The Great Geek Manual News

Amazon has been taking a beating online for the removal of sales ranking on a number of gay- and lesbian-themed books. The company initially called it a glitch that was being fixed. Now Amazon is calling it a “ham-fisted” error that goes far beyond gay titles.

Here’s a statement from Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener: This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles – in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon’s main product search.

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Source: Tech Flash

Since its release in 2007, the last volume of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, has garnered 3,286 reviews from Amazon.com customers. While response has been overwhelmingly positive for the book, several hundred Amazon customers rated the book as mediocre or worse.

Because of a very subtle yet clever feature, Amazon makes the best of both the positive and negative reviews easy to find. And that feature, based on our calculations, is responsible for more than $2,700,000,000 of new revenue for Amazon every year. Not bad for what is essentially a simple question: “Was this review helpful to you?”

Amazon had reviews from the very first day. It’s always been a feature that customers love. (Many non-customers talk about how they check out the reviews on Amazon first, then buy the product someplace else.)

Initially, the review system was purely chronological. The designers didn’t account for users entering hundreds or thousands of reviews. Interestingly, only a fringe portion of the audience writes reviews. For example, while Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has more than 3,000 reviews, our calculations indicate Amazon sold more than 4,000,000 copies of the book. That’s 0.075% or only one out of every 1,300 purchasers that took the time to write a review.

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Source: User Interface Engineering

One of the key issues in the recent Pirate Bay trial was the prosecutor’s contention that the lads behind the site were raking in something like 10 million kronor (one million dollars) a year. This led defendant Gottfried Svartholm Warg to complain during a court recess: “It’s totally absurd, those numbers are totally disconnected from reality.” And, for good measure, he took a shot at the prosecutor. “The old bastard’s crazy,” he said.

Whatever the truth of The Pirate Bay’s profits, BitTorrent search engines can rake in quite a bit of cash. Mininova, for instance, earned €600,000 in revenue back in 2006, upping this to a whopping €1,000,000 in 2007. Is it profiting from piracy?

Mininova is one of the largest such sites in the world (indeed, it claims to be the largest, with over 17 million pageviews a day), but that doesn’t mean it tries to hide its contact info or address. It operates as a legitimate business from a canal-side office in Utrecht, which entails certain consequences. One of these is that it is legally required to file a basic financial statement with the Netherlands Chamber of Commerce each year, and these statements are available to anyone 1) able to navigate a Dutch-language website and 2) cough up €9.

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Source: Ars Technica

Google Inc. will allow developers to sell applications for its Android cellphone operating system beginning next week in the United States, as the search giant strives to expand in a smart phone arena dominated by Apple Inc.

Google’s announcement marked an important step in the search giant’s quest to catch up with Apple in the fast-growing market for smart phones.

It signals Google’s commitment to expand into a relatively hot mobile market, even as it pulls back on certain other initiatives such as broadcast radio.

Google said in a blog post Friday its Android Market will initially carry paid applications from developers in the United States and Britain, with plans to allow developers in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, France and Spain to participate later this quarter.

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Source: The Globe and Mail

Twitter, the microblogging service that is spreading like wildfire, has secured over $50 million in its third round of funding. Strangely, the company was not even looking for the money, but news of such a large sum is placing even more pressure on Twitter’s plans to begin generating revenue. The service has become everything to everyone—a microblogging platform, a customer service hub, a replacement for chat and e-mail, a bite-sized newspaper, and even a Pirate Bay trial translation service—so, naturally, everyone is waiting to see what Twitter’s first major step into prime time will be.

Twitter’s latest funding comes from Benchmark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners. According to the company’s announcement, though,Twitter was not even in the market since there was plenty of cash left from the $15 million it raised last May. The company is not generating any of its own revenue yet, though ironically, a growing number of third-parties have cashed in by selling applications or accepting donations for services that work with Twitter (in particular, iPhone clients and sites like Tipjoy that allow users to donate money to friends or organizations).

Still, with everyone from President Obama to Shaquille O’Neal contributing to a 900 percent growth in active users over the last year, Benchmark and IVP clearly must see an opportunity for big ROI.

No one at Twitter will discuss revenue ideas with any detail beyond some vague statements from wonderfully named co-founder Biz Stone about the value that exists for businesses and organizations from using Twitter.

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Source: Ars Technica

Amazon has blocked sales of a sick Japanese PC game that puts the player in the role of a criminal who rapes a mother and her two teenage daughters.

The online vendor recently advertised two copies of the game RapeLay sold through the Amazon Marketplace section open to third-party vendors.

Made by the Japanese production house Illusion, RapeLay is intended for release in Japan only. But a couple “like new” copies were made available by the US seller Hentaiguy who specializes in peddling Japanese animated porn.

Online reviews of the game describe a disturbing plot where the player sexually attacks and kidnaps a single mother and her daughters out of revenge for being sent to prison for molestation. Gang rape and forced abortions are listed as features.

Yokohama-based Illusion’s other games include Battle Raper, Artificial Girl, and Sexy Beach. The game was pulled after Amazon received several complaints — but Google cache reveals all.

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Source: The Register

Memory chip prices shot up on Monday–a welcome bit of news for beleaguered chipmakers, who have been caught in a relentless downward price spiral.

Prices for DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory), the main memory in PCs, shot up as much as 26 percent, according to data posted on DRAMeXchange. A number of reports have attributed this to the bankruptcy of Germany-based chipmaker Qimonda, and seem to indicate that this will relieve some of the pressure on prices caused by oversupply.

The price of certain DDR2 (Double Data Rate, second generation) memory chips rose as much as 28 percent Monday. Flash memory also rose, with 16-gigabit chips rising more than 5 percent.

DRAM chip traders in Asia were returning from a week-long Lunar New Year holiday in China and Taiwan.

“I think it’s just the first chance for the markets to respond to the demise of Qimonda,” said Avi Cohen, managing partner at Avian Securities, which tracks the memory chip market. He also attributed the price rise to “recent commentary from Samsung and others of expected slightly higher DRAM contract pricing.”

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Source: CNet

There are a few reasons Google makes so much more money than rivals like Yahoo and Microsoft in search advertising. First, it accounts for a lot more searches. Second, its technology is believed to be better at matching ads to queries. And third, it has more advertisers. A lot more.

Until now, however, the number of advertisers on Google was a closely guarded secret. Google would only say that it had “hundreds of thousands” of advertisers.

It turns out that was an understatement. In a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Google said it had 1 million advertisers as of 2007. If history is any guide, we can expect the number to be much higher now. The number of advertisers on Google has grown at a steady clip, from 89,000 in 2003, to 201,000 in 2004, 360,000 in 2005 and 600,000 in 2006.

Ben Schachter, an analyst with UBS, said he expects the current number is likely to be between 1.3 million and 1.5 million. Google declined to comment on the current size of its advertising base.

“It is a number that people have wanted to know for a long time,” Mr. Schachter said. More advertisers means more revenue — and more revenue, on average, for every search query — for a couple of reasons: a larger number of queries will have ads matched against them; and on popular queries, competition for placement will be more intense, and as a result, ad prices, which are set by auction, will be higher.

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Source: The New York Times

It’s dawn at a Los Angeles apartment overlooking the Hollywood Hills. Laura Sweet, a graphic designer in her early 40s, sits at a computer and begins to surf the Net. She searches intently, unearthing such bizarre treasures for sale as necklaces for trees and tattoo-covered pigs. As usual, she posts them on a shopping site called ThisNext.com. Asked why in the world she spends so many hours each week working for free, she answers: “It’s a labor of love.”

Later this morning, a half-hour’s drive to the west, a serial entrepreneur named Gordon Gould strolls into the Santa Monica offices of ThisNext. Gould has managed to entice an army of volunteers, including Sweet, to pour passion and intelligence into his site for free. Traffic on ThisNext is soaring, with unique visits nearly tripling in a year, to 3.5 million monthly. What’s in it for the volunteer workers? “They can build their brands,” Gould says. “In their niches, they can become mini-Oprahs.”

Here’s how it works. Entrepreneurs like Gould build meeting places that provide visitors with tools to express themselves, mingle with friends and strangers, and establish their personal “brands.” The result, when it works, is an outpouring of creativity. It has produced not only ThisNext, but also YouTube and even American Idol.

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Source: Business Week

For retailers, the holiday shopping season was the worst in decades. Even so, Amazon.com said Friday that it had its “best ever” holiday.

On Amazon’s peak day, Dec. 15, customers ordered a record 6.3 million items, or almost 73 items each second, the company said. Last year, the peak day was Dec. 10, when customers ordered 5.4 million items.

Amazon’s press release has all sorts of entertaining factoids: the weight of all GPS devices it sold from Black Friday through December equals the combined weight of 151 Mini Coopers; it sold enough “Breaking Dawn” books that, if stacked end to end, they would reach the summit of Mount Everest eight times; and its top sellers in electronics included a 52-inch Samsung LCD HDTV and the eight-gigabyte Apple iPod Touch.

But the numbers do little to tell us how good (or bad) Amazon’s season really was. The company didn’t disclose whether shoppers bought more or fewer high-priced items than in previous years or whether discounts ate into profit margins. It didn’t disclose revenue or even the total volume of products it shipped throughout the holiday season.

What’s more, as consumers do more and more of their shopping online, where Amazon is the leading retailer, a “record” season at Amazon is hardly surprising. Amazon has claimed that its holidays were the “best ever” or “busiest ever” every year since at least 2002.

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Source: The New York Times

Everyone loves talking about Twitter’s business model — because there isn’t one yet, and they’ll keep talking about it until there is one. But it’s becoming more clear that while a business model is of course important, Twitter is perhaps the perfect example of a company that can afford to take its time in finding the one that is perfect for it. That’s because other businesses are building so much on top of the micro-messaging service and using it for their own services. If worst came to worst, and Twitter had to sell, there would probably be a bidding war of a magnitude that would make it seem like this country wasn’t in the midst of a recession.

InternetNews has a good rundown of the Twitter/business phenomenon. Buried in it is this gem: “Less altruistically, some businesses have discovered that Twitter is an effective way of communicating with consumers. Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) says Twitter has produced $1 million in revenue over the past year and a half through sale alerts. People who sign up to follow Dell on Twitter receive messages when discounted products are available the company’s Home Outlet Store. They can click over to purchase the product or forward the information to others.”

If Twitter has made Dell $1 million in revenue, imagine how much it’s making for all of the companies it helps promote. While a million dollars may not be much to a company like Dell, for some smaller companies that are also using Twitter as a sales/promotional tool, it is no doubt invaluable.

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Source: Venture Beat

Black Friday and the holiday shopping season are upon us, but in a slow economy, many consumers plan to opt for online shopping over hitting the mall. Comparison shopping, free shipping, and easy searches are cited as reasons why so many plan to shop online, and businesses behind search sites are taking heed.

With an unstable economy and the biggest holiday shopping season of the year upon us, many consumers are expected to stay at home, using their computers and wireless devices to do their holiday shopping. More people are expected to shop online this holiday season to do comparison shopping, take advantage of free shipping, and search for gifts using search engines instead of driving from store to store.

Total online shopping sales in the United States is expected to reach $44 billion this year, a 12 percent increase from last year, according to the Forrester Research Online Holiday Retail Forecast 2008 report.

Twelve percent is not a huge increase compared to previous years, but considering the economic conditions, retailers will be happy with any increase. Offline holiday shopping sales are expected to increase only 2.2 percent from 2007, according to the National Retail Federation’s September 2008 report.

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Source: News Factor

YouTube on Wednesday said it’s rolling out a new ad platform called Sponsored Videos.

According to YouTube, which held a press conference at its headquarters, Sponsored Videos lets users promote their videos by bidding on keywords. Here’s how it works: First, YouTube users, whether individuals or corporations, decide which of the videos they’ve uploaded they want to promote through site search. Then they decide which keywords they want to target.

Google, YouTube’s parent company, has created automated tools that help users place bids for the keywords in an automated online auction, as well as set spending budgets. When people use keywords in search terms for videos, YouTube will display relevant videos alongside the search results. If you’re, say, a Hollywood film studio, maybe you bid on the words “movie trailer.”

Wow. Selling keywords on YouTube’s search. What a great idea!

It only represents the single most important concept in online advertising, and it’s the inspiration on which Google built an advertising dynasty. So why has it taken so long for YouTube to adopt a similar strategy?

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Source: CNet via Yahoo Tech

Online electronics retailer Newegg has stopped charging sales tax to its New York customers, according to a posting on the Consumerist.com.

The move by Newegg reverses action the online retailer took in June, in which it began to charge applicable sales tax for all shipments to New York, following passage of a new state law that required certain companies to charge sales tax on shipments to New York state.

Effective August 21, however, Newegg discontinued the practice and is leaving it up to New York residents to pay that sales tax themselves. That policy basically returns the responsibility of paying sales tax for online purchases back to the New York consumer, which was the case prior to the New York legislature passing its law earlier this year.

Newegg is not the only retailer taking a stand against the change in law. Earlier this year, Amazon.com filed a lawsuit against the state, claiming its law was “invalid, illegal, and unconstitutional.” And online retailer Overstock has taken similar legal action. Amazon, however, has since said it will abide by New York law and collect the taxes.

Calls to Newegg were not immediately returned.

Source: Yahoo! News