What is Alibaba? It’s kind of like if you combined Amazon, Hulu, JCPenney, PayPal, Google Maps, Twitter, Spotify, Orbitz…

Lot of news recently about Alibaba, since it’s going public in the United States. A common refrain is: what is it? There are many ways to answer that — do your own Google search — but this one might be the… Continue Reading

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Social media pretty much killed the marketing funnel and the relationship between “advocacy” and “customer”

Is the conventional funnel you always hear about actually now dead? Continue Reading

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The last time Amazon didn’t post at least 14 percent sales growth in a quarter was the fall of 2001. Whoa.

Check out the chart above; essentially, the last time that Amazon had quarter-over-quarter sales growth of less than 14 percent was, ahem, 2001. This is a completely new model in the business world in some ways, because while their sales growth — and the… Continue Reading

Is UberRush going to change the world, or ultimately make it more depressing?

Uber — which may have been on a path towards world domination anyway — just launched this thing called UberRush (trial version is in Manhattan), which essentially works like this: You want to send your air mattress to your friend… Continue Reading

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Hulu has a billion dollars (not all profit). It appears to be re-investing in original shows.

As more people cut the cord, streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime are going to become increasingly important (I forgot Chromecast there; muh b). This will all be tied up in whatever the “TV of the future” is… Continue Reading

Starbucks will eventually sell alcohol in about 1,000 stores. And so it begins.

Here’s the corporate version: “Anything that you see happening here is driven by the question: what is the customer looking for?” Starbucks spokesperson Alisha Damodaran told Quartz.“When we think about new product offerings in the stores, we always think about what… Continue Reading

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Social vs. search vs. direct: How do you get to a website? (Or, why ‘we put it on Facebook’ is a bad strategy.)

There are a couple of different ways a person can reach your website, but three of the biggest would be social (i.e. from Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest or what have you), direct (typing in/bookmarking the URL) or search (i.e.… Continue Reading

Wal-Mart tried a video games trade-in strategy in 2009. It didn’t work. With CExchange, will it work now?

This seems like an interesting plan: Wal-Mart is now going to accept video game trade-ins in 3,100 or so of their 4,835 U.S. stores. It’s interesting because normally when you trade-in a video game — say, at GameStop — you use… Continue Reading