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Posted
Apr 03 2008, 12:32 PM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Apple has become the top music seller in the U.S. The company made the announcement today after Ars Technica leaked an internal e-mail with details. Just a couple of months ago, Apple passed Best Buy to become the #2 music retailer. Now, the company is topping the charts.
Apple had 19% of the market in January, and Wal-Mart was in second place with 15%, according to the leaked e-mail. It's worth noting an obvious difference between the two: Apple is an all-digital music seller, while most of Wal-Mart's sales are physical CDs. Best Buy, Amazon and Target rounded out the top five spots. Some tech blogs thought that January's numbers were skewed due to people redeeming iTunes gift cards recieved over the holidays. But it looks like Apple stayed on top in February as well.
Shares of the company rose nearly 3% today to close at $151.61. Here's what others had to say about the news:
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Posted
Apr 02 2008, 12:17 PM
by
Kim Peterson
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Amazon will now take your orders through text message, and though the system seems a little clumsy, I like the idea.
Here's how it works. Say you're at Borders and see a copy of the book "Unaccustomed Earth" on the shelves. Looks interesting. Hm. Wonder if Amazon is selling it for less? Send a text message with the book's title to 262966 (that spells "Amazon" on the keypad). Amazon will send you two results with the option to buy.
I tried it this morning and quickly got a response with a set of instructions on how to buy by phone. A few seconds later, I got a second message offering me the book for $15.94. It also listed a book called "Malgudi Days," which has an introduction written by the same author. Amazon will only send you its top two results in each text message, so don't make a generic request like "Disney."
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Posted
Mar 20 2008, 12:05 PM
by
Kim Peterson
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I've been thinking about CEO apologies today after reading the Jeff Bezos note plastered on Amazon's front page. Bezos' contrition stems from the fact that the company sold out of the new Kindle electronic book reader in 5.5 hours, and it has been scrambling to increase production ever since. Some customers have waited six weeks to get one. Soon, Bezos said, Amazon will start shipping Kindles to people the same day they order them. "We had high hopes for Kindle before its launch," Bezos wrote, "but we didn't expect the demand that actually materialized." This wasn't exactly an apology -- Bezos never said he was sorry -- but it did have a "we screwed up" tone. And yet it smacked of product promotion -- it was another opportunity to advertise the Kindle to everyone who visits Amazon today. Amazon shares rose more than 4% today to $73.25.
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Posted
Mar 07 2008, 06:08 AM
by
Kim Peterson
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Selling wine online in this country is pretty screwed up. Or, as the Financial Times so elegantly stated, it's "a business fraught with regulatory complexities and littered with the wreckage of previous failures."
But Amazon is up for the task, and is recruiting a senior wine buyer on its site. I'd like to volunteer, but my knowledge of wine basically comes from what I learned in "Sideways." Amazon has been interested in this area for some time, having spent $30 million nine years ago for a 45% stake of Wineshopper.com. Oops, Wineshopper was folded into Wine.com the next year.
Maybe Amazon can help straighten out the convoluted mess that is selling wine online. Retailers can only ship wine to 26 states. Wineries and retailers follow different rules. FreetheGrapes.org has a nice summary of this complex issue. And the competition is nasty. Online wine retailer Wine.com went so far as to conduct its own sting operation, telling state regulators whenever it found that its rivals were violating wine-shipping laws.
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Posted
Feb 25 2008, 12:24 PM
by
Kim Peterson
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The weeklong boycott of the eBay auction site ends today. But did it accomplish anything? Fed up with recent fee hikes and other policy changes, some eBay sellers decided to boycott the site from Feb. 18 through today. Third-party tracking sites say auction listings have dropped about 13% since the strike started to 13 million items listed. Ebay shares dipped slightly over the past week, but have returned to where they started -- at just under $28. The share price closed up 30 cents to $28.01 today on news that Shopping.com CEO Josh Silverman will now run eBay's Skype online telephony unit.
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Posted
Jan 31 2008, 12:22 PM
by
Kim Peterson
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Amazon is buying audio book seller Audible.com for $300 million. That, and the release of the Kindle e-book reader, gives a pretty good picture of where the e-commerce giant wants to go in terms of online content. And it sets the stage for an interesting rivalry between Amazon and Apple. Amazon shares rose nearly 5% to close at $77.70 today, reversing a month-long trend. Shares are down about 20% from the first of the year. A few numbers about today's news: Amazon is paying $11.50 per share for Audible -- a 24% premium over yesterday's close. In buying the company Amazon will add at least another $110 million in annual revenue. Audible has strong revenue growth -- 2007 sales rose nearly 30% over 2006, due in part to strong distribution through Apple's iTunes store -- but the company wasnt profitable. (Though to be fair, its net loss in Q3 was only $200,000).
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Posted
Jan 22 2008, 12:22 PM
by
Kim Peterson
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EBay chief executive Meg Whitman will retire from the post soon, the WSJ reported today. And that means eBay is at the most critical point in its history. The retirement news isn't a surprise; we discussed the idea of her resignation earlier this month. Whitman, 51, has been giving her top executives more responsibilities recently and could be grooming one to replace her. EBay investors weren't too thrilled today. The company's shares fell more than 4 percent to close at $27.13. I thought the market would react more favorably, considering that eBay's share price has dropped by almost a third since October. Whitman's legacy has some black marks, such as the overpriced Skype acquisition and the increasing anger among a user base irritated by high fees. I don't think she's done enough to improve the user experience, and as a result companies like Amazon have become a serious competitive threat. But what outshines those flaws is this: Whitman has kept the company growing and profitable, which is exactly what a CEO should do.
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Posted
Jan 04 2008, 11:35 AM
by
Jon Markman
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Whenever your job is getting you down, just be glad you aren’t a financial journalist who has to make annual predictions that live forever on the web. Since the advent of MSN Search and Google, there is no hiding my most unfortunate calls in the drawer anymore. It’s all out there. So as an addendum to my 2008 forecast, which you can read right here, here’s how my '07 predictions fared.
1. Bull market, year 5. Well, sort of. I forecast an S&P 500 gain of 13% on 2007. We got 3.5%. The Nasdaq 100 did go up 19%, though, so let’s average them out and call it good.
2. Goldilocks lives! I forecast modestly rising inflation, modest job growth and below-trend U.S. economic growth of 2.6%. This was right on, as annualized growth came to 2.8% in 2007.
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Posted
Jan 03 2008, 03:21 AM
by
Kim Peterson
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There's been some talk lately about whether eBay CEO Meg Whitman should resign. EBay would be invigorated if she did. Recently, she's been criticized for signing on as the financial co-chair of Mitt Romney's presidential campaign. Whitman met Romney years ago when she consulted for his private equity firm. At BloggingStocks, Gary Sattler thinks that Whitman might request a paid leave of absence from eBay to work on the Romney campaign. I really doubt that. It's ludicrous to think that a CEO of a major public company would do such a thing. If Whitman indeed asks for time off to campaign, eBay shareholders have every right to be angry. Putting politics aside, is it time for Whitman to step down? If you're an eBay shareholder, you might think so. The stock was abysmal in 2006 and continued to disappointment in 2007, staying mostly in the $30-$35 range when companies like Amazon saw shares go through the roof. (Ebay closed yesterday at $32.49.)
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Posted
Dec 27 2007, 07:23 AM
by
Kim Peterson
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Apple is finally going to offer digital movie rentals from its iTunes store, the FT reports. The company has hooked up with News Corp's Twentieth Century Fox to allow short-term rental downloads of Fox DVDs. Apple hasn't officially confirmed the news or said anything about potential pricing, which is rumored to be about $3 per rental. Apple sells movies for download, but to this point hasn't made anything available to rent. So far, the downloadable rental business has been pretty abysmal, with rivals like Movielink and CinemaNow unable to turn big numbers. But the opportunities are there, and Amazon and others have been working hard to come up with a groundbreaking rental service. Enter Apple and it's not-so-secret weapon: the iPod (and now the iPhone). I'm assuming Apple will make it easy to shoot movies from your computer to your iPod. If that's the case -- and if Apple shines its marketing megaspotlight on the feature -- iTunes rentals could be huge. The next step might be enabling the downloading directly to an iPod over WiFi, but that could take hours.
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