Linked List: August 26, 2014

Tuesday, 26 August 2014

Amazon Is Now Aggressively Going After Google’s Core Business ★

Dan Frommer:

Amazon also is aggressively building out its advertising technology portfolio. The company is “developing its own software for placing ads online that could leverage its knowledge of millions of web shoppers,” the WSJ reports (paywall). Amazon supposedly has told potential partners that it could start testing a “new placement platform, dubbed Amazon Sponsored Links” this year. Amazon also recently debuted a new service that runs banner ads on other sites, called Amazon CPM Ads. (“CPM” is ad-industry jargon for “cost per thousand” ad impressions — referring to the way that banner ads often are priced and publishers often are paid.)

Together, these services broadly sound like Google’s AdWords product, which allows advertisers to buy sponsored links on Google and other sites, and AdSense, which is Google’s ad network for publishers. And Amazon is investing in more: The company has 45 job listings for its Ad Platform team, ranging from general manager to various engineering and sales roles.

Uber’s Playbook for Sabotaging Lyft ★

Casey Newton, reporting for The Verge:

But one Uber contractor The Verge spoke with said Lyft’s complaint had merit. “What’s simply untrue is that not only does Uber know about this, they’re actively encouraging these actions day-to-day and, in doing so, are flat-out lying both to their customers, the media, and their investors,” the contractor said. Until now, the canceled Lyft rides have been understood as a kind of prank call designed to keep competitors’ drivers off the road. But interviews and internal documents suggest another reason: Uber’s recruitment program has vastly increased in size and sophistication, and recruiters cancel rides in part to avoid detection by Lyft.

Great service, dirtbag tactics.

(And kudos to The Verge for the excellent investigative reporting.)

Estimating Amazon Fire Phone Sales Through Web Usage Stats ★

Charles Arthur:

Amazon famously never gives sales figures for any of the devices it sells, preferring to let its financial results do the talking. Analysts can make estimates of how many devices have been sold, based on their information from sales channels and any guidance the company might give. But it’s not as definitive as, say, the smartphone sales that Apple or BlackBerry include in their financial figures. (They are now the only two companies which give specific values for device sales in their financial results; Apple goes farther by giving the revenue from those sales too.)

But we can have a stab at estimating how many Fire Phones are in use, based on data from Chitika, which runs an ad network.

According to a release from Chitika, looking at activity on its ad network in the 20 days after the Fire Phone’s release, the Fire Phone accounted for 0.02% of activity — although a more precise figure, in another graph, shows it as around 0.015%.

Slow start.

CocoaLove ★

New iOS/Mac indie developer conference right here in Philadelphia, October 24-26. Great speaker lineup, including my Q Branch colleagues Dave Wiskus and Brent Simmons.

New ‘Hyperlapse’ App From Instagram ★

Very cool new video time-lapse/stabilization app for iOS from Instagram. I’d never heard of “hyperlapse” until that research paper from Microsoft a few weeks ago. But while Microsoft was publishing research, Instagram was building an app that will soon be in the hands of hundreds of thousands of people.

From the profile by Cliff Kuang for Wired:

By 2013, Dimson was at Instagram. That put him back in touch with Alex Karpenko, a friend from Stanford who had sold his start-up to Instagram in 2013. Karpenko and his firm, Luma, had created the first-ever image-stabilization technology for smartphone videos. That was obviously useful to Instagram, and the company quickly deployed it to improve video capture within the app. But Dimson realized that it had far greater creative potential. Karpenko’s technology could be used to shoot videos akin to all those shots in Baraka. “It would have hurt me not to work on this,” says Dimson.

“It would have hurt me not to work on this” — that’s the sort of passion that leads to great new products.