSubscribe […]
Daily Update: Justifying Beats, Amazon Prime Music Streaming, Swipely and Square Follow-up
Good morning, I will be traveling to San Francisco next week, which means the timing of these updates may be a little irregular for the entire week (likely several hours later on Tuesday through Wednesday in particular). Thank you for your patience. For Access members, I plan on doing some sort of live chat duringSubscribe […]
Publishers’ Deal with the Devil
Ay, we must die an everlasting death. What doctrine call you this, Che sera, sera, What will be, shall be? Divinity, adieu! – The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe To evoke Faust as allegory for the ongoing dispute between Amazon and book publishers is appropriate on two levels, the first being the nature […]
Daily Update: AT&T to Buy DirecTV, Google to Buy Twitch, Facebook Building Snapchat Competitor
Good morning, After a relatively slow week, lots of stuff happened this weekend, so let’s get to it: AT&T to Buy DirecTV Lots of folks are comparing this proposed deal to the Comcast-Time Warner merger, but I think it’s much more benign, both from an explanatory perspective as well as an impact one. One ofSubscribe […]
Yahoo and Tumblr, Alibaba IPO incoming, #AmazonCart
Good morning, Thanks for being subscribers! No site news, just on to the updates: Apple Retails and the Innovator’s Dilemma As Angela Ahrendts takes over Apple Retail, I explore why Apple Stores matter from a theoretical perspective. Link Yahoo and Tumblr It’s been a year since Yahoo acquired Tumblr, and the New York Times hasSubscribe […]
Daily Update: Net Neutrality, Google+, Amazon Earnings Follow-up
Good morning, A few site updates: For access members, I invited everyone who had updated their profile to confirm that they wanted Glassboard access to the private Glassboard. If you haven’t gotten an invitation, please double-check your profile; I’ll do another import later today. I’ve manually gone through the member lists to make sure everyoneSubscribe […]
Daily Update: Microsoft, Qualcomm and Amazon Earnings
Good morning, I am aware of two issues with the daily update: Some email addresses were not automatically imported to MailChimp. I am investigating why and will add you manually if need be. Please email me if you have not been receiving emails Feedly does not respect the private RSS feed addresses and instead redirectsSubscribe […]
Daily Email (2014-04-22): Microsoft, Cloud Services, and Amazon
Good morning, I’m making good progress on finding a solution to making this content readable in RSS readers and web browsers for those of you who hate email. In the meantime, if you click the “Open in Browser” link at the top, you can not only read this content in a browser, but also subscribeSubscribe […]
Black Box Strategy
With the announcement of the Amazon Fire TV and the leak of the alleged Android TV, all of the major players have (or soon will have) a TV offering. There’s been a lot of talk about how similar the products are, but those similarities are for good reason; what is more interesting to me are […]