Posts Tagged with ‘amazon’

One can toss many companies into the circle of “Web platform providers.” Yahoo!. Microsoft (MSN). Google. They’re all part of the group. Many more are classifiable as such, too. Amazon is a platform provider. As is eBay. PayPal, existing for many years under the tutelage of eBay, even gets to hold the title itself. The list is expansive; the names mentioned here are only the most prominent of the bunch.
Why do we mention these companies? Because apparently a researcher by [...]

Every so often when I'm reading about a new-to-me Web 2.0 site or service, I follow the link and try the site out just because I need a giggle. With the gimmicky heart symbol in their logo, I Heart Movies seemed like a kitschy one-off site like Famousr. Of course, in the interest of you, the Profy reader, I signed up for an account and took it for a spin. And was hooked.
I Heart Movies is a social network built [...]

DRM isn’t so much a product of Web 2.0 as it is its nemesis. Web 2.0 is very much an open space. DRM is very, very closed. That alone should be reason enough to send cumbersome copy protection off to the gallows.
Which Amazon pledges to do. (Pardon the terrible opener and subsequent segway.)
Today in the news: The largest of online retail giants intends to offer only DRM-free music downloads. Big story. Perhaps even more so than Apple’s recent [...]

Think Web 2.0 is a lotta hype backed up by little realism? The Web 2.0 Expo held last week (April 15-18) proved the exact opposite. Well, maybe not the exact opposite (there was still a fair amount of hype). But it was all very real. If not, 30,000 feet of space was a lot to fill with hot air and no substance.
Good thing there was a lot of substance at the Expo, where dozens of exhibitors showed off the [...]

One of the most innovative and interesting startups from the Web 2.0 Expo is a comprehensive development environment called Bungee Connect from Bungee Labs. This on-demand web development tool allows for the building and deployment of a large number of APIs onto the Internet. The scope of this service is vast, but perhaps the most attractive aspect of the utility is that Web developers actually only pay for the service once their application is making money.
Essentially, Bungee Connect enables [...]

On a very slow day I finally found a very interesting story about the lawsuit against Statsaholic by Alexa. Alexa is suing Ron Hornbaker the developer of Statsaholic over the domain name Alexaholic, which was Hornbaker's original domain for the feature filled ranking site.
The depth of the story was reported by TechCrunch back in March, but essentially Statsaholic began to gain popularity because of their features, but changed their name and stopped using the conflicting Alexaholic domain to appease Amazon. Amazon got [...]

ThinkFree is formally launching Viewer API's at the Web 2.0 Expo which will allow Web Services to integrate and mashup viewer and editor applications on their Web pages. Visitors will be able to open MS Office files from their browser without the need for MS Office or other plugins.
The biggest news for yesterday was ThinkFree's partnerships with Jive Software, NHN Naver, Coilm Livestart and Amazon live at the Expo.
These partnerships represent a significant acceptance of the company's offerings and the NHN in [...]

A month ago, I took a look at PowerReviews, which at the time was still in private beta. Since then, they've made a lot of changes to the site, changed the name to Buzzillions , and done a soft beta launch, with the big push coming next Tuesday.
In an email to private beta users, Jim Morris, VP of Customer Experience explained many of the changes:

"too busy, too many links" - We streamlined the home page, reorganized the categories, [...]

A few weeks ago, I started noticing a trend in some of the latest community site releases from some heavy hitters. iVillage was rolling out a new community feature. Even the usually hyper-paranoid-about-image Disney was launching a user-created content site. There definitely seems to be a trend with companies to attracting women, particularly mothers, to Web 2.0 sites.
However, as I started looking at these sites, and others I would have assumed were also being helmed by women, I noticed [...]