Archive for December, 2008

Apple App Store’s Untapped Potential

Saturday, December 13th, 2008

Apple has quietly released a few changes to its iPhone App Store on iTunes, in an attempt to alleviate some of the growing pains around its app ecosystem. The App Store has recently hit 10,000 apps and is expected to accept many more. "Most popular" lists and 19 ...

Netflix’s Million Dollar Baby Only Expected the Day After Tomorrow?

Thursday, December 11th, 2008

For the second year, Netflix has awarded a $50K progress prize. The winning team – BellKor in BigChaos – improved on Netflix’s recommendation algorithm by 9.44%. Although the 10% improvement seems to be getting closer in absolute terms, the last stretch might prove elusive for a little while longer. Is ...

Online Holiday Sales Catch Up… But Margins Will Suffer

Thursday, December 11th, 2008

Deep discounts and free shipping promotions have sparked a catch up in holiday online sales, as exhibited in the chart below. However, remember this holiday season is one week shorter than last year, so holiday sales might well end up coming short overall. Consumers have been very receptive and ...

Techmeme’s Human Eye for the Straight Algo

Thursday, December 4th, 2008

Gabe Rivera of Techmeme fame has sparked a lively debate as he announced he had hired an editor to improve interestingness, reactivity and relevance of his news aggregation website (see VentureBeat, TechCrunch, and ReadWriteWeb). Rivera’s plight echoes Netflix’s challenges at boosting its movie recommendation engine, as algorithmic improvements gradually near ...

Cyber Monday Update - Clearance Sales Amidst the Holiday Season

Thursday, December 4th, 2008

ComScore’s numbers are in: Cyber Monday sales grew 15% year over year, making last Monday the second biggest single day on record for ecommerce. However, this performance hides a fair share of rebalancing, as shown by the chart below, as consumers held off on purchases until Monday this year. The overall ...